It's not loading for me. I thought that was the joke until I read and few comments...
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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How many ways is that?
I'm going with "infinite" ways, assuming the 3.5mm jack is a perfect circle.
But it was broke…
There was a time we used it for data.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
Pine64 devices like the PinePhone still use it for serial: https://pine64.com/product/pinebook-pinephone-pinetab-serial-console/
A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.
I use jack cables every day on my audio interface, headphones, electric guitar, effect pedals and synthesizer in stereo, which means twice the cables.
I miss you Jack.
My work recently gave me an iPhone - first one I've ever owned - and the lack of a 3.5mm jack just fucking sucks. It makes everything so much less convenient. Bluetooth is so much slower to get going than a simple plug-in pair of cans (or even buds), and then that's another thing with a battery that I have to rely on.
Such a garbage decision. Now I understand what fashion truly is, I guess.
You wouldn't if you'd just let me onto that bloody door, Rose you dumb bitch.
Hmmm, how long would your jack need to be to be used as USB?
4 pins. So standard length because four pin aux exists
https://www.amazon.com/Auxiliary-Braided-Compatible-Stereos-Headphones/dp/B07PJW6RQ7
Unless you wanted high transfer speeds for something like an iPhone if you’re transferring videos, then you’d need something like 12 or 13 poles. Now imagine accidentally yanking on the port of a modern smartphone tripping over the cable.
I could only generate about 9 poles in my testing.
Just make the usb-c connector a circule and not an oval. I am guessing that the only reasons it isn't circular is thinness (devices are thin and need thin connectors) and manufacturing costs (probably harder to get it circular with all of the inner pins)
Hmm, maybe just use some variation of DIN connector? It's a circle, but keyed to one position, and fairly effortless to plug in the right way without seeing. Also full size DIN connectors are robust as hell and can be easily replaced and rewired.
Hell, my Commodore 64 IEC bus cables still work after decades, and I can't say the same about many USB cables these days.
inb4: people try to connect them by jamming and twisting, bending the pins into a spiral and then pushing even harder causing them to break off.
Thanks to the eu, it's unlikely we'll ever have another usb variant. Certainly nothing in the next decade.
Found the apple fanboy.
That's what you get out of that? I have no problem with usb-c, I won't buy anything that doesn't use it. However, I feel that the EU has set too high of a standard and we're going to get stuck until they revise it.
Feel free to argue how if the EU law was applied back when USB-A was top dog, we'd still have made the switch to USB-C but I don't see it.
USB-c has a bunch of futureproofing in it, like a bunch of pins that aren't used yet. And even without those pins, is supports usb4v2, which has 4 lanes of PCIe 4, and they keep doubling the speed every minor release of usb.
If we get to a point where those other pins are needed in the next decade, I'll be surprised.
So unless there is something physically problematic with the connector, like after all this time we suddenly realize that the design causes failure in some common scenario, or material science leaps ahead and the port becomes too large for consumer devices, then it's probably good that they're not making a new standard.
I am not knocking usb-c. It would actually be nice if the standards were move unforced so one could be gauranteed exactly which version they were getting.
My issue is exactly what you're saying about material science and not knowing what might come along and what it would take to overcome the EU standards. I predict they will need to revise the rules before anything would be able to meet the current standards by it'll be 15+ years before we know it.
I think we're more likely to go fully wireless before there is enough progress in material science to make phones too slim for USB-C while also being sturdy enough for everyday use of the average person.
Good.
<.< I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
Seems serious to me. Is there an obvious reason it'd be a joke / is not to be taken seriously?
I expect theres some technical limitation that wouldn't be obvious to a layman, but I'd love to learn if you can point to resources.
I can’t think of the proper words so I apologize for how untechnical this is: If you look inside the connector you’ll see a thin line jutting out. That’s the actual thing that USB-C connects with. You can’t make that round. The reason the outer part of the plug is an “oval” is just to make plugging it in easier. It could be a rectangle and still work.
You can’t make that round.
I mean, you could. You'd need three times as many contacts in the receptacle as pins in the plug. Each pin would have to be able to touch exactly 1 or 2 contacts simultaneously. Each receptacle contact would need to programmatically assign itself to perform the role expected for the particular pin it is touching