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This is somewhat related as it's the next step of the above.

The floating tongue of the USB connection is in the socket, not the on the cable. As in the most fragile part of the design is on the device side, not the cable side. This means that you can more easily break your $1000 device not the $2 cable. They repeated this mistake with USB-C as well.

It's not hard to make a port where the cable is the free floating tongue and the device is a more robust socket that wraps around that fragile piece. I know everyone's happy about the iPhone moving to USB-C but the tongue on the cable side that it had was much better. Anyone who's tripped on a cable and broken a USB socket can attest to this.

Idk, lightning has the opposite problem where the contacts are exposed and degrade very quickly on the cable and need to be replaced constantly. Great for apple. And lightning has the gripping pins on the phone which degrade rather quickly too over repeated use. No cable is perfect I fear

Fwiw as a known clutz i haven't yet broken a USB C socket, the worst i've done is gummed a socket up with pocket lint. The symmetry helps avoid as many issues.

I did break USB A sockets though. They could easily be jammed in backwards and with the offset from center tongue and the cable perfectly designed to wedge in the wrong way and snap the tongue i did it far too often.

Unless we go to something radically different then one side or the other is going to have the flimsy bits.

For my money, I’d take a flimsy cable over a flimsy device port. Replacing a cable is a two minute trip to Amazon. Replacing a device port is a pricey and annoying trip to a repair shop or an evening with my soldering iron cursing the universe.

Basically buy 2 Lenovo X due to the broken usb-c power slot. There is a backup one but for business notebook you fly with you you really do not want a broken notebook.

That's incorrect. USB-C design maximizes the device longevity by removing springs from the device that typically get worn down quickly.

The cable is responsible for the grip. You do get a protruding tongue on the device side, but it's well protected.

I broke mine on a S21. It's also getting wobbly on 2 Essential Phones.

As OP said, now those 3 expensive devices are mostly broken or at risk instead of the cheap cable. It's bad design compared to the Lightning connector, and I don't like Apple...

Be that as it may, the Lightning port's communications are shit and inferior to those of the ancient 30-pin iPod port.

Lightning can't even deliver full HD video; the iPod port could. And what Lightning does deliver is compressed trash.

For the aggrieved downvoters: https://blog.panic.com/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...

It's not really "bad design", it's an intentional tradeoff.

Doing it the Lightning way makes it significantly more difficult to guarantee good signal integrity, especially once you get into USB 3 speeds and beyond. Not to mention exposing sensitive pins to all kinds of ESD shocks!

Most repair shops are able to solder a new connector in the motherboard. You could try it.

My OnePlus 5T have 4 years now and connector is still fine. I suspect user error

>Tt's bad design compared to the Lightning connector, and I don't like Apple...

Lightning connector is significantly worse.

It's not. Their cables are bad but the connector is very simple to use and if abuse it the cable breaks.

I haven't had any problems with dozens of devices over the years. What are you doing to your phone?

Getting unlucky? I'm probably a bit careless when plugging in but at least the Samsung failure is a disgrace.

A Samsung tablet is faring better, though.

I was surprised this mistake was made with USB-C. Surely a committee voted on this and knew what they were doing? Isn't Lightning the opposite way around?

The best feature of those little thumb screws was that the computer-side mount could become unscrewed and fall off when you were trying to remove the cable. On some machines, it was held in with a tiny little nut on the inside of the case. The nut was just the right size to fall onto a motherboard and bridge PCB traces or exposed I/O pins.

Of course, there was no way to detect this by feel.

now this sounds like you've had a terrible accident.

worst I ever had was the computer side falling out on the outside (no bolt, it was just threaded into the case itself)

> trying in vain to reach behind a heavy computer and unscrew the two jammed retaining bolts holding in a serial, parallel, scsi, vga, or DVI plug with slippery bent plastic jacketed heads

Oh yes, that brings back very bad memories.

Only gradually did it dawn on me that nothing really bad actually happens if I didn't screw the connectors tight on DVI/VGA etc. :)

(Yes, these are technically not plug-and-play, but the occasional disconnect sure beat all the banging my head on the desk and swearing profusely every time I changed something with my personal setup.)

