Original USB inventor says a reversible connector would have been too expensive to produce

[IceIceAyu]

Reversible was never needed. what is needed is a convention MARKING the connector: This Side Up.

Never had a problem with USB Type A. The mark you're looking for is those two holes in the jack itself. Thats where the host (PC) physically locks in your cable to prevent unwanted disconnections.

Meanwhile my type C cable always gets disconnected with the slightest tug I also had some Chinese USB drives (flashdrives and SD card readers) that were 'reversible' type A. The had holes on both sides and the board with the metal pins inside were free-floating and wedge-shaped to allow entry in either orientation. All broke easily though by either getting themselves shorted out (the two-sided wedge pins proved deadly to the flashdrive eventually) or the material eventually broke.

I miss the locking mechanism of Type A and microUSB ports. If they were abused, I simply bent the locking pins in type A ports or microusb Jacks back in place.

Reversible isn't that easy. Check out GamersNexus's video on the factory that made USB cables where the cost of making USB 3 type C wasnt just double of USB 3 Type A, it also balooned the material cost, added more risks of broken cables, had more steps with tigher standards, needed more machines, and made less cables pass QA check.

 

[treetops]

That wasn't what you asked. What you are doing is shifting the goalpost instead of conceding defeat.

People were like oh why didn't he do xyz. xyz is available if anyone wants to do it on my given example. That's all I was saying.

 

[Sergey Novikov]

There is bullshit, I don't know why they did not think about it 10 years ago?

 

[Danny101]

It's only a minor inconvenience. USB Type C for cell phones however is well appreciated.

 

[Ludak021]

Talk about rationalizing a bad decision. and let's not forget, how many ports got broken by squeezing the connectors in the wrong way! And let's see, double costs (so the cables might have gone to 6 cents to produce?, but you are eliminating VGA, Parallel, and serial cables. Geesh!

They worried about the cost to the manufacturer, not to the consumer. A dollar more per port times hundreds of millions of ports per year, do the math.

 

[cliffordcooley]

If you are under the age of 20, I wouldn't curse too loudly. You might not even exist, had USB been designed differently.

 

[kenc1101]

Reversible was never needed. what is needed is a convention MARKING the connector: This Side Up.

Most USB cables have a USB symbol on the connector marking which side is up. Doesn't help too much if the USB port is vertical but they are usually marked.

 

[Someone8MyPosts]

...and yet people are paying crazy amounts of money for various dongles/adapters and crap just to hook up stuff to their various devices.

 

[Markoni35]

HDMI is much worse. Apple FireWire was much worse. Don't blame the creator of USB for something that others did worse at the same moment in history.

If nothing else, USB is more reliable than any of the other standards. Apple standards which were used for video cameras were so fragile, it was normal that your port dies on both sides (in the computer and on the camera). Other ports that preceded USB were equally sensitive. A little bit of fiddling and it would fry.

I never had problems with USB. It's one of the most electrically resilient systems ever created. Don't look just the outside connector people, USB is more than just a piece of plastic.