In the same sense that A and B are variants of each other, sure.
Even though it's called micro-B, the design is closer to A, and micro supports both ends with basically the same plug. I would never refer to it as just "B". "B" means the square plug.
You’re mixing up mini-USB and micro-USB. Also, the board attachment is not strictly speaking part of the connector standard. Manufacturers are free to, and do, screw that up in myriad ways.
Anecdotally (and probably relatedly), my mini-usb plugs always wiggled in the socket, while micro-usb does not. They also seemed to require less force to unplug, and so popped out accidentally more often.
Good point, but you have Mini-B and Micro-B reversed. Mini is the old thicker connector that you don't see much any more, and Micro is the newer thinner one.
Samsung also had USB3 Micro-B (the wide connector) on the Galaxy Note 3, but went back to a regular Micro-B in the Note 4.
That is a legend born at the time USB-mini-B was replaced with USB-micro-B. For what it's worth, typical USB-mini-B has a particularly bad spring design. "Spring" is just a protrusion stamped out from a thin flat sheet of regular mild steel. Same sheet that is making bulk of the receptacle.
One does not necessarily have to make springs that are quite as epicly bad, and indeed both typical USB-C connector, and lightning receptacle, avoid that pitfall.
No, I'm not. The connector side of micro-USB is usually the failure point. I had mini-USB receptacles fail at an extremely high rate back when I was building and selling mini-USB 2.5 inch external hard drive enclosures back in high school. Micro-USB wasn't even invented until 2007.
The "old square style USB plug" is USB-B. It's the counterpart of USB-A, the ubiquitous microUSB-B connector is meant to be a tiny version of it (there's also miniUSB-B, which now is mostly dead, and mini and micro A, which no one ever used).
Do you have a fuckton of devices with replaceable cables that came with usb a terminals or are they all hard wired? If the former, you mean you have a fuckton of easily replaceable usb a cables.
Don’t forget micro/mini usb doesn’t imply a usb a terminal. I swapped out my usb a terminal cables even for micro/mini devices.
That's a reading of the standard I've not considered. That the wall wart accepts a USB A plug, with a micro USB on the other end.
I don't get why they would specify the micro USB in that case, but they do. I still think the spec was intended to be USB A on one end, and Micro USB on the other. But that's entirely plausible without actually going back and reading it again..
Also micro USB and mini USB were asymmetric, right? I think the "wrong all the time" angle just didn't register when they developed the rectangular one. And I don't blame them, I wouldn't have thought of it, and probably user testing was inconclusive.
MiniUSB wasn't too bad; it's somewhat easy to figure out which end is up solely by touch. Not only is that nearly impossible with micro, OEM's can't seem to agree on "up". Samsung and Nokia goes with wide side down; HTC and Asus (on the N7, their other tablets use a custom dockplug) have wide side up. And just for fun, on the USB cable with my backup drive, WD decided to defy the spec and put their logo on the top side; and the USB logo on the bottom.
And the Apple dockplug is even worse IMHO; besides looking near-identical on both sides, the cable with my iPad 3 printed the logo so lightly it's quicker to guess vs. trying to find it.
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