Shitty Connectors - Schrödinger's USB connector

[Lord of the Large Pants]

PC case front panel connectors on the motherboard.

Came in to post this. How, in The Year of Our Lord 2024, is this not a single standardized connector?

 

[George Lucas]

Speaking of DisplayPort, there was a time when these were the only things you’d find on laptops:

Not bad per se, but rare enough to be annoying when you needed to plug your laptop to video because of course no TV or projector supported it natively, so you have to carry a myriad of adapters: mini-DP to DP, mini-DP to VGA, mini-DP to HDMI. I guess they used this one to not have to license HDMI or something.


These things would always just die on me randomly. I can’t even count how many I went through. They also tend to mysteriously get borrowed and never returned. I swear there must be a thousand of these sitting in people’s drawers somewhere while procurement departments around the world continue to order replacements because of all the legacy shit relying on Serial. For some reason they are always in some kind of ugly, transparent plastic.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

I'm most likely having that with an HDMI cable now. It blanks the screen a few seconds per hour with no apparent vibrations or other interference causing it. I wish it was all or nothing, so annoying.

Dunno if this happens to HDMI too, but with DP it's often because of chairs. Had to put the ferrite doodads on the cable to stop it blanking every time I got up and down slightly on the chair.

 

[Slav Power]

USB micro-b is probably my least favourite followed by this motherfucker
Ver archivo adjunto 5939965
You could hang half a hundred niggers with the amount of wired earphones I've broken in my lifetime because this fucking thing never came with adequate strain relief.

How the fuck do you people keep breaking this shit. I never had earbuds die on me over the plug breaking. It was always either the cable or something with the earbuds, either one sounding quieter than the other or the tips failing to stay on.

Came in to post this. How, in The Year of Our Lord 2024, is this not a single standardized connector?

I wish I knew that too. Or why modular PSU cables aren't standardized. At least with front panel connectors you have ExplainingComputers to explain it for you:

These things would always just die on me randomly. I can’t even count how many I went through. They also tend to mysteriously get borrowed and never returned. I swear there must be a thousand of these sitting in people’s drawers somewhere while procurement departments around the world continue to order replacements because of all the legacy shit relying on Serial. For some reason they are always in some kind of ugly, transparent plastic.

Good thing that on-board COM connectors are still around so you just need one of these dinky dinks to get serial connectivity:

 

[User names must be unique]

How the fuck do you people keep breaking this shit. I never had earbuds die on me over the plug breaking. It was always either the cable or something with the earbuds, either one sounding quieter than the other or the tips failing to stay on.

It was always the connection to the plug that failed nothing else I consider that a fault in the plugs design.

 

[gagabobo1997]

USB micro-b is probably my least favourite followed by this motherfucker
Ver archivo adjunto 5939965
You could hang half a hundred niggers with the amount of wired earphones I've broken in my lifetime because this fucking thing never came with adequate strain relief.

My $200 sony headphones came with the shittiest aux cord known to man that broke after like a week.

 

[indomitable snowman]

Or why modular PSU cables aren't standardized.

They're not even standardized between the same manufacturer or even PSU model. I've seen so many posts about people frying their systems because they've used different cables. I saw one recently where a guy bought what should have been the right cable from I think EVGA for his PSU only to fry something because EVGA had a revision of the same PSU which somehow changed the cables.

I feel like I won the lottery when I had to buy a replacement PSU cable for one I lost a couple years ago.

 

[Anti Alien Alarm]

How the fuck do you people keep breaking this shit. I never had earbuds die on me over the plug breaking. It was always either the cable or something with the earbuds, either one sounding quieter than the other or the tips failing to stay on.

Broke a cable and its socket on a laptop while running into a room and the cable's base hitting the side door frame. It's really just one long piece of conductive metal. 120 year old standards aren't the greatest for durability it seems.

 

[Slav Power]

while running into a room and the cable's base hitting the side door frame

Yes if I were to smash my G-Shock with a rock I'd break it too even though it'd survive a drop from a few stories just fine because it was designed for that. 120 year old standards just aren't the greatest when it comes to idiots abusing their hardware out of the scope it was designed for.

 

[George Lucas]

How the fuck do you people keep breaking this shit. I never had earbuds die on me over the plug breaking. It was always either the cable or something with the earbuds, either one sounding quieter than the other or the tips failing to stay on.

Because we’re men with big hands, not weak little Eurofags such as yourself.

Good thing that on-board COM connectors are still around so you just need one of these dinky dinks to get serial connectivity:
Ver archivo adjunto 5940314

What is with you thinking you’re smarter than everyone on this forum? You think everyone in my fucking office at the time was a braindead retard? We were using laptops and embedded systems with locked down hardware that had no PCI access. Think Ethernet, one or two USBs, a video controller (usually shit-tier VGA), and some proprietary shit nobody used. Options were severely limited. Why did we have laptops? Because we had to travel. We didn’t have the luxury of sitting in the same spot everyday and using a desktop.

