585
I want that sticker (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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https://chaos.social/@derPUPE/115821447087590444

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[–] 155 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (12 children)

ACAB but expressed in USB connector types (that funky shaped one on the right was a short lived USB connector type B). I only had like one peripheral, a scanner, that used it.

EDIT: Lots of people pointing me to printers and music gear with those ports! I dabble in music and my little korg nanoKEY2 uses mini USB. And I've not bought a new printer in over a decade (laser printer toner lasts forever). I think I unintentionally invoked Cunningham's Law here

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  • [–] 138 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    short lived

    A printer I bought two years ago, a DAC a month ago. Its definitely not short lived

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  • [–] 73 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, AFAIK all printers still have these

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  • [–] 24 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah I always call it the printer USB port. I wonder why it’s so popular there? Maybe it’s the USB connector that is hardest to break or pull off by accident?

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  • [–] 25 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    My understanding it's the other end of a one way USB cable. Normally the cable is attached like your mouse or keyboard, or commonly these days USB C, but if you are plugging in USB and it's not USB C but the cable unplugs at either end, one will be USB A and the other USB B so you can't put it in backwards like you could if they both has USB A.

    Early android smart phones used USB B micro or mini, but printers have no need to keep the plug small.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, C had two major innovations: it was symmetrically functional, and it was symmetrically functional. Everybody knows about how A was kinda a pain because you'd try to plug it in upside down a lot, but A also was unidirectional. You never see male A to male A cables despite A being so common, meanwhile C to C is the default C cable, even things that would have used an integrated cord often just slap a port on instead

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    Maybe it’s the USB connector that is hardest to break or pull off by accident?

    Yeah, pretty much. Printers and scanners are kinda the only common devices big enough not to need to use a more fragile mini-B or micro-B.

    (There are certainly other more niche "big" devices that also use it: the MIDI connection on my digital piano, for instance.)

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    A screen I bought recently has this for the integrated USB hub, I think?

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago

    Every monitor with a USB hub and every printer I’ve owned for the last 20 years has had one. It’s used to differentiate USB directionality, for example which side is upstream or the “host device” and which side is meant to plug into the computer.

    They’re moot now with USB C which is bidirectional; USB-A male to USB-A male is dangerous and not compliant with the USB specification, so they’d use USB-B on one side.

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  • [–] 51 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    So short lived you can still find it on brand new printers

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    In case anyone thinks you're being figurative, LITERALLY brand new printers. The Brother laser I bought last week is USB-B, as I expected it would be : )

    This replaced the HP laser I bought in 2004 which was, of course, also USB-B.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Why change? It does the job. The cable doesn't need to pass audio or video, doesn't need to pass fast charge power, and sure as hell doesn't need 80Gbps data transfer speeds... the bottleneck will always be the print function itself. Usb-c would be overkill. And Usb-b is made to be secured to prevent accidental disconnection for devices that typically dont move like printers and scanners, unlike Usb-c which is made for repeated insertions and easy release for devices like smart phones. Only reason the connector might change in the future is if they either start adding stupid features to printers or if it simply becomes cheaper to support newer standards.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Also some screens still use that one to act as an USB hub for the PC. There's also a variant that is a but taller, but I don't know what that type is for.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago*

    The tall ones are just the USB 3.0 version

    The tall bit on top of the type-B houses the five extra electrical connections that were added with USB 3.0.

    Maybe you've seen the same on type micro-B which gets a little extra side car. Same story there, the same five connections were added on the side.

    In a type-A connector they are in a second row deeper in the plug, you can see them if you look in, behind and offset by half to the classic four in front.

    These three plug designs all allow the old USB 2.0 type-A, type-B and type micro-B plugs to fit in new USB 3.0 holes, they will simply make contact only with the classical four pins and work as USB 2.0 then.

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  • [–] 32 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Anything non-portable that you plug in to a computer with a USB-A connection is supposed to have a USB-B on the other end if the cable is removable.

    I have a lot of music gear with USB-B connectors on them

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Same. Music gear (although my recent stuff has started going C), printers and scanners since USB became a standard, older networking hardware, older external hard drives (most of them before USB 3.0), and every piece of medical equipment I've ever dealt with. It was ubiquitous from the time USB started in the 90s until USB C got popular after 2014.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    until USB C got popular after 2014

    Nonono, USB-C isn't over a decade old.....

    ....

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Well, the good news is that it wasn't really popular in 2014. It probably didn't become popular until about 7-8 years ago and that was thanks to smartphones.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    The Nexus 6P had it in 2015. Samsung was one of the last to switch over, and they still did in 2017. I'd say closer to 9 years ago.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    You're right as far as devices go, I was just adding a year or two because most people don't switch phones immediately at release.

    The other side of that is I'm probably a little biased because I was using the weird usb-b 3.0 micro connector (the long ass one) until a couple of years ago on external drives until it got too painful to open up my sample libraries on spinning platters.

    So maybe 9 years ago and my view is colored? Or between 7 and 9 years ago depending on how you're measuring popularity?

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  • [–] 28 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    a short lived USB connector type B

    Not short lived at all, it's literally one of the three standard connectors alongside A and C. USB is an inherently directional protocol, so one side if the host device and the other is the peripheral device. The difference between Type A and B plugs helped enforce that directionality. Prior to the C connector becoming the new standard regardless of direction, all USB cables had both a Type-A and Type-B connector. (A to A cables violate the spec, and are an abomination).

    The miniUSB and microUSB connectors are both Type-B connectors, just physically smaller to accommodate smaller peripheral devices. There's also technically a mini-A and micro-A, but they're very uncommon since host devices are usually large enough for a full size plug, and now USB 3.0+ Type-C connections don't require a directional cable the same way.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    I have a bunch of USB hubs that plug into a USB-A outlet and then give you USB-A outlets. Are these not cursed because they're a hub?

    I also have a switchable USB hub from Amazon that lets you send your USB hub outlets to one out of four host devices. I use this to be able to have my mouse and keyboard plugged into my desktop or switch it to my laptop, if I have my laptop plugged into a USB dock.

    That switchable USB hub uses USB-A to USB-A cables to connect the hub to the host devices. What cable should it use instead for this purpose? USB A to USB B? And the hub would have four USB-B inputs on the back?

    To answer my own question, here is a expensive version of what I'm talking about, which uses USB-A to USB-B. https://www.startech.com/en-us/usb-hubs/hbs304a24a

    And here is the cheap version I have from Amazon, over $100 cheaper which uses the cursed cable... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHY8L11W/

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    I have a bunch of USB hubs that plug into a USB-A outlet and then give you USB-A outlets. Are these not cursed because they're a hub?

    The "cursed" thing is a male-A to male-A cable. A hub is fine because it's male-A to female-A

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Is there any risk of using the cheap A to A version?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    So far the only downside I've seen is that the keyboard and mouse don't work super well in the UEFI screen maybe one time in 20. And sometimes the keyboard would disconnect in other contexts, but that seems to have resolved itself. 

    I'm assuming for the $100+ the real one better be reliable.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    USB 1.x type B definitely wasn't short lived, I've picked up new devices with a B connector in recent years.

    The B connector you pretty much never see is the USB 2.0 one. Pretty much all devices I've seen use the wide version of USB Micro-B or, you know, USB C.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Wait until you learn about USB 3 with connector type B.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    As others have pointed out, B is still well in use today. But it seems nobody mentioned why: it's because an A to A cable would be nonstandard and since there was no c yet, it's the a to b cables. C to c is okay and there are funky A to A things which shouldn't exist.

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