USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)
I know everybody is still on the high from USB-C but I'm still going to go on the record it will be one of the biggest disasters in cable history.<p>1) There's going to be video-only cables; low-voltage only cables; etc and this time everything is usb-c so you can literally only tell which ables work by testing all of the dozen cables instead of the 1-2 USB-As you have.<p>2) The connector is symmetrical but the pins aren't. You can see a wiring scheme of how symmetry is handled [1]; literally manufactures are going to cheap out and not do that and you have 1-way USB-C cables without any kind of orientation markers.<p>An obviously key'd connector like firewire / ethernet would've solved all of USB-A's flip it thrice problems. And this could've been allowed in a backwards compatible where old USB-A cables were basically a skeleton key and the new USB-A cables had a ward that blocked them from fitting incorrectly.<p>[1]: <a href="https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/125011/how-does-usb-type-c-handle-reverse-polarity-signal-duplication" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/125011/how-d...</a>