They're not even standardized between the same manufacturer or even PSU model. I've seen so many posts about people frying their systems because they've used different cables. I saw one recently where a guy bought what should have been the right cable from I think EVGA for his PSU only to fry something because EVGA had a revision of the same PSU which somehow changed the cables.

I feel like I won the lottery when I had to buy a replacement PSU cable for one I lost a couple years ago.

Most of the power supplies brands are OEMs and don’t manufacture their own models, so you can get wildly different standards and performance even from the same brand. That’s why I always stick with Sea Sonic. They make their own power supplies.

 

[Slav Power]

not weak little Eurofags such as yourself

What is with you thinking you’re smarter than everyone on this forum?

lol calm down

 

[Kosher Dill]

USB-C is fine, nice connector, symmetrical.

Until you want to charge something. Then you have a segment of transatlantic cable attached to your gracile plug with its diaphanous metal sheath, bending and deforming it with its sheer weight. And no, the plug doesn't stay securely in place even after "snapping in", because consumers are for screwing.

 

[George Lucas]

Can we talk about light bulbs for a moment? You know the Edison screw, the standard screw-in thpe connector, isn’t particular elegant. It’s big and clumsy, but it gets the job done. It doesn’t require any special tools. But I think what makes it an actually good connector is that it is secured by torque and not pressure. That means you just need to unscrew it and you don’t need to exert any pressure to remove. Lights are always in weird places where you may not be able to get much leverage, so having the light bulb be able to be removed effortlessly or even just by gravity once unscrewed is nice.

Unfortunately we can’t have nice things when Climate Change exists, so we had some retards come up with all these retarded fixtures that kill me:


Once in a while I run into one of these monstrosities. It’s a connector that apparently was made so that you can’t accidentally use a incandescent light bulb (except they have adapters so it doesn’t mattee). But these things are so poorly designed that the pins don’t even sit correctly half the time. Different manufacturers have slightly different sizes, so the bulb is always either loose or tight. It also requires precision to install. You have to line the pins up and it’s nearly impossible to do blind, unlike the big dumb Edison screw.


These plugs are gay. They are sticky, and require a ridiculous amount of force to remove sometimes. It’s infuriating when they are used as recessed ceiling lights, because you have to maintain balance on a ladder while using force to get the out, and often the lip is not very big and you risk exerting pressure on the glass and imploding the bulb. These pieces of ass were used in new construction before becoming obsolete about as soon as they were introduced because of LEDs.

 

[ForkyMeetsPorky]

From my experience:

SCART - Mostly great because of the pin 8 switching that would switch your TV over to the correct input when you turned on your cable box or DVD player, but was very easy to dislodge. Some expensive cable's came with clips but these rarely did anything.
PS2 keyboard/mouse - The pins in these always bent too easily, luckily they are easy to fix
Molex - On older PC's these can be hard to remove, and often feels like you're about to break the connector off the board.
Micro USB - For reasons stated earlier
Nokia PopPort - The pins on the port were often exposed and would get dirty, leading to intermittent connection issues
Internal USB 3 ports - The cables are always very heavy and puts a lot of strain on the connector, I've encountered a few that have bent or snapped off the motherboard connector itself
ADC Connector - This was an custom version of DVI that Apple used on their PowerMac computers and displays from 2000-03 that bundled DVI/USB and power down the same cable. A nice concept but was short-lived as they ended up switching back to DVI which require adaptors that are difficult to find today.
eSATAp - A combined USB and eSATA port, both difficult to plug devices into and a pointless design. Why not just have seperate connectors for both?

 

[Fae Supremacist]

It's funny to bring up proprietary mobile connectors from the Dark Ages before the Great USB Unification, but there's still one abomination that still exists.
The despicable USB Micro-B, used for external hard drives and literally nothing else, worse than C in every metric, looks like a failed abortion

Look at this shit.

Comes with screws too!

 

[seri0us]

Spoiler

 

[ghastlyretard]

[...] used for external hard drives and literally nothing else [...]

Ranjit would argue otherwise.

 

[Aljam]

This fucker is the bane of my existence

 

[WULULULULU]

Everytime I try to do a multi drive set up with more than two drives, I give up because of this nonsense.
Ver archivo adjunto 5939102
If your case is a silent one, that shit is going to be a pain in the ass. It's pretty bad in normal cases, too. Also never really know if the damn thing is fully plugged in.

>be me
>PC needs some extra cooling
>buy new fans
>6 P12 Max
>needs fan hub
>Arctic fan hub
>requires Sata connector
>check Corsair PSU cables
>sees this thing
>
>rip cable management

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

It's funny to bring up proprietary mobile connectors from the Dark Ages before the Great USB Unification, but there's still one abomination that still exists.
The despicable USB Micro-B, used for external hard drives and literally nothing else, worse than C in every metric, looks like a failed abortion

Look at this shit.
Ver archivo adjunto 6944979
Comes with screws too!
Ver archivo adjunto 6944985

This hurts my soul on a level I didn't think was possible.