If you lost a $5 cable or broke your $1 charging port, the OEM is economically motivated to get you to shell out a three-digit figure for a new phone.
Given this simple and obvious observation, the fact that phone manufacturers have mostly dropped proprietary charging interfaces in favor of USB seems like a minor miracle.
Yeah, very true. It's actually pretty easy to replace USB ports on many mobile devices. I read about users doing it all the time on Android forums and rather cheaply. Mostly depends on how easy the device is to open up and repair though.
Given this simple and obvious observation, the fact that phone manufacturers have mostly dropped proprietary charging interfaces in favor of USB seems like a minor miracle.