Proprietary USB Cables are BS!
As you may have gathered from my previous articles, I am an enthusiast when it comes to having the privilege of living in the era we find ourselves in. Modern society has given us so many luxuries that the kings and emperors would be envious of the lifestyle of even the poorer segment of our global community. However some believe in not conforming to certain standards we should be taking for granted in this day and age. And that’s BS.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous interface today for anything electronic is the standard USB socket and for smaller devices the mini-A and mini-B versions thereof. They are used so much so that we have everything from keyboards and mice to storage to coffee machines and sex toys powered by USB. We are at the point where we condemn most devices useless if they do not interface through USB. The problem comes when there are companies, such as Apple and even Microsoft, employ custom sockets for the standard we have come to know and love. The first question that comes to mind is why they do it. Apple uses a custom USB port in all its iPods. Does it serve a purpose? Absolutely not. Other than that it allows them to blatantly inflate the prices for their custom USB cables. Not even Microsoft has the heart to commit bigotry on such a level. (Though they are guilty of custom ports which I will explain momentarily.) To understand why custom ports are useless you have to understand USB to its fullest, which can be explained fairly briefly - it provides more bandwidth than you need in most cases and it also has the ability to provide raw power to whatever it is connected to. This is why we can charge all our stuff through it, albeit slowly. So for the consumer, the iPod cables serve no purpose over the regular ones.
I did say earlier that Microsoft is guilty of the same shenanigans, which it is (or at least was). Remember the first Xbox, otherwise known as the thing that plays Halo 2? The controllers used USB. Believe it or not those clunky slots are really just USB. Hell the controllers themselves have USB hubs built in to them. Why? Because the memory cards no one bought connected to the controllers using, you guessed it, USB. And yet they had the ports in that clunky shape, doubling the size of the socket. It’s not like toddlers and blind people have something to find enjoyable on the machine. Furthermore, the proprietary port isn’t required for the safety mechanism used for when you pull the cable, safely breaking the cable in two parts, as it is also featured on the 360 controller which uses standard USB plugs. We can only conclude that the companies using these custom ports try to regulate their product market. No one benefits from this, which some companies seem to understand more than others.
What’s bullshit here is that we still can’t take USB for granted, eventhough it’s convenience has been with us for a decade.
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