I’ve actually never had either a USB-A nor a USB-C port or connector fail on me due to lack of sturdiness.
Can’t say the same about the 30 pin or micro USB… Had several of those fail.
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USB-A
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Can’t say the same about the 30 pin or micro USB… Had several of those fail.
Back then I used a Windows PC. I can’t remember what year it was but the PC I bought didn’t have a floppy drive and I was not happy. My thoughts were why fix something that’s not broken. I think it was after 1998 though so maybe sometime in the 2000s but my memory is not that good.
They don’t fail, but rather are just too easy to unplug. You can lightly tug on the cable by accident and they unplug. You can’t just gently tug on a USB-A cable and it will unplug. I agree micro USB is terrible. 30 pin that’s the joystick connection?
That's not normal. There have been issues with USB-C ports being made too loose and that's what causes them to disconnect so easily. It's considered a defect. My 2016 tbMBP had this issue. I brought it to Apple for a keyboard replacement one time and they did a full diagnostic on the machine and determined that I also needed new ports so when it came back I had ports that no longer disconnected easily.
Loose ports happen for almost any kind of ports though. I've had a few loose USB-A ports as well. Those were defects too.
Lol ok. Well, Apple is not putting USB-A ports back on their machines. End of story. Your only recourse if you want native USB-A ports is to buy a PC.
Apple wants to continue to tell their customers what they need instead of asking their customers what they need, that's fine by me - I left that abusive relationship a long time ago and I haven't looked back. I have all the native USB-A and USB-C ports that I need, and I can add more if I so desire in the future.
I just come here for the popcorn nowadays.
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You may not, but I certainly do. I'm sick of having a plethora of different cables in a drawer that turn into a mess OR have just one single use case because of their odd hardly ever used USB shape. If a highly intelligent alien came to visit us and we discussed about our wonderful "standardised USB cable type" he'd ask, why the hell does it have 8 different ends on it if its a "universal standard", and only one (USB-C) is interchangeable and fairly logical ?When did I suggest I care what cable is in the box? What kind of a person would decide what device they buy based on what cable it comes with, as some have suggested here? "I was going to photograph your wedding with the A7RV but returned it because it came with a USB-A to USB-C cable!"
I doubt any of us like it when we look in the "cable box" at home, find 14 USB cables and NOT one of them work for the device we have because the end type is not there. I know that feeling all too often. And also just the sheer accumulation of cables that no longer work for anything because old USB is mostly redundant. If a modern device is packaged today with a USB-A end for your computer I can guarantee you that they're using USB-C for the device end as opposed to USB-mini or micro. So, why not just go all in.
Again, talking as technical people here who can probably tell a Type B from a Micro B or a Mini B, possibly we don't mind it too much being a technical thing to know what cable to use. But USB is supposed to be for "everyone", including less technical people who would struggle to understand what end goes where, and the fact that the USB micro they have in their hand can't go in a similarly looking but completely different USB-mini port. Imagine their frustration when, with maybe poor eyesight, they need to distinguish a Micro port from a Mini port from a USB-C port and they look on their camera for the USB-A end not realising that that's on the computer end. With USB-C, that gone in EVERY WAY, and if it remains the same for 15, 20 years (which I believe it should) then it becomes second nature for the vast majority of people who instinctively know what to do (because it's simple), the way young or old have NO issues with plugging any device in to a power outlet - they're standardised to ONE port type, not at all complicated. We should do that for everything, as much as possible.
Not true, that's literally the point of docks. A dock is a device with a beefy thunderbolt 3 or 4 USB-C cable that delivers quite amazingly 65W to my Dell Latitude work laptop and in return provides me with 4K at 60fps (maybe more is possible but that's what I use). The two USB-C ports on this laptop are capable of it, I've just tested both of them. That's a marvel of engineering, that.
