this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I'm glad that most of the older formats are gone. Screws are cumbersome, USB formats were intentionally varied for profit, and molex would break itself before you could seat it properly.
I love USB-C for its universality and SATA cables are a nice alternative to the old IDE. I wish they'd come up with a better solution to the plastic clips on my Ethernet and PSU cables.
As for my favorite... Maybe 3.5mm? I mean, it's old as dirt but still super functional. Nice chunky clicks and usually a solid connection. I miss having a 3.5mm port on my phone. It obviously has some drawbacks, but it's a solid contender.
Thumb screws are great for a secure connection that holds up, and can be undone at any time, and takes the stress away from the port itself, since the screws support the stress, so you cant screw up the port by accidentally yanking the cable out like you can with HDMI.
USB variants? You mean mini and micro? That was so products could be made smaller and smaller, cause no one wanted a phone that had a USB B slot on it, making the phone an inch thick.
Everyone has different experiences, but in all my years of PC building and repairs, I only ever had 1 problem with a molex connector, and it was cause the pins had corroded together (PC had water damage, was seeing if anything was salvageable.)
3.5mm its old as dirt and functional, but its also flimsy. a bad bump and you can break the connections inside it without breaking it externally.. Which is what happened to my last pair of headphones...thankfully they had a replaceable cable.
USB-C is a major pain in the ass. You pick up a random USB-C cable. Okay.. is it a charging cable, or does it have data? is it Slow speed or high speed? Does it support thunderbolt? Who knows! Hope you label them and keep them properly separated!
USB-A, USB-B, USB-B Superspeed, mini-USB, micro-USB, micro-USB-Super Speed. Some of those also presented the issue of not having a simple visual indication of whether it was USB 1, 2, or 3. At least with USB-C, the cables should all work, even if you get slower speeds, whereas a USB-B-3 connector wouldn’t fit a USB-B-2 port at all.
The solution to the USB-C mystery cable is to just get a pile of Thunderbolt cables and then you can be sure it’ll handle whatever the attached devices do.