Some interesting points I ended up reading when the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to pass a law for a common charging standard in Europe for devices, making it essentially a USB-C versus Lightning debate:
This Quora answer points out one key difference in the two standards:
Contact springs [for Lightning] are in the socket, not the cable, a design the USB people abandoned with the Micro-B connector. So when the springs wear out — and they will — you need to fix or replace your iPhone…
[USB-C is an] Industry standard with a specified 10,000 cycle plug-unplug life. Contact springs in the cable, not the socket. When the srings wear out — and they will — change cables. Cheap.
But USB-C is a whole thing by itself.USB Type C ports can support many interfaces in addition to USB: Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, MHL, and HDMI. But it’s not always clear what cables support what capabilities: against an image of a single Apple USB-C cable, the article asks the following question:
… can you tell what kind of USB Type C cable is shown? What USB speeds does it support? Does it support Thunderbolt? What is the maximum current it can carry?
The answer:
not full-featured, USB 2.0, does not support Thunderbolt, and 5 Amperes.
The USB-C standard supports up to 100W power delivery, and using a cable to transfer higher-than-rated power can damage the cable and the device.
Marco Arment describes this in painstaking detail, including
Some cables don’t support USB-C PD at all, and most don’t support laptop wattages. Apple’s cable supports USB-C PD charging at high wattages… unless you bought the earlier version that doesn’t. Most standalone batteries sold to date don’t support USB-C PD — there are only a handful on the market so far, and most of them can’t charge a laptop at full speed, unless it’s the 12-inch MacBook.
You can use USB-C PD to fast-charge an iPhone 8 or iPad Pro with a USB-C to Lightning cable. But it doesn’t work with every USB-PD battery or charger, or every USB-C to Lightning cable, or every iPad Pro.