My front bike light charges over micro USB and the back one over mini USB. Why in the year of our lord 2019 was some company still making mini USB the charging plug for their bike light…
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Ha, cynicism suggests it’s to sell you two sets of bike lights. You know, after the first set fails from use.
Or an endless set. Maybe they could put together a subscription.
It’s tiresome how little life is planned into these things. They just want to sell more. What’s the problem with a AA battery pack for a bike light? It’s probably LED, I’m guessing, too? A lithium AA will last you probably the year with no charge ever needed.
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You are not wrong.
But our Dark Lord prefers to be called by name when being petitioned for USB bike-light-related favors.
Nullum Lux Fiat, baby.
My bike-related electronics are the one area where I haven’t been able to move everything to USB-C. My bike GPS still charges over micro B, and my dynamo-powered device charger has a type A port (meaning I need to keep a type A lightning cable around for charging my phone on bike rides). At least with a dynamo, I never need to charge my lights, so that’s nice.
For non-bike-related stuff, my tablet, laptop, phone, game console, and headphones can all charge from the same power brick or even charge each other; I only need two types of cables; and all connections are 180-degree-reversible so no more of the USB plug flipping dance. Type C is nice!
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While I like the Type-C standardization, I don’t like one specific part of the plug/jack design, and think that Apple’s Lightning does it much better, the nested nature of the plug, in that it has a hollow in it that relies on a post inside of the jack with the pins on it.
Yes, that nested post design haas been present from the first Type-A and Type-B connections nearly 25 years ago, but I’ve seen the posts on Micro and Mini jacks break, taking the pins with them, and yet the USB-IF has kept that element around.
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Try to say “Blunt Cut” 10 times fast. (video 5:22)
What’s wrong with USB-C? If anything, I’m annoyed that everyone hasn’t already gone to it. A standard that can charge laptops? Sold!
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Identical looking cables can offer vastly different capabilities. Cables intended for data transfer may not charge at full speed. Cables intended for charging may not support high speeds (for example, USB-2 speeds). Thunderbolt is it’s own thing but uses the USB-C connector. So would need to make sure your cable specifically supports it.
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The first laptop I ever owned, way back in the early 90’s, was an Apple Powerbook 100. A groundbreaking machine, and it had a most excellent 30-pin mini SCSI port for the external floppy drive, because obviously. (I guess the FD had an internal terminator, come to think of it).
Behold the magnificence.
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There seem to be a a couple distinct reactions to this topic floating around out there. Some see it as being a long awaited and transformative cable clutter reducer, the specification can support high current charging, fast video and ethernet links - effectively exposing the PCI bus to peripherals, it makes it possible for a laptop to use eGPUs and usable external mass storage for editing video files etc. But for someone who isn’t interested in those things, doesn’t want to have to know the distinction between thunderbolt and usb-c and thought things were pretty much fine the way things were, or at least had adapted ones assortment of techno detritus and protocols - then this is just another chapter in a seemingly never ending saga of technological disruptions.
IMHO USB has been pretty much a disaster for most interesting computing applications up until this point. Mostly because it was “good enough” and displaced more capable interfaces like SCSI and Firewire. Those were expensive, but they enable true peer-to-peer communication between devices and fast synchronous transfers. Definitely think USB-C is a good step back in the right direction, even with the admitted annoyances of varying cables depending on the task.
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I didn’t know that! I stand corrected. Although, “USB 3” pretty much immediately came to mean “USB C” as well, so it’s unlikely to become a widespread problem.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of it, and in 10 or 20 years it will probably live up to that idea – all cables are the same, can be plugged in upside down or back to front, and will work for pretty much all gizmo-connecting purposes.
But for now, as folks have already said, it’s replaced a bunch of visibly incompatible cables with a bunch of cables and ports that look compatible, but aren’t, potentially to the point of causing damage.
Personally, I would add that with the amount of fanfare about the connector design, and the time it took to come up with, it’s kind of galling that it’s not better designed in terms of plugging it into stuff. Specifically, the older Apple lightning connector is noticeably easier to plug in because the tip has a ~2mm radius on the sides, while USB-C is completely square so you have to get the angle just right (even though the sides are rounded, which has only cosmetic value).
Like @nobodez, I suspect having a floating blade inside the receptacle is not the most durable, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt as to how it compares to the lightning connector in practice. Although thinking about it, that choice is probably why they needed a design that forces you to get the angle exactly right.
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I loved my PowerBook 100! Such a pleasant little machine, and the external floppy disk was a stroke of cleverness. One so rarely needs floppies, even at that time, so why carry the drive around all the time.
The external floppy wasn’t SCSI though. The floppy port was HDI-20 and next to the (HDI-30) SCSI port. That form factor, as you point out, is a beast. It feels like plugging in a candy bar. The PB100 was also the first Mac to support Disk Mode, a massively underrated feature of 90s Macs.
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The USB Mini is far more durable than the USB Micro, in terms of insertion/removal cycles. From a design perspective, where you’re not optimizing for minimal profile, USB Mini makes for a more durable product with a much lower return/repair rate.
I am so done with the AA battery lights. Never going back. A set of alkaline batteries gives maybe 6 hours of use at a useful brightness, NiMH 2-3 hours. Lithium batteries are probably a bit better than alkaline but not that much.
The limiting factor on bike lights’ lifetime, for me, is how long until I forget to take it off my handlebars when locking up outside and it gets stolen. A good quality light will last years and years, at a corresponding price - the question is, can I be conscientious enough to make sure I get all those years of use out of it, and some random thief doesn’t?
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Mini USB is rated to half the insertion cycles of Micro. I’m glad to see the back of it.
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That’s a marketing problem. Add that it’s for data safety when charging in an unknown USB A connector out in the wild. Instant mark up and charge more, to leave out the data pins.
Side note. That’s the real problem with USB A ports acting as power supplies for every device on the planet it seems. There’s so many different standards on how that’s done, what kind of power can actually be supplied, that they can require the data pins to negotiate how the power is supplied. Exactly why do I want to expose the data pins of my device to some random USB port in an airport or coffee shop while traveling? Then, without them, they all default to the lowest standard and it’s not able to actually charge.
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In theory, modern laptops can have a single-cable charge/dock function with USB-C. The reality is…
It can be somewhat difficult to figure out if your device is actually going to charge. I have a USB-C docking station which should work with one of my devices, but will only charge when the device is off, and when turned on will only work as a dock for monitor/peripherals. Never both at once.
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I do not have optimism that we will ever live up to that idea. Nothing in the past 10-20 years makes me think we are likely to be any more standardized in the next 10-20 years. There will be USB-D, iUSB-Plasma, and USB-WFT as new incompatible competing standards. The best we can possibly hope for is that an iUSB-Plasma cable won’t be easy to accidentally plug into a USB-D device and fry it.
Hell, they even decided that headphone jacks are too standardized and compatible and so are doing away with those now.
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I hear you on all of that. I suppose my larger point was these bike accessories are rechargeable now? I have the same set of lights I’ve been using for 25 years; they unclip off the handlebars and I take the seat with me so it’s been fortunate that I haven’t had to weigh theft over design in their longevity.
Would NEVER advocate for alkaline batteries on anything. Those things are bombs. Lithium batteries might fail and swell (and in some extreme heat settings catch fire) but they don’t leak when left alone like alkaline. I have a lifeban on alkaline anything - even convert C and D cell battery compartments to take AA or AAA (easier than it sounds, there’s even plastic converters)
My guess with a rechargeable USB-based bike light is it uses one of those small piece of shit battery packets that are soldered onto the board along with the USB. Are bike lights really weatherproof for both of those fail points? Have you cracked open your bike light? Is one of these inside?
This visual example of a battery packet is better than what I’m describing, the super cheap ones have very thin wire gauge soldered like a thread onto the board. A good hit from shock - common from biking, of course - can break the connection. A good lithium AA battery has a much more robust power connection (just look at the casing for one, with springs and clips) and should power a bright LED for some time. But you might be right that such design considerations aren’t built into these things.
I don’t know anything about bike battery design but it seems dumb to make an accessory like that rechargeable. Progress isn’t always forward, ha. I’m happy to be corrected, too.
Fun conversation.
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