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Comment by aslilac | Hacker News Reader

going off of you saying “micro port” I think you’re talking about USB B.

More likely they mean micro-USB. USB-B is anything but micro.

Micro-USB is a variant of the USB-B connector. The whole point of A and B was that A ports were used on the "host" system, and B were used on the peripheral. If you remember USB On-the-Go, that was an attempt to reverse the trend and allow a USB-B device (including micro ports) to act as a host.

USB-C erased that distinction in favor of a full duplex network connection between two hosts.

USB-OTG ports are technically mini-AB and micro-AB ports that can fit both A and B plugs.

And USB-C is neither full-duplex (at least not for USB 2) nor host-to-host; there is a protocol negotiation and some devices can never act as hosts, although some can indeed assume both host and device roles.

Even in a “host-to-host connection”, only one side will act as the host.

"some devices can never act as hosts, although some can indeed assume both host and device roles"

> Micro-USB is a variant of the USB-B connector.

In the same sense that A and B are variants of each other, sure.

Even though it's called micro-B, the design is closer to A, and micro supports both ends with basically the same plug. I would never refer to it as just "B". "B" means the square plug.

If we're being pedantic, it's USB Micro-B - more specifically the High-Speed variant. There's also USB Micro-A and USB Micro-AB, and all three have SuperSpeed variants which are twice the size.

Thanks for the reminder on just how bad the USB working group is at naming things.

Thanks, this is new information.

I wasn't being pedantic though. USB-B is in my experience used to refer to the square plug (commonly found in printers). Micro-USB seemed like a closer approximation to what I though that poster was referring to.

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