this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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yet all I needed is a "this side up" symbol ...
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).
Word
Typically, the side of the plug with the USB logo is "up". There are exceptions.
Also typically, if a USB port is vertical, up is to the left. Again, there are exceptions.