The base iPhone 15 is still a “premium” phone, it costs 2x as much as Google’s A series phones, and google never had a problem putting USB 3 on those. Maybe most people won’t do this, but it’s obviously important enough that they didn’t do the same on the pro version. It’s so weird to see people defending a company purposely gimping their phones just to give them upsells.
See, you’re assuming that this would have taken time and money to develop. Usb3 is ubiquitous at this point, it probably doesn’t even cost any more to include, or if it does, it’s a trivial amount. This isn’t apple “not adding a feature” this is apple purposely removing features to push people to the more expensive versions