“You’d always stick it in wrong at least once, preferably twice, and then swear about it under your breath, as was the style at that time. And the smaller devices had the micro USB ports that had the same problem. And you’d have to take out your mouse’s ball and gently clean all the lint off it when it would start getting all onery. And don’t even get me started about when they removed all the audio jacks from all the cellular phones!”
Grandpa, What’s an audio jack? Is that what you guys used to eat those tide pod things?
Can’t you see that gramp’s busy cleaning his ornery balls
Was it mini or micro usb, tho?
USB-B always getting forgotten
Unless you’re an office worker or musician
USB micro 3 was the weirdest. One of my Samsunk Note phones used it.
Neat thing a lot of people didn’t know about it though was that you could still plug an older Micro B in and leave the rest unplugged, so it was backwards compatible for things like charging and slow data transfer.
I also have a widescreen conferencing monitor at work with a USB3-B connector for its built-in camera. It also has Type C, but I guess they wanted to give options for people with computers that didn’t have Thunderbolt ports or were using older docking stations.
I have an old Samsung tablet with a USB micro 3, gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. Galaxy tab 2 or 3 maybe? It was a top-of-the-line device in that era, and the only device I’ve ever seen with that funky connector. I actually find it curious we didn’t see the standard more, as it’s backwards-compatible with regular micro-USB in a pinch, but when you did use the proper cable it enabled both faster charging and data transfer.
Yes.
Mini was okay, micro was awful
The pain of those clips
breaking so fucking often 😭huh really? i’m using micro 5pin on my daily driver phone for more than a decade now and my stock cable from 2013 still works perfectly
I’ve had them break, but nowhere near as often as people online claim. Maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I’ve also has USB C break down on me already, so…
This is one of those cases where the name brand cable probably is better than an off brand.
Tangential story, but a cheapo headphone cable once broke the headphone jack on my computer. It was too big and stretched out the connector in there.
I actually miss having to clean the mouse’s ball. It was oddly therapeutic.
Nah give me lasers, but it was fun to spin as a fidget toy
Ornery vs Onery. They are both valid.
I’ll make and sell USBC cables that only have pins on one side of the connectors, marketing them as retro nostalgic.
I will not be marking them differently from your other cables, for authenticity of the experience.
Replace half the cables from all of your friends’ cables drawers without them knowing and go enjoy your free ticket to hell
wouldn’t that actually be completely fine since the ports handle the orientation?
USB-A was a rare case of a quantum-locked consumer device. It would not reveal its orientation until after observing all possible combinations.
Turn 3 times to achieve the superposition.
There are quantum objects that need to be rotated 720 degrees to return to their starting orientation. 360 degrees is not enough to get back to the start.
That’s what USB-A is like.
One day USB-A will be so uncommon
Every USB-C to C connector I’ve seen ends up coming with half a dozen adapters, because cell phones seem like the only device that uses it reliably.
Usb-c covers so much that something like 75% of the onea i have are entirely useless for data transfer, or dont have fast charging capabilities, or just… Suck? And sometimes i do feel the need to flip them for troubleshooting purposes or whatever.
I also had a laptop charger that needed to be flipped one specific way. Usb-C will one day die and be replaced with an extremly expensive usb-Delta that everything i wanted but also costs a bajillion dollars
I ended up getting a USB c cable tester to see which cable could do what because it was such a mess.
One day, children will ask why we don’t make the plugs different shapes so you know if you’re using a 60 watt cable or a 240 watt cable or something in between.
(I do not know anything about electricity so I’m certain there’s a better way to explain this but it’s bananas I have USB cables that look identical but my Steam Deck will die while plugged in if I grab the wrong one)
That’s because your supposed to use usb 3.2-1v3.1.2-hyperfast and not USB 3.2-1v3.1.2-superfast.
- You don’t care, the cable will tell both device how much current can go through it using its e-marker chip.
- More and more cable comes with their specification engraved on at least one end.
USB-A, the fonz of USB.
I’ll see myself out.
No, not likely.
USB A and B still have use cases, predominently in their physical strength.
For any use case that requires a stronger socket that will take abuse and needs to hold longer, then USB C fails.
Its smaller and more brittle, more prone to failing under pressure.
DE-9 with potting, a proper strain relief back shell and screws.
Or go all the way to MIL-DTL-38999
There has got to be more reliable and stronger sockets than a usb a. Like if something truly needed to be stable and withstand pressure, I really hope they are not relying on usb a or b
Time to bring back the little screws that VGA connectors had (have?)
Yes! Exactly!
Something like this?
Oh there absolutely us.
But, also more expensive and much slower to remove/put in
Usb B especially strikes that balance of still very eaay to quickly pop in/out, while being fairly robust to take some abuse.
Its why you see it in use for stuff like midi keyboards, where you expect to have to frequently connect and disconnect but also withstand some abuse.
USB B is the most common plug for digital instrument stuff. XLR / Analog of course otherwise which are also super robust.
Problem is USB lock connectors are not standardized. So these are only sporadically used, much more expensive and hard to replace by end users.
For many professional use cases, USB-B suffices. Most professional devices don’t need the speed of USB 3.0 and aren’t plugged in and out all the time, they just need to be reliable for a decade or more.
If you really want sturdy, fast and standardized then different protocols are used entirely in the industry. Such as Profinet, Ethercat, Ethernet or DE9 with CAN or RS485. These can cover larger distances, can be used in networks and the protocol is often more deterministic.
I design and build industrial things (custom, <10pcs ever) and USB-B is my go-to device connector for this reason
Same here, we make diagnostic devices used in factories. These are shipped with USB A to USB B cables.
USB C was considered but it doesn’t have enough withdrawal force
And some people were gifted with the clairvoyance to always plug it in one go. Yes I know at least a few.
I’ve always said, i have the most worthless super power ever imagined in life or comic books.
in that I can always plug a USB cable in on the first try.
The heroes and villains are racing to plug a USB into the Blue and Red USBs before the other can…then a Random Idiot casually inserts a jack into the Green USB, obtaining the powers of the Infinity Serial Bus.
Grandpa, what’s a USB? Is that one of those old three letter groups that were part of the big group you always talk about? The, uh… guvver men?
My old chargers are all USB-A, and they all still work. I’ll be needing that standard for a while, still.
Also, almost always, the open side on the appliance is down, and the blocked side is up, so you just need to put the blocked side of the cable down.
People thinking there will be advanced electronics in the next decades. How naive /s
Do people have a massive skill issue? I get it in first try almost every time.
Ya ok buddy, and my real name is Reanu Keeves
I’m not going around plugging in USB-A into hundreds of unfamiliar devices. I have a few devices which I sometimes plugin and I have the muscle memory to know the correct orientation for my USB stick or that other cable.
Honestly, I would like an L-shaped USB standard. It would make it so much easier to figure out what orientation things should go. I have a super-tower PC, and there isn’t enough ambient light behind it for me to easily identify where to stick my USB peripherals.
I am pretty much just blindly stabbing, hoping to connect. 😣
