231–240 of 544 posts
My take on USB-A: aside from audio connectors that have axial symmetry (and have no meaningful orientation), I never used any reversible computer cables prior to USB-C, and that’s not the main issue. Nor is it the axis of symmetry of the casing allowing failed upside down plugin attempts. The shitty part of USB-A is that the tactile feedback of being slightly misaligned is identical to it being upside down. My experi…
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I've been using USB-C on basically every consumer electronics device I've used over nearly the past decade. Over the years I have accumulated: 1. A laptop with a USB-C power/data/DisplayPort port 2. A phone with a USB-C power/data port 3. Multiple USB power banks which use a single USB-C port for both charging and discharging 4. A smartwatch with a dock that uses USB-C 5. Multiple flashlights with USB-C charging 6. M…
I'm an Android user, and for your points 5, 6, 7, and 8 all of mine are USB-A to Micro USB (except for a flashlight bought this year which came with a USB-A to USB-C cable, and I use wraparound bluetooth headphones instead of earbuds and get the feeling those designs are just extremely rarely updated). No displayport or smartwatch here, and my power banks all came with A-to-micro or A-to-C cables (mostly the former)…
That's not just a convention, it's a vital part of the specification :)
USB-C devices go to significant lengths to make it hard for users to violate that invariant using an unsafe combination of otherwise safe adapters – that's why there is no USB-C-to-A adapter, for example (because that would let you build an A-to-A cable, and USB-A hosts are not required to detect possible loops/short circuits; USB-C hosts are).
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Even having a bump on the rubber moulding as part of the standard would have solved the problem.
The USB symbol goes on top, IIRC. Edit: ninja'd by an enormous amount of people elsewhere in the thread, gah.
USB 1 stayed plugged in, required no screws, had higher bandwidth than any data port you'd find on a typical PC, the wires were much thinner, and it could even power low power devices! Yes, a design that doesn't take three tries (my average) to get right would be nice, but it exceeded every existing port by miles. Audio jacks were the only ports that didn't have a direction back then.
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I have yet to see people die (and/or kill bystanders) by not being able to plug in an HDMI cable to their home entertainment system correctly.
I suppose the joke went over your head, sorry about that. I found it comical given the HDMI connector shape and how it would be nearly impossible to get wrong without being oblivious.
> Making USB reversible to begin with would have necessitated twice as many wires and twice as many circuits, and would have doubled the cost. This is... not correct. You can make USB reversible with 1 extra pin and 1 extra wire. Grounds on pins 1 and 5, data on pins 2 and 4, and VCC on pin 3. Then have those pins on both sides of the plug and a socket with a single set of contacts on one side. That's BASICALLY what…
The problem with USB-a isn't that it's non reversible, it's that it's non-reversible _and_ rectangular, so it's not clear at a glance which way round it should go. All they had to do was make the connector have a non-symmetrical shape so that it's immediately obvious which way round it goes when you pick it up - you could do it without even looking. Think of how much time we'd have collectively saved with this minor…
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Not really, HDMI ports are in weird orientation and mounted in hard-to-reach places as well, but the shape makes it very obvious (even by feel) which way it should (or can't) go. This is much harder with the rectangular USB plug.
HDMI can be a real pain to plug in blind / by feel.
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3) The most fragile part (the wafer in the center of the receptacle) is on the expensive-to-repair device, while the least fragile part is on the cheap-to-replace cable. HDMI makes this same mistake. With USB-A, at least the plastic part on the device is relatively robust, and with Lightning, both plug and socket were rather robust (albeit prone to debris incursion). With older pin-type connectors like VGA and DVI, t…
Im not sure this is true, the part in the cable is just tiny pins and far more vulnerable than the wafer. For years now I've dug woodchips and other junk out of my phones usb-c socket with paperclips and never came close to damage. It seems sufficiently recessed to prevent all but the most aggressive attack. Edit: in fact, trying now it seems to be perfectly recessed that I can't even push on it from an angle with th…
I'll grant that it's robust in that it continues to work more than I'd expect, for example continuing to charge the laptop but not reliable for the external display. And once connected, sure it's secure.
I suspect it's not the cable mating that causes the failure, but other foreign objects… keys in the bag or something… that manage to dislodge it. And some laptops have more play in the connector than others, which I think allows the connector on the cable end to hit the wafer with an angle of attack sufficient to dislodge it. Some of my users handle heavy bulk materials all day and are anything but gentle with computers.
In any case, I'm sure the designers considered this, and far be it from me to second-guess their compromises. It is what it is. But if the port has failure modes, this is one of them.
I know everybody is still on the high from USB-C but I'm still going to go on the record it will be one of the biggest disasters in cable history. 1) There's going to be video-only cables; low-voltage only cables; etc and this time everything is usb-c so you can literally only tell which ables work by testing all of the dozen cables instead of the 1-2 USB-As you have. 2) The connector is symmetrical but the pins aren…
When USB-C was brand new, I got a flawed breakout board where only the socket's data pins on one side were connected. I did not notice it until it was soldered together and the device got power but no connection when the cable was connected in one orientation. But then I had already built a metal case to fit that breakout board perfectly, so I just left it in.
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3) The most fragile part (the wafer in the center of the receptacle) is on the expensive-to-repair device, while the least fragile part is on the cheap-to-replace cable. HDMI makes this same mistake. With USB-A, at least the plastic part on the device is relatively robust, and with Lightning, both plug and socket were rather robust (albeit prone to debris incursion). With older pin-type connectors like VGA and DVI, t…
> The most fragile part (the wafer in the center of the receptacle) is on the expensive-to-repair device, while the least fragile part is on the cheap-to-replace cable. Why do you think that the wafer is the most fragile part? One might argue that the latch mechanism would be the part most exposed to wear and tear due to mechanical stress incurred by plugging and removing. Those side latches are located in the plug,…
I guess I'll have to take a video next time I see it.