It can do exactly the same for my MacBook Pro. EVERY USB-C port on my MacBook Pro 2021 is capable of it - accepting a high charge rate AND outputting 4K at 60fps - that's damn incredible and a level of interoperability and simplicity that is only possible with USB-C. For sure not every port on a dock is capable of that, but the same can be said for USB-A in that regard, in relation to cables that just contain enough wires for charging but not for sending data (as I've said before, I don't think that the standard should allow for that, I don't think that cables should be crippled to save money for the manufacturer, forcing a person to BUY a second cable that does both charging and data so now they have one good and one useless cable at home - it's wonderfully wasteful on resources bur great only for the cable manufacturers).
I addressed both problems at the same time by using velcro cable ties to bind my USB-A cables together in pairs and triplicates of different typed termination heads. They're less messy to store like that and it's rare that I grab the wrong cable because I'm always grabbing 2 or 3 at a time.
I'll also put colored tags on different types of USB-A cables to make it easy to identify.
I look forward to the day when I don't have to do this anymore.
You'd get the impression from you that other manufacturers ASK their customers what they need - they DON'T. They build us things that THEY think we want (just like Apple). I DON'T want any more USB-A ports on ANYTHING as it leads to a frustratingly fractured landscape of devices that use wasteful and resource ignorant multiple cable types that are redundant, dated, old and unecessarily cumbersome, force me to have drawers full of different cables, and are more difficult and confusing to use than a modern connector type thats been around already for 10 years, is reversible, interoperable, charges at high power and sends enormous amounts of data at the same time.
But they DON'T listen to me on this, they barely even listen to EU technical bodies on phasing out old adapter types so we can standardise on ONE very capable and decent type that will reduce the amount of chargers, cables and port types we have in our lives. So who's worse - Apple or "the others" who don't listen either, "the others" tell us just as much "what we need".
You sound like a very organised person and I doubt I could put that much effort into organising cables, but I envy your effort. I also look forward to the day that this is no longer necessary, when this monstrosity can get recycled forever...
They NEVER ever work more than a year anyway, and reliability is a whole other question of waste and frustration.
No it doesn't. The point of my post is to see what a USB user of any kind, which is essentially ALL of us, has to put up with in relation to something that is supposed to be "standardised". Standardised for them, i.e. the industry group who designs USB means a connector that changes shape every few years, rendrers old devices somewhat obsolete, instead of working on a decent, simple to use connector type that has a 20 year lifespan. Its fairly typical to say that "standardised, universal" connection types that are agreed upon by an entire industry typically have long lifespans (often multiple decades) to ensure interoperability, simplicity of use, low cost use and a relatively long lifespan before major changes.
Not so with the consumer market which is seen as a money grab and something highly profitable, and hence why changing port types every technological generation has been normalised as it obsoletes products, and ensures purchases of new ones (something that the EU is stopping with enforcing a cable standardisation on USB-C for the forseeable future to prevent excessive cable waste).
MY issue is not exclusively with the USB-A port itself, its the relationship that USB-A has with the other end of the cable - the fact that ONLY with USB-A cables do you have a plethora of differing ends for differing needs, you admit that yourself in saying "The only thing you really have a complaint about is USB-B, which I agree is a bit of a ********". When the USB-A (old) standard is shown it is typically represented by its PC port because it is the ONLY part that is universally the same, hence why I use USB-A it as the descriptive name, so most people know what I'm talking about. So lets not be semantic. USB-A implies a USB-B or even C end and that's where the whole mess begins and ends, the very fact that ends are different and confusing and you never have the right cable. When a cable is JUST USB-C, its simple, reversible in EVERY way (whether we speak of ends or orientation), fast, compact and powerful and because all these needs have been met THE WHOLE industry should move to it as quickly as possible, not leave this fractured mess.
But the problem is, you can't EVER separate USB-A from its other end - which as you say, is a mess. Hence USB-A is ALSO a mess by definition. There is no such thing as a USB-A to USB-A cable which is USB-C equivalent (unless it's an extender) hence whatever USB-A is in a relationship with is a mess, hence USB-A or OLD (if you like) is a mess by definition (he repeats). USB-A happens to be the descriptor or signifier of the old USB standard, hence why I use it's name.
Again, you prove my point. A plethora of different port types will actually LEAD to this problem as the tiny and pointless variations in differing port types (mostly done to increase profits for said companies who have unique licensed rights to said connector types), people who have to fiddle around the back of a computer under a desk in a poorly lit room WILL make these mistakes. Lets not be faceitous, not many people will confuse the monstrosity of an ethernet port with something the size of USB-C - those people are not making an awful lot of effort anyway, and are just asking for trouble.
And that could happen to USB-C if it was mandated at a minimum level. The problem is that an industry group controls USB's design and future plans and no doubt, they build it to make profits for companies - hence all the pointless iterations. Multiple different cable standards, speeds, uni-directional, bi-directional, charging only, charging and data, all this means differing product categories at different profit and cost levels for them and utter ****ing confusion for us, even as technical users. Consumer councils need to be involved in this group too, to stop its scammy behaviour of 6 different standards in ONE cable standard. There's nothing to say that this is necessary - its just decided by this industry group of for-profit companies. Imagine the most basic USB-C cable being at least 10Gbps with high power charging, and for those with higher needs getting a clearly marked Thunderbolt cable at 40Gbps. Again, why don't we ever question WHY so many useless, incremental, tiny separations of standards to eek out another 5 Gbps with this cable thats $30 more expensive, it's product separation for maximising profits and reducing costs for USB participant companies, not for building something minimally decent, universally useful for us.
Well, you can put a USB-C connector at the other end. Which solves the problem of the multitude of B-connectors, and phones which can be both host and peripheral.
...and for the millionth time, I'm not talking about removing USB-C/TB completely and forcing the world back to USB-A, I'm just talking about keeping one or both of the extra USB3-only ports on desktops like the Mac Mini as USB-A since there are going to be perfectly good USB-A devices, cables, flash drives, wireless dongles etc. around for the foreseeable future - which will gain no performance benefit from using a USB-C cable especially one plugged in to a USB3-only socket like the Mini's front ports.
Except USB-C hasn't made it better. Under the hood it's still the same old confusion PCIe, USB 2/3.1/4, DisplayPort 1.2/1.4/2.0, Thunderbolt, analogue audio (...just be thankful that HDMI-over-USB-C alt mode died a death...) - the plugs may still fit anywhere but if the protocols don't match it still won't work plus you've got all those different cable types...
Yes, but, in this reality it isn't. And look at all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the EU mandating it for just a well-defined range of charging purposes (basically, that's more about the USB power delivery standard - the connector comes with that).
Because it turns out that physics matters - higher charging currents need thicker conductors, the top data speeds need active cable driver chips for longer lengths and people don't want the cable that they only ever use for 15W charging to be as thick as their pinky and cost $100 in case they ever want it to carry 240W of power and 40Gbps data.
Yes, there's some gouging and maybe Apple's $160 Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable is a bit overpriced but it is still not the same thing as a $7 Amazon Basics charge cable with a different label.
The fundamental problem is, trying to combine everything into a truly universal connector and cable "to make things simpler" is a pipe dream and - in practice - just ends up adding even more permutations to the existing mess.
If you're going to start from scratch with The Great Open Source Connector, you'll also need the Open Source data protocol, the Open Source display protocol, the Open Source power delivery protocol and all of those things are only ever going to work if you throw away your capitalist computer and replace it with the Open Source Computer... that kinda worked once with the IETF and the Internet up to about the mid 1990s (it somehow sneaked under the bureaucratic radar and the engineers got to design it) but I'm not sure if lightning is going to strike twice.
I mean, I broadly agree with the EU charging directive (which, BTW, doesn't mean you can't charge your phone from a USB-A port) but they chose an already-emerging commercial standard for a quite specific purpose. The idea of any government organisation anywhere designing a standard port is the stuff of nightmares.
USB-A is a PC-side connection port standard. To date, there has only been one iteration of that standard, and that is USB-C. USB-B is a device-side connection standard. Device connections have a completely different purpose from PC connections. To that end, the four main different USB-B connections that you list aren't even the whole list of device-side "standards" that exist or have existed in the past 30 years. If you want to split hairs about device-side connections, you can also talk about all the proprietary device-side connections that we see as well, which exist just as much in the USB-C arena as they have in the USB-A one (among those would be Apple's 30-Pin and Lightning connectors, as well as Microsoft's Surface connectors). With the exception of bog-standard (square) USB-B on printers and a few cell phones using Micro-USB, most devices have always shipped with the cable needed to run that device, so your idea of having to "keep a huge box of cables" is pretty overblown here. At any rate, USB-C hardly changes that.
USB-A has stayed consistent as a universal standard for the decades since its introduction. The protocol has evolved, necessitating all the other connections on the device-side, but the PC-side connection (the one that is actually the standard) has remained as consistent and backwards compatible as a standard can.
Just to finally illustrate the fact that PC-side USB-C does not negate the plethora of device-side connections in the way that you claim it does, check out the cable that currently ships with the USB-C version of the Luxafor Flag:
(yes, that is a USB-C to Micro-USB cable).
That has almost exclusively been an Apple thing. The rest of the world standardized on Micro-USB 15+ years ago and then USB-C ten years ago as charging standards. The only place where the other connection types in your original diagram are ever used is in data transfer cables, and those almost always were included in the box with whatever device used them. The PC-side of those were always and are still USB-A, and nothing that consumers would have been using prior to buying a new device would have been "obsoleted" by buying the newer device.
Apple and maybe a few niche manufacturers pushing their own proprietary device-side connectors are the only ones targeted and affected by the EU's mandate.
The Lightning cable itself is an example that proves this sentence false.
I wasn't being semantic. I was being precise. Because the point of your whole argument relies on the muddying lines between the PC-side connection and the Device-side connection and the incorrect conflation of the two, I'm going to continue to point out that those are two completely different things.
USB-C hardly changes this, as others have pointed out. You have the same connectors, but you have cables that are for power-delivery only, you have cables rated for only certain USB-C protocols, and you can have cables that still have a non-standard device end. The former two issues are even worse for your "box of cables" example, because you often don't know you have the wrong cable until you plug it in.
Aside from that - I'm sure YMMV, but I don't often find myself "never having the right cable" for the vast majority of my USB-A devices, because they generally get plugged in and left where they are. Most of my USB-C devices are the ones that require charging periodically, but even then they are usually charged using a USB-A to USB-C cable (because of where I have set up that cable in the grand scheme of my desk setup).
Sure. Until some new engineering breakthrough happens that requires an "upgrade" to USB-C such as those that have happened to USB-A before it. Then all of a sudden, we will see another adaptation to the device-side connection, and we will see this whole thing play out again.
Of course you can. Just as you can separate USB-C from its other end (which in many applications is also USB-C, but not always).
People have to fiddle around the back of their computer with all of those other port types? What kind of a computer has a Micro-USB or Mini-USB connector on it? Or any other kind of USB-B connection? See, this is exactly why it is important to understand the difference between USB-A and device-side connectors - because people like you try to conflate the two to make up silly scenarios that don't actually exist in real life.
The rate at which users have to "fiddle around the back of a computer under a desk in a poorly lit room" is a known quantity and has been for decades. It is low. Very low. For most users, it happens when they first set up their computer, when they buy a new device, or when they need to troubleshoot something. For some users, it may happen occasionally when they have things like portable hard drives or other devices that they only use temporarily. In these circumstances, though, these users generally don't set up their work areas so that they are fiddling around under a dimly lit desk regularly - they will either use a hub or will have their computer positioned in a way to make the ports they need more accessible.