In case anyone thinks you’re being figurative, LITERALLY brand new printers. The Brother laser I bought last week is USB-B, as I expected it would be : )
This replaced the HP laser I bought in 2004 which was, of course, also USB-B.
Why change? It does the job. The cable doesn’t need to pass audio or video, doesn’t need to pass fast charge power, and sure as hell doesn’t need 80Gbps data transfer speeds… the bottleneck will always be the print function itself. Usb-c would be overkill. And Usb-b is made to be secured to prevent accidental disconnection for devices that typically dont move like printers and scanners, unlike Usb-c which is made for repeated insertions and easy release for devices like smart phones. Only reason the connector might change in the future is if they either start adding stupid features to printers or if it simply becomes cheaper to support newer standards.
Also some screens still use that one to act as an USB hub for the PC. There’s also a variant that is a but taller, but I don’t know what that type is for.
The tall bit on top of the type-B houses the five extra electrical connections that were added with USB 3.0.
Maybe you’ve seen the same on type micro-B which gets a little extra side car. Same story there, the same five connections were added on the side.
In a type-A connector they are in a second row deeper in the plug, you can see them if you look in, behind and offset by half to the classic four in front.
These three plug designs all allow the old USB 2.0 type-A, type-B and type micro-B plugs to fit in new USB 3.0 holes, they will simply make contact only with the classical four pins and work as USB 2.0 then.
So short lived you can still find it on brand new printers
In case anyone thinks you’re being figurative, LITERALLY brand new printers. The Brother laser I bought last week is USB-B, as I expected it would be : )
This replaced the HP laser I bought in 2004 which was, of course, also USB-B.
Why change? It does the job. The cable doesn’t need to pass audio or video, doesn’t need to pass fast charge power, and sure as hell doesn’t need 80Gbps data transfer speeds… the bottleneck will always be the print function itself. Usb-c would be overkill. And Usb-b is made to be secured to prevent accidental disconnection for devices that typically dont move like printers and scanners, unlike Usb-c which is made for repeated insertions and easy release for devices like smart phones. Only reason the connector might change in the future is if they either start adding stupid features to printers or if it simply becomes cheaper to support newer standards.
That and if you’re replacing a printer, you can just use the existing plugs as-is; no need to go fishing behind your PC to swap out the USB cable.
Also some screens still use that one to act as an USB hub for the PC. There’s also a variant that is a but taller, but I don’t know what that type is for.
The tall ones are just the USB 3.0 version
The tall bit on top of the type-B houses the five extra electrical connections that were added with USB 3.0.
Maybe you’ve seen the same on type micro-B which gets a little extra side car. Same story there, the same five connections were added on the side.
In a type-A connector they are in a second row deeper in the plug, you can see them if you look in, behind and offset by half to the classic four in front.
These three plug designs all allow the old USB 2.0 type-A, type-B and type micro-B plugs to fit in new USB 3.0 holes, they will simply make contact only with the classical four pins and work as USB 2.0 then.