It's like VGA cables came with loctite pregooped on with how hard they were to unscrew.

I think it was the plastic material for those screws and heat. Over time it just gets tighter because the computer is warm and the plastic expands.

This is what I do with these (terrible) screw-in connectors.

- Loosely plug in the connector

- Screw in the right side, relatively tight

- Use the right screw as a pivot point, by pushing the plug to the left, this will properly seat in the connector

- Screw in the left side until it touches, do not tighten

To unscrew, use the left side as a pivot point by pushing the plug to the right, this should loosen the right screw, unscrew it, then, unscrew the left side, which shouldn't be tight if you did it correctly.

Note: you can switch left for right and right for left.

The general idea is to wiggle left and right by using the screws as pivots. Do this to unscrew if it is too tight. If only one side is screwed in (don't do that) and it is too tight, screw in the other side and use the pivot trick.

I don't like not screwing these in as they have a tendency to come loose, especially since they also have poor feedback and chances are that they aren't properly inserted to begin with.

And side note: another thing I hate with this plugs is that when you pull out the cable, the plug tends to grab ever other cable that's on their way. In fact, some of these plugs look suspiciously like boat anchors and seem to be just as effective at grabbing stuff.

The D-sub connectors were pretty intuitive, as far as I can remember. The 9-pin joystick ports never caused much trouble.

Making the USB connectors symmetric in their outer shape but not symmetrically pluggable was really inexcusable. When it came out I remember thinking that it was worse than any of the existing connectors. And this is supposed to be the new “universal” connector?

> The D-sub connectors were pretty intuitive, as far as I can remember.

I never personally had a problem with them, but I can attest that people did. At my first job (a small computer shop), we had multiple customers who tried to jam their D-sub connector on wrong, and broke one or more pins off. Since this was back in the day when the cable was hard wired into the monitor, that generally meant they had to buy a new monitor.

That is malicious, you cut off the d-sub connector and put another one on. I have never heard of someone replacing a monitor because the pins on the connector were damaged.

I've never heard of anyone replacing their hard wired monitor cable. And in any case I certainly wouldn't have had the skills, so I think "malicious" is an uncalled-for term here. Maybe my boss (the owner) knew better and chose to charge people for new monitors, but I definitely didn't.

Have you never wired a plug? I'm baffled that it would never occur to you that the connector is replaceable.

I wired a plug for the first time in my life this past year. Nor have I ever known someone who has wired a plug. It's pretty rare to have to do something like that, in my experience. Certainly at 18 I wouldn't have had any reason to believe that was even possible.

My class got taught it in high school age 15-16, shrug. (And I'd done them at home before that)

Sure, obviously different people will have different experiences. That's why I was careful to qualify it by saying "in my experience". But we never did that at home (though oddly enough my dad did plenty of other electrical work around the farm), and it definitely wasn't something I got taught in school. Until this year when I replaced my dishwasher, I had no idea one could even replace a power plug or that some things required you to wire a power plug into them.

Wow, that is almost impressive. Especially since you will find power plugs hanging next to the light bulbs in almost any grocery store in the world. But I guess, one need to know, to see them. Maybe we shouldn't think the users of our software are totally hopeless when they don't find all the functions we put in the menus.

Heh, as a former EE masquerading as a software developer, I would elicit gasps by...taking the case off a computer (do it while it's turned on and jaws hit the floor).

I once opened the hood of a running car.

As a repair shop, it is your job to repair the broken thing, not just sell them a new one. A big shielded molded cable can be fixed, either at the connector or replacing the whole cable where it terminates into the PCB. If I had known about a shop disposing of 500-700$ monitors with bad cables, I would have made a fortune.

As I have said, I had no idea you could fix such a thing. Hell I didn't even know that until this very thread, much less 20 years ago. As such it was not in the least malicious (ignorant perhaps, but that's a separate thing).

