its kind of weird because you would think something like an audio jack is bomb proof because its a giant cylinder
Part of it is probably that nobody at the time would have taken a micro USB connector seriously... I mean printers were usually on 25 pin centronics (about the size of a GPIB connector), usually cabled to a D25 on the PC end, keyboards were 5 pin DIN or mini DIN, mice were D9 serial.
The real mystery with USB, is did nobody actually try plugging in a USB-A before standardising the thing? The number of the stupid things I have tried to stuff in upside down over the years (It always seems to take three tries!).
Bear in mind that USB was really seen as a sort of more standard (and slightly faster, but filling the same niche) version of the Apple Desktop Bus that used to be the way you plugged keyboards, mice and laserwriters into mackintoshes, portable devices as we now understand them were not even a consideration, and the phones of the time all used gratuitously different connectors anyway.
Regards, Dan.
did nobody actually try plugging in a USB-A before standardising the thing?
how come the reliability of the mini was bad?
[micro-usb is] more robust than any USB connector version previously made. More mating cycles and mechanically stronger.
Micro USB connectors just don't break.
Only variants with no through-hole mounting pins are subject for breaking off from PCB
QuoteMicro USB connectors just don't break.That statement does not match my personal experience. They may resist breakage in exactly the ways that they were intended to resist breakage, but other "system-level" issues seem to come up that have been the death of several (otherwise undamaged) products I've owned. Including some expensive cell phones. The cables break even more frequently, too (apparently usually due to shoddy strain relief, fine wires, and poor soldering/assembly technique.)
Unfortunately, the "no through-hole" versions are by far the most common, and in between the lack of TH, the smaller overall area of the pads, and the thinner PCBs, the "break off of PCB" failure mode is very common :-(
you should post this in other peoples threads repeatedly
The micro connectors are ok for phones, because phones are small and light and generally do not exert a great deal of force on the cable. Put a micro USB connector on the back of a 15 pound laser printer and then trip over the cord and I bet it snaps off the plug, rips the connector off the PCB or both. Try the same with a fullsized USB connector and there's a pretty good chance it will spin the printer around and yank the plug out of the socket without damage.
The fullsized B connectors normally have the far end supported by the opening in the housing it goes through. You may have had one break but I never have. They're bigger and heavier, with large through hole posts. Has anyone else here ever had one break? Can anyone point me to a printer, scanner, 3.5" hard drive or other bulky USB peripheral that has a micro USB port? Anyone?
The fullsized B connectors normally have the far end supported by the opening in the housing it goes through
You may have had one break but I never have.
3.5" hard drive or other bulky USB peripheral that has a micro USB port?
IIRC the original USB connectors were based on the connector used for linking the Nintendo Game Boy handheld systems, which had proven it to be a robust design even in the hands of clumsy or rambunctious kids.
The 6-pin FireWire 400 cable is more like the old gameboy connector.
i wanna know the engineering process at this point I don't care the politics behind the spec
Desire to design a universal serial interface to replace the hodgepodge of connectors currently in use such as DB25 and DB9 serial and parallel ports, DB15 game ports, SCSI ports, PS/2 kb/mouse, bus mouse, etc while also providing power to the devices. The standard USB connectors were made to be robust and foolproof, easy to manufacture, sturdy, easy to insert and remove, durable enough to handle loads of insert/removal cycles, designed to connect power before data...
What produced the modern USB connectors (culminating in USB-C) isn’t magic new materials. It’s simply ordinary engineering done to improve upon the shortcomings of what came before. The number of devices with USB today is probably orders of magnitude larger than all the computers in the world in 1995, and the use cases cover things never anticipated before. At this kind of scale, you discover issues that you wouldn’t have otherwise. And the economies of scale involved mean that you can amortize much more expensive R&D than you could have before, so we could spend more money designing better connectors to improve upon the last. And at this kind of scale, manufacturers can afford the more expensive tooling for higher-precision parts.
Used to be you could just include an RS-232C port, with its mind-numbingly simple hardware and software, and you had connectivity to 99% of the world's devices.