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.
USB-C has more connectors for data and power than A/B so it's not a surprise that it's more capable.
What's really changed is demand. No one really expected USB to be used to power everything, it was only ever really expected to be used on computers and maybe digital cameras, smartphones used to arrange matters for themselves. It was only when they two began to adopt USB aas well that calls for smaller ports and higher capacity cables started to arise.
Yeah, it's not like the U stands for Universal or something.
Yeah, Universal Spower Bus. Sounds right. I was reading the "power" part emphasized in the comment you replied to. Prior to mass adoption by phone mfrs, USB wasn't powering all that much. You'd usually have 5v wall wart and cable ending in a barrel connector. Hate those things.
I chuckled more than I would like to admit about that spelled out USB name, dunno, it's funny
The Universal Spower Bus
sounds like an awesome transit vehicle!
Let's take a ride!
Edit: Spower is a contraction of Space and Power. Yes, you heard me right. It's running on spinfinite space power!
And there you have it,
The Universal Spower Bus:
The barrel connector was reversible, and I don’t think I ever had one fail.
They did always use way too much space with their AC adapter things and for whatever reason nargles liked to steal them.
I'm not really sure what that means. The original A/B specification did not allow for much variable voltage. It's only universal in name, not in nature. There was absolutely no way to deal with high voltage devices, the cables were not adaptive.
USB 4.0 specification allows for powering things like electrical drills. No way the original USB A/B specification can handle that.
As long as it's a serial bus
You are right to an extent but the context of its original universality is in the rest of the name. Universal serial bus. The idea was a universal port for dealing with data and connections not neccesarily power.
And yet it still can't retingulate droopglers. Pathetic.