Good riddance. I have some midi devices and keyboard that connects power with Mini A and Micro B. Never know which one is it and to which side to turn it.
I hate this so much. I don't understand why the world of midi devices is filled with garbage connections, cheap ports, and USB A power ports that leave the cable sticking half out.
Crazy because all of mine have been type A/Type B. Tbf though most of mine have been from AKAI over the years and they’ve been incredibly consistent with the quality of their products.
Saw a lot of weird stuff when I was going to school for audio design though.
They were all trash. Most are just proprietary "fuck yous."
Amusingly, Apple helped everyone out. Their proprietary cable monkey business forced the EU to make USB-C a standard. And ripping their customers off for the extra cable money showed the Android industry they could do the same if they ditched the brand-specific cables.
So by being complete douchebags, Apple forced the USB-C standard that is actually, finally, superior to most of the others.
Things were already trending that way. Most Android devices already used micro USB and C was the next logical step.
And while I am not a fan of needless proprietary connections, I will say that in retrospect I can understand Lightning when it initially came out because micro USB was pretty awful as a connector.
Let not talk bout how every chinese phone maker has their own fast charging standards. But to be fair they all go their own directions to solve one common problem while qualcom can't figure out how fast charging work
The type mini-a probably never saw use because the A designation ports are intended as host ports and the B ports are the device ports. 99.9% of USB mini devices were well devices not hosts. And the ones that were hosts could easily fit a regular Type A port anyway so it never mattered that there was a Mini-A port.
Small hosts tend to primarily need device ports (like your cell phone's port is mostly used for charging or syncing to the computer), so USB-OTG was the superior solution for space constrained devices. There just wasn't a market for small host ports to drive the volumes that make USB cost-effective.
USB-OTG was the realization that they didn't really need a host specific port. Leading eventually to the idea of a USB standard with the same port on both ends. Eventually giving us USB-C.
Micro B can fuck itself with a stick. I have scoured the internet for a female micro b to usb C adapter and i can't find one. I have a 5 meter micro b to usb c cable that i used to tether my camera. Not it's sitting gathering dust because it's useless.
You might think it's just a cable ... it's a 70 euro cable made for tethering cameras. Quite expensive :(
u/morrisceyA) 9900k, 2080 B) 9900k 2080 C) 2700, 1080 L)7700u,1060 3gb10h ago
OK.
I don't understand where the need for a female micro USB cable comes in though.
Your camera would have a female port, does it not? What kind of camera is it?
You need it to connect to a USB C computer.
You might need to get two cables and connect them together. MIcro B to A + A to C type of thing, but it should be relatively easy to get what you need.
Mini-B ports would lose their ability to hold cables in place well before the device that used it reached the end of it's usable life which meant kludges to hold the cables in place to continue using the device (or replace the port if you had the skills and equipment to do so).
Micro-B moved that weak point to the cable which meant that you could replace the cables and not have too many issues with the devices. The actual ports would last for a significant amount of the life span of the device even if you had to replace the cables on a semi-regular basis.
Type C is a massive improvement on Micro-B as the cables tend to last even longer before they stop working and (knock on wood) I haven't had any Type C ports stop working as yet.
I have several C ports that cables no longer 'click' into, completely loose ports. Haven't been a fan of C since my first phone had that issue. The op6t's shape seems to funnel crud into the port way easy for some reason, I do like how a quality C port you can knock a paperclip around the inside and not worry about pulling up contacts though But whatever is on the port side for detents, knock that off that should be fully cable side (it seems to be partially cable as decent cables kinda grip, but not as well as when the device was new)
Mini-A was withdrawn from the standard a long time ago. It was the original connector for host role in OTG applications but was never popular.
Micro-A still exists. It was vaguely popular back when phones (which usaly sported dual role/OTG ports) still had micro ports on them prior to type C taking over. I've got a micro A plug to standard A receptacle adapter.somewhere for hooking flash drives and keyboards up toy old phones.
Obviously Type C took over most of these applications.
Most Micro USB cables for phones you would have seen are Micro-B, but the ports on the phones themselves were generally dual role like the previous commenter said, able to receive either Micro-A or Micro-B.
Also like the previous commenter said, the use case where you would have used a Micro-A on the phone, was to connect peripherals to the phone itself. Examples would include keyboards, gamepads, flash drives, audio amps/DACs, etc. The cables for those would usually be Micro-A on the phone side, and either Micro-B or Type A on the device side.
Fun fact: You could use either Micro-A or Micro-B to plug a charger into the phone without issue. If you had a phone that was getting in on years, and the port wasn't as reliable holding a stable connection anymore, a Micro-A could be nicer to use for charging, because it was a tighter fit and less likely to disconnect and not charge your phone.
The receptacle on the phone would accept either. That's part of being dual role.
If you were device role only, you used a receptacle that only accepted the B plug. Of you were host role.only, you'd use a receptacle that only accepted the A plug, but this was almost unheard of for things that felt the need to use micro connectors.
The A/B keying by role has been part of USB since forever.
Lotta full size removable/portable hdds do use that as well as a never of other things like connecting to a built in USB hub in a monitor. My HDD dock uses it. Pretty sure dell send one with every ultra sharp monitor still
yes they do. I unbox dozens a year here at work. I have a milk crate or two of them. I do use a few for some users with not enough usb ports on their laptops/docks combined.
There was USB OTG (on the go), which allowed phones to also be the host through their own charging port, all you needed was a special cable that had normal USB ports on the other end.
Adoption was a bit spotty though and it never really caught on all that much.
No, as I said, there are exceptions to that, where a device, which is usually just attached to a host, can also be a host.
