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Comment by rincebrain | Hacker News Reader

Is that not something many people can do one-handed?

The last time I had any trouble doing that one-handed was in the era of proprietary inch-wide charge connectors.

Last I checked, I only had one opposable thumb per hand. I need that to hold my phone, so how would I grab the cable? With my teeth?

It’s not super convenient, but I do it this way: press the phone to the ball of my palm with the middle, ring and little finger and use the thumb and the index finger to pull the cable out. The trickiest part is the positioning of the phone in the palm, because that pulling motion has a very limited range.

And unless your phone has the charging port at the top, you're now holding it upside down.

As the other commenter said, the more convenient method is to hold the phone upside-down and pull it out.

The less portable method, assuming you have a phone sufficiently smaller than your hand and sufficient pull, is to pull the cord out using some of the non-opposable digits that are located near the phone bottom when it's right-side up.

I usually opt for the former, but the latter is much more feasible than I would have expected (IME USB-C is not that hard to tug out, by mistake or otherwise, though it's still better than microUSB B).

That’s nice for you, but some of us suffer from disorders that lead to shaking hands and poor coordination, such that plugging in a device to such a small port is a grueling, sometimes impossible task. What then?

Sure, I wasn't trying to imply anything about people who, for one reason or another, had difficulty with or could not do it, I was just expressing surprise that this might be a much larger subset of people than I had previously thought.

I think it’s something most people _can_ do, but _don’t_ do simply because unplugging the cord from the bottom of your phone with one hand is rather awkward, especially with larger models.

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