Have you noticed that the charge ports in the devices we drive for the devices we carry have changed from rectangular to oval? It’s a small but significant hassle if you have an older device – with the rectangular plug – that you cannot plug into the oval port. Why do they do this? The obvious answer seems to be to push you into buying a new device that uses the oval charge plug. But maybe there’s another reason. You tell me!
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As others have pointed out, USB-C provides more charging current, but the other “feature” is greatly enhanced bandwidth over the connection to connect the device you carry to the device you drive, all the better to assimilate your sail phone to the hive mind.
@Eric – When plugging the device you carry into an evaluation vehicle, I’d recommend a data blocker and sufficient adapters to filter the data connection to the hive mind.
An Android phone plugging into a Google/Android “infotainment” system strikes me as dangerous.
The same thing applies to an Apple device and CarPlay.
I have a data blocker from Plugable for use in rental cars, but other brands are on the market.
The downside of the Plugable is max 1.0 A of current at 5 V.
Also known as a “USB Condom”
Older USB ports wouldn’t even fit on my current computer, a MacBook Air. It’s too thin. I think Apple, back at the end of the 1990’s was going to solve the thicker connector problem with Firewire. Firewire, of course was WAY better than USB, but Firewire never gained much traction with the PC crowd. The early iPods came with firewire, not USB. Video camera’s used firewire so it was a thing for us Mac users at least.
It’s a pain though, the connecters never stay the same for long. Gone from SCSI to firewire to USB. At least the newer USB sort of works with the older.
Firewire is still popular with the Forensics and filmmaker crowd.
Apple and Sony developed the standard, but ditching Firewire was the price Apple paid for the exclusive on Thunderbolt being an exclusive for at least six months before Intel gave it to the rest of the OEMs.
Why do you even need a phone in your car at all? Things worked fine back in the golden era of the mid 1990s, didn’t they? We didn’t have charging ports in cars and they were good cars. We had answering machines on our landlines at home, which is where a telephone should be, right?
I’ll stay off your lawn.
Kidding! I do like the mapping function with search. Comes in handy to quickly locate a liquor store in a strange town.
Contrived Complexity for Job Security
That’s at the core of the planned obsolescence of the tech brigades. These cats make the 1950’s designers in Detroit look like a bunch of pikers. At least you could use your ten year old car if you maintained it. Not so with our “electrified future”.
Detroit did it, they in fact invented the “model years” idea to get people to keep buying new cars every year. The US manufacturers are the worst, too, about ripping everything up and changing it every year. The window crank from a 1962 Impala wouldn’t be the same as a 1961 or 1963. The Japanese were a lot better, many components in a Camry being the same as a 4Runner for decades at least.
The other joy is when the built in port in the car gets sketchy. 2018 Grand Cherokee now both USB ports in the cubby below the center console are intermittent. Nice. Think your phone is charging a few bumps in the road no more charging. There is a old school 12v cigarette lighter type port in the jockey box that always works with an ancient USB converter plugged in.
I am so irritated there is no phone jack in the…phone! I cant charge and listen to music at the same time like every older phone going back to 2008. Unless I buy another accessory- being a charging pad on top of the adapter for the phone jack.
Only good thing about the newer cables seems to be they dont get a contact issue as they get old where you have to bend the wire a certain way to make it work again. Or maybe they do but it takes much longer
Fuckery squared…… cannot do without the latest gizmo or update . My f-150 keeps prompting for the latest update, as if, i will keep taking a pass.
P.S. Where is raider girl,Eric , miss her posts
Tax season. She’s gotta be a busy beaver bout now.
Morning, Nova –
Raider’s back; she posted here yesterday. Now if I could only figure out what happened to Nunzio.
I’m actually happy everything is moving to USB-C. I was so tired of carrying so many different cables. My wife insists on iPhone but I have always had Android. Nice that they both have the same charger.
Yes ! I was shocked to find out iphone and android had the same plug just recently . What is the world coming to !
Might it be that the newer ones carry more current for newer devices and if the older devices were plugged in without some adapter they might be damaged?
That’s part of it. The more recent USB standards also increase the voltage.
It’s not a conspiracy. Trust me, designers don’t care if you need to update or not. We like to fix things and the USB A and B plugs are clunky, don’t support high speeds, can’t handle a lot of power.
That’s why the mini and micro came about. But they all suffer from one serious flaw, they’re unidirectional. Isn’t the most frustrating thing to figure out the right way an old USB cable has to be inserted?
So that’s not a small reason the Thunderbolt, Lightning and USB-C exist.
But to give you some idea.
The original USB plug can handle 2.5 watts per spec. The USB-C power delivery can handle 240 watts. That’s 100 times more power, not an incremental “just to make you buy new” change.
As far as speed, the original USB 1 spec was 12 Mbps, the current top USB-C 4 is 20 Gbps. That’s an increase of 1,667 times in bandwidth. Those old connectors can’t reliably transfer those speeds.
Before you answer, tell me you don’t hate waiting for hours to transfer our music on an old USB 2.0 thumbstick. You hate it. Technology is a merry-go-round. You can stop upgrading and stand pat with something that still works but almost no one does. Apple and Microsoft stop sending you updates but an computer with Windows 95 will still turn on and do the things it did in 1995. That might be all you need, so no reason to replace it. But if a developer finds features of XP or Windows 11 useful it’s not their responsibility to keep supporting you.
OK, sure, some times there’s no choice. I wish I could still use my iPhone 5S but the cell carriers dropped 2G, 3G and pre-VoLTE so it can’t be used anymore.
The churn does bother me. But the cell carriers are by and large responding to market demands and supporting cell standards that old holdouts only want is inefficient use of the airwaves. People wanted to stream video over their data connections so they had to eventually do an upgrade. The same thing happened when the cell system dropped support for analog AMPS phones (like the original bricks) to go digital in the first place.
Thanks for hipping us – well, me – to this, Terry!
Thanks, Terry, for the detailed answer to my query!
Thing is, too, that when you think about it the USB committee does actually try to make it easy. You can use a $5 adapter to plug a USB1 device into a USB-C 4 and it’ll work just fine, up to USB1 specifications. There’s a lot happening in the background when you plug a 20 year old thumb drive into a brand new laptop or vice versa. When you think about how fast technology changes that USB is actually pretty universal is kind of amazing.
Get adapters from ebay for $1
I still find adapters for my 2O year old laptop on eBay, cheaper than when they were new.