I'd agree that it's overall cheapening of quality and trying to get the hipster dollars (grumble stupid hipsters grumble).
Back in the days I was servicing iBooks for a school system the machines we got in the first wave (466 clamshells for the teachers/staff, 500 dual-USBs for the students) seemed to have noticeably more resilient adapters than the later ones. A lot of teachers were still using their original yo-yo/puck adapters when the county ditched the iBooks 4 years later, while students who were "lucky" and got iBook G4s as the older 500MHz machines started to wear out seemed to go through adapters much faster. The students liked the white adapters because they had the charging status light on the barrel but the pucks just seemed to hold up better.
Back in the days I was servicing iBooks for a school system the machines we got in the first wave (466 clamshells for the teachers/staff, 500 dual-USBs for the students) seemed to have noticeably more resilient adapters than the later ones. A lot of teachers were still using their original yo-yo/puck adapters when the county ditched the iBooks 4 years later, while students who were "lucky" and got iBook G4s as the older 500MHz machines started to wear out seemed to go through adapters much faster. The students liked the white adapters because they had the charging status light on the barrel but the pucks just seemed to hold up better.