I agree it does read like the punchline to a joke, that did not escape me when I wrote it, but the larger message is that comments explaining who really owns projects we're talking about are not "unhelpful and unproductive".
Many of the sibling comments were coming from the maintaining freedom perspective, which I personally appreciate as well. I wanted to chime in that this information is also helpful from a corporate/competitive perspective.
I think the original sentence was written more in of "Your loss is my gain" competitive advantage vein. The real trick is, as you say, to critically assess the output, and many people are incapable of that.
In talking about a switch to USB-C, one point seems to be missing - Lightning gives Apple absolute control over which devices can connect. If you don't pay up your MFI fees, and get your device blessed, then there's a chance it can be blocked in a later firmware update, at Apple's discretion. This extends all the way down to charging cables, (tho I'm not sure how well it's enforced / easily sidestepped for charging cables).
Maintaining that level of control, and maintaining the licencing revenue stream, over USB-C, might prove difficult?
Either that, or they change the connector, and leave all the handshake protocol / custom chipset at both ends in place, in which case we will end up with devices that are USB-C in connector only.
USB-C standard has a stload of DRM built-in with quite a bit of crypto protecting it. You can even ask the country code where the power is from! I've yet to hear about Lighting possibly being region-locked D:
"Dropbox also went public. It had a first-day pop of 36 percent; however, with only 200,000 paying customers compared to its 500 million users, I would be hesitant to rush in to buy, even as it comes off that year-to-date high considerably."
https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup