I see this as Apple doing a good thing for the world. People want simple, thin, reversible. They want high-wattage charging. They want cables that are the same on both ends. And they want them to be standardized and cheap.

Apple only got some of these things right. USB 3.1 seems to be *finally* getting all of them. My guess is the standards people were given huge piles of shit over the fugly design of Micro USB 3, and resolved to do it right. Really right.

The question, of course, will be whether they still managed to screw something up. I'm also curious whether they're trying to replace Apple's Thunderbolt connector. They've got enough bandwidth in the new connector that it could potentially do video.