Comment by vkou
4 years ago
> A big reason that stuff isn't replaceable anymore is because consumers wants some of the benefits that come w/ non-replaceable parts.
This may be true, but we shouldn't confuse 'a decision made by a product manager' with 'the customers want this'.
Some design decisions succeed because of the other strengths of a product (and the competition cargo-cult copies them), not because they are good design decisions. Some design decisions are made because they are more convenient for the vendor, not better for the customer. Some design decisions are made because of inertia. Pointing to any particular design trade-off in a successful product, and saying that 'Well, this is obviously what the market wants' is not always a correct conclusion to draw.
USB is unarguably the most successful mechanism for two hardware devices to communicate with each-other in history, and yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in. Should we conclude that customers want to play the cable fandango every time they plug one device into another?
>yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in
I used to know one of the folks involved with the USB standard pretty well professionally. At one point, he told me that this aspect of USB is one thing he wished they could have dealt with differently.
(That said, the fact that the mini and micro versions are more explicitly keyed doesn't make that much of a different and I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs.)
> I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs
Interestingly, reversible USB-A cables are readily available (at least here in Japan). They just have a too-thin "lip" in the middle which is prone to breaking. https://www.sanwa.co.jp/product/syohin.asp?code=KU-RMCB2W
I think it's just that nobody thought of it when the plug was designed, because this wasn't a problem that serial cables etc before USB-A had (and even USB-B is keyed!)