In any case, your unfounded criticism of my moral character is really irrelevant to the main point I made: it was totally possible to fuck up plugging in D-sub connectors, and I witnessed multiple people who had done so.

I apologize, my comment was too strong. I am sure many shops did this, probably because they got into retail when the home computer market was booming and weren't yet skilled in repair.

I did this once, it's not trivial. If you don't impedance match correctly, the colors get all wonky. It's a fairly specialized skill and more challenging than your typical solder job. Honestly easier to take the monitor apart and solder on a whole new cable.

At least PS/2 cables were mostly made with "keyed" rubber jackets where one side was flat and the other rounded, so in the dark you could tell which way was up.

(Though, that keyboard and mouse were different ports was stupid, so it loses points there)

Keyboard was always the one closest to the mobo, since it was there first (and was originally a larger, more robust DIN connector); the mouse piggybacked on top of that later.

Never have I been able to successfully plug a PS/2 port in by haptics alone.

I can totally see how they were designed to theoretically allow for it; practically, the tactile feedback for the correct orientation is just way too subtle.

And regarding the two different ports: I can't remember (or rather, I was never motivated to revisit the plugs once connected to experiment, since it was such a pain) – was there a technical reason for that, or could modern mainboards/BIOSes/OSes detect and correct for that?

> was there a technical reason for that, or could modern mainboards/BIOSes/OSes detect and correct for that?

IIRC, there was a technical reason in that original mainboards lacked the circuitry to detect and correct for it (I think different mouse vs keyboard interrupts were involved?), and it would have been a extra x¢ on the BOM. But modern mainboards just use two of the same circuit and in fact do work fine if you swap them (tested just now, sample size of 1).

But then you have to remember the orientation of the port itself!

That sounds silly, but I forgot a non-trivial number of times.

PS/2 connectors were a regression on AT DIN & D sub 9-pin serial for most practical purposes.

The only upside of PS/2 was a higher mouse data rate, particularly with high monitor refresh rates, made mouse movement smoother. You didn't get this for free in Windows though, you needed a registry tweak to tell the mouse driver to bump the sample rate.

The huge downside was that PS/2 peripherals couldn't be inserted when the PC is turned on. They need to be inserted at boot time, and aren't detected if they're plugged in later.

And the keyboard and mouse connectors were physically the same but not generally switchable.

The fact that keyboard and mouse connectors in ps/2 were not interchangeable was really annoying. No matter how much USB-A is annoying, this alone made having USB keyboards and mice a win in my book.

This brought back many bad memories of trying to straighten a bent pin with needle-nose pliers and other tools that weren’t made of the job.

I find small flat bladed screw drivers work well.

> unscrew the two jammed retaining bolts holding in a serial, parallel, scsi, vga, or DVI

Yes, it was kind of annoying, but OTOH it provided reliable robustness. Today, many connectors are just too prone to unintentional disconnect. And in the case of optional locks, like e.g. on some DP cables, one never know if the cable has the lock or is just stuck.

I fail to understand what you mean with plugging a mini-DIN plug "off-center". Please explain!

I find it easy to use by feel alone. You can feel when the sleeve fits the socket. Then you can rotate it in the socket until it can go all the way in.

Given the number of bent pins I've seen on mini-DIN connectors, I think people don't find it as easy as you do.

You’re reaching around the back of a computer and you can’t see the exact location of the mini-din jack, you have to angle the plug normal to the plane of the computer back (more or less), you have to center the plug (translate the plug horizontally and vertically) to align it with the jack, and you have to rotate it so the the indentation (and of course pins) align.

But… My old computers all had a slippery steel plate surrounding the jacks, and the jacks had plastic centers aligned flush with the plate, having the plug overlap the steel plate never felt terribly different from only having the rotation wrong.

Ah, the token ring connectors. Not reversible, but genderless.

> the tactile feedback of being slightly misaligned is identical to it being upside down.

Did that come out right?

(Asking as I have a similar hypothesis- depending on your answer.)

3.5 mm audio jack: I'm absolutely perfect