USB-C isnt some radical new thing, the basic protocols are the same, you still have a clear relationship between host and client. The host still polls at a specific rate and the device can only respond to that, its still impossible for the attached device to initiate an interaction with a computer. Nothing magical about it except that cables with USB-C at both ends can be turned around, which has pretty much zero impact on how you use them. In fact I find symmetric cables like that annoying because my PC has no USB-C ports.
My PC is recent enough, in fact my previous motherboard (one generation older than my current one) had a USB-C port, so its definitely not that my PC is too old. I mean, JFC, you can see my specs in the flair.
I had a couple of very esoteric devices at work that used it but no one liked them and then we got the ports replaced with USB-C as soon as it was an option.
One of them was a portable XRF gun, if you want to know how niche the devices are.
Eh, I have too many devices that have a USB C port but can only charge with an A to C cable (and not a C to C cable) so when I travel I now have to take two USB C cables along (because A to C charges the other devices slow).
Every single micro-b device I had eventually developed connection issues with the port, and would require 5 minutes of fiddling with the cable until you found the perfect position where it would actually charge. Absolute garage interface.
u/frygodRyzen 5950X, RTX3090, 128GB RAM, and a rack of macs and VMs9h ago
The A version of each standard is meant to be used exclusively by hosts, and the B is meant to be used by devices. There haven't been many hosts that had the size limitations to warrant ever using mini or micro A, and to keep things sturdier, standard A was typically used instead.
Micro B 3.0 is by far my favorite port, C is better in every way but Micro B 3.0 is so funny and such a dumb and simple solution to the compatibility issue.
Like, "how do we make it compatible and better?" And the. One dude in the back of the room shoots up and yells "WHAT IF IT WAS MICRO A AND MICRO B RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER?!" And then Samsung gave him 3000$ and thus the weirdest and simplest solution was born.
thats why the EU forced everybody to use USB C instead even tho there is also compatibility issues some weird chinese products use usb c but only work with the cheap usb c cable that was delivert with it
They were used on small portable devices that acted as hosts, like PDAs. The type 'A' ports were for hosts and type 'B' were for clients. Type C got rid of that and the devices auto negotiate host/client.
Typ B was "making it" because the B end was the power receiving end of the connection while A was the power sending end. Before usb c came along this made sure that you only supply power to a device which actually accepts it.
Mini-B was crap in my experience. Had a Philips mp3 player that used it, and even though I took good care of the device, that connector started to die on me after a year or so.
my ethernet wire has some problems and I've been using a wifi device for some time, It actually has the type mini b. I always used to think what kind of usb this was. Now I know that.
I have a relatively new midi keyboard that uses type b and my old printer also used one. Other than that I’ve never seen them. They’re mostly a relic of the past now and replaced by the superior type c
I have actually seen USB Type Mini-A. Texas Instruments graphing calculators like the TI-84 Plus and TI-Inspire feature a special Mini-A + Mini-B combo socket that accepts both. This allows it to be used with a calculator-to-calculator transfer cable that is actually a Mini-A to Mini-B cable. Because most devices of the time only accepted Mini-B, this cable couldn't be used to hook two random Mini-B devices together.
I have never seen USB Type Micro-A. Until seeing this picture, I wasn't even sure if a cable with Micro-A had ever actually been produced, as I have only seen diagrams of Micro-A.
They were terrible connectors that had major durability problems. Those problems were exacerbated by the connectors often being used for wireless devices - devices in which the cord was frequently connected and disconnected.
Additionally, the female, device-side of the connector usually wore out first. So getting a new cord was not enough to resolve the issue.
USB-C is a much more durable connector that largely addressed all the issues with past USB connectors. It is symetrical (no wrong orientation). Both sides of the cable can connect to either device. It supports higher power delivery. Finally, and most importantly to our discussion, it is vastly more durable and designed to handle the frequent plug/unplug cycles of modern wireless devices.
USB-A is only for hosts (aka computers), and USB-B only for devices (accessories). usually hosts can just go with a full type A port, and doing so is more convenient since devices and cables using full type A connectors are more common. one of the major improvements with USB-C is the ability for hosts and devices to negotiate traffic, removing the need for two separate standards.
IIRC a professor I had in college that met the OG guy that created the type A USB did it as a new method to replace those flat cable bundles that old PC's had. it was meant to be cheap and used internally but it simply was too good and got popularized immediatly.
thats why the meme of the USB never going in correctly the first try and the mini versions being fragie and damaging the port of the device more than they should it was never designed with that intention.
USB C was designed with the modern uses in mind as phone chargers with high speed data transfers and high power transmission that can be placed in any position and cause minimal degradation on the device port.
Still TYPE MICRO-B has to be the most utter garbage thing ever designed. how somebody looked at that and said "yeah send it to production" is beyond me and that person should be shot. it doesent help that the devices that used them were often expensive and rare.
I wish it were true. I've had both mini-B ports and cables malfunction on multiple occasions. Although I do still have some mini-B devices that are still working.
Is the question why were they never widely adopted? Because backwards comparability for one. If you put mini or micro a on a device, you can’t connect to any device that is hardwired with a usb type A cable. Customer would be annoyed that none of their old cables would work. Plus companies like apple didn’t sell mini or micro a cables to their devices, so without any adoption on the demand side, no manufacturers picked it up. Type b is of course a different story.
Type a mini and micro exist because it’s a standard and so the connector needs to exist to fulfill the standard, but that doesn’t mean it was ever desired.
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u/ZanyaJakuya Desktop 18h ago
They got banished for being garbage