Did Apple try to buy the rights of USB-C so that only Apple could use it?

The rights to USB are held by the USB Implementers Forum, an organization with members from across the industry. The forum, by design, would never assign exclusive rights for any of their technology to a single company.

There is a rumor that Apple contributed some of the design and technology (Did Apple invent USB Type-C? Maybe a little bit). Apple had 18 of the 79 engineers listed on the standard, but Intel and Seagate chaired the work group.

he “U” in “USB” stands for “Universal”.

This means that no one has to pay Apple a royalty to make a product that uses the USB interface. Apple would love for that to happen. Every product made with a USB-C interface will come with a royalty that has to be payed to Apple. It would increase revenue by millions.

It would be terrible for the consumer though. Imagine paying $80 for every single dongle.

What Apple wants badly is to get a royalty fee from every computer, phone, and device produced. Even 10¢. They failed with Firewire. The USB-IF only makes open standards so they would not agree to anything Apple required. Buying rights to an open cable spec isn’t going to happen. Apple could however, and maybe that is how you heard this, push for a technology they have patented to be optional. Then they could convince device manufacturers their addition was such a great thing. And then computer manufacturers would include it in order to enable those devices. Then they can charge their 10¢.

10¢ on billions of devices, for doing nothing, is a lot of money. There are lots of bits of intellectual property, via patents and copyrights, in a modern computer and lots of companies earning fractions of pennies. It adds to your cost, sometimes a lot. Maneuvering for a share of that is probably what Apple’s goal was with whatever rumor you heard.