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Some basic info about USB
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Honestly, I didn't really have an issue with USB type A ports. They worked fine, and it was only a minor inconvenience to orient them the right way. I cared far more about capabilities of the port (speed, power delivery, etc) than I did about the actual port.
That said, micro-USB sucks in every way. The awkward "is this the right way?" thing is way worse than with USB-A, it's not meaningfully smaller than mini-USB, the port is incredibly hard to clean (and it always gets dirty), and the connector seems to break all the time. I would've been totally fine with moving everything to mini-USB instead. The connector was less flimsy without being that much bigger, and it had room for more wires.
I do like USB-C though, I'm just not sure the added complexity is worth it.
I believe that the reason that the smaller USB variants showed up was because some devices were just too small to physically accommodate a USB-A plug. Think MP3 players and later -- very importantly -- smartphones.
For the vast majority of consumer electronics, USB-A is fine. But for things that are as thin as possible, usually to fit into a pocket, it starts to bump up against limits.
Mini-USB put the tensioners -- the bit that wears out over time, is the bottleneck on the lifetime of the thing -- on the (expensive) device rather than the (cheap) cable. Micro-USB and USB-C didn't make that mistake.
Like, I think that there was a legitimate reason to fix that one way or another.
Sure, and I had a handful that used mini-USB instead of micro-USB, and they were completely fine. It's easy to quickly look at the plug and orient it the right way, whereas with micro-USB, it's a fair bit harder.
I don't think I ever had a mini-USB device wear out the port. Then again, I didn't have a ton of them, so maybe it's more common.
Regardless, USB-C feels like an over-engineered solution to a few small problems. The ability to use it in any orientation is nice I guess, but I still have similar problems that I had w/ micro-USB, with cables wearing out over time. I'd rather we optimize for easier to swap ports (i.e. something like the Framework laptop's changeable ports).