Trevor Mogg for Digital Trends:
You know how it is. You need to get some files off your thumb drive so you go to plug it into your PC and … nope … it ain’t going in. So you flip it around and fiddle and fumble to find the port again and … nope … it still ain’t going in. So you flip it around again and … what the … somehow it still refuses to slot in as it surely should. How can that be?
It’s taken a while, but the man that led the Intel team that created the USB (Universal Serial Bus) all those years ago, Ajay Bhatt, has finally acknowledged that the design has caused plenty of frustration over the years.
Stating what hundreds of millions of people around the world have known for years, Bhatt told NPR recently: “The biggest annoyance is reversibility.”
MacDailyNews Take: Boy, we hated those plugs when we had a bunch of them (and still hate them on the odd time we have to use them again). It seemed like you’d have a 50-50 chance of getting it right on the first try, but it felt more like 95% of the time it was wrong!
He obviously did not live near the ontersection of technology and liberal arts
And yet they’re a million times better than ADB.
They had the “reversibility” problem x 360º
Plus the pins could bend. Plus S-video cables could mess with them.
Ditto the PS/2 ports they replaced on the PC.
Micro-USB is the super-frustrating one; they only go in one way, yes, but they’re so easy to damage in a way they’ll go in but will never stay in a matching port, making the entire cable useless.
You always get USB on the third try.