Layoffs are unpopular so companies are tightening the belt by making the working conditions less hospitable.

Return to office is designed to have employees leave willingly so they can reduce headcount without making employees feel unsafe about budget cuts.

What they don’t seem to care is top performers are the ones most able to move to another job with better working conditions.

With a trim at the bottom by letting go of low performers and encouraging top performers to leave they are just trending toward mediocrity.

Based on the size of the connector a tear down is going to show a rather complicated board for a “simple” adaptor. Because the Lightning port is designed to be reconfigured on the fly depending on the accessory plugged in and not a single dumb bus protocol like USB2.0 the chip in this cable needs to be able to talk in HDMI and some other standards.

Fun fact: while Lightning was originally designed around being a reversible USB2.0 connector because of the dynamic reconfiguration of the reversible sides at the port it is capable of speaking in native USB3.0 on all of the pre-Usb-C iPad pros.

The price is reasonable for what it is, honestly, but very few people will actually need to buy one.