But most people aren't buying an iPhone 7 and a MacBook at the same time, and Apple only had one laptop with USB-C ports until a month after the iPhone's release.
An iPhone 7 buyer is far more likely to find a USB-A port to plug into. Your idea would be to make the masses buy a dongle, instead of the minority who own brand new laptops.
That might be OP's point, but that ignores the fact that Apple would likely dealing with a much worse PR disaster when millions of users can't plug their phone into literally anything they own without first buying a USB-A cable.
Seems like you don't know apple. They have always favored fancy features and out of box experience with other apple products over out of the box backwards compatibility.
Why can't Apple ship both a USB-A and USB-C cable? In the early 2000s, Apple bundled both a USB and a Firewire cable in the packaging with a new iPod, presumably to facilitate exactly the sort of transition they're confronting now.
Those aren't packaged together anymore so now you get 3 separate boxes full of packaging just for a power adaptor. It feels wasteful... not to mention annoying if the apple sales person forgets to tell you you need to buy USB-C separately! And the correct one at that.
What? Apple's shipped in March, and third party cables have been available since at least May, 2015. IIRC there was ~a month between release of the USB-C MacBook and the first such cables, but they were available for over a year before the MacBookPro shipped.
