this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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But in practical use, people found out that even a 50/50 chance of plugging the connector in the right way is annoying enough to warrant the additional complexity of reversability, hence the development of USB Type C.
The USB-C design turned out to be much more durable and versatile (signal and power wise) in addition to reversability compared to the previous USB designs, and it is developed specifically to address the problems people found with USB-A/B/MicroUSB.
Sometimes problems only reveal themselves through real life usage, and iterative improvement through a scientific trial and error process to address these problem is how you get development progress.
Can someone explain to me why I keep reading about people having problems plugging in USB A connectors upside down? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Per the spec, the holes always go up. They indicate the correct way to plug in the port. Not only that, but the printed logo on the connector also always goes up.
The only time this is SLIGHTLY confusing is if you have a desktop tower where the motherboard is essentially mounted sideways, but for that case it just takes an extra second to think which way is "up" from the perspective of the motherboard.
And before anyone says "who reads the spec?", it feels like I subconsciously knew this for something like a decade before I even knew what a spec was.
Sometimes you're working on an IoT device in a tight space, which makes rotating/seeing everything much harder.
Especially if you drop the cable it falls into a crevice somewhere.
You probably won't have trouble plugging it in the first time, but gods forbid you unplug/replug it then the cable rotates 540 degrees and you have no idea how it was plugged in before
Yeah that's fair. But I feel like I've seen these "USB superposition" memes since before IoT was even a thing.
I've seen enough devices with the usb ports mounted upside down, for whatever strange reason. Also sometimes you want to plug something in without looking, this is much easier with USB-C
That's wild, I've never seen an upside down port.
I agree reversibility is better and am happy usb c will finally kill this meme.