ITT people pretending this is a spite based move, when realistically it is probably cutting costs by reusing the same hardware they used for lightning ports just soldering on a USB-C port instead of a lightning one.

You think this more likely than just creating a bigger artificial difference between the standard and normal model?

I think that is most likely a lot of what drives that divide, but this almost certainly the case for the port. Some shit undoubtedly is software locked, and that is in fact scummy, but new hardware will always be more expensive than hardware you have already designed and maybe even have lying around.

To get thunderbolt in there they probably need a new board specifically for the iphone, while they can just cram in the lightning version with a new solder job and call it a day.

At the end of the day 95+% of the people who will use their phones will only use the port for charging anyway.

Well we don't know yet what port the pro model we have, so once we do, we'll know whether it's just scummy behavior once again, or if Apple decided to use low to midrange hardware on all their models
Edit: surprise surprise.

Someone else commented that the SoC literally lacks the capability to run above 2.0. If this is the case it would be very hard to call this even scummy adjacent.

Can't find any confirmation on this claim, but their Ipad pro model uses USB c with far higher speeds.
Edit: surprise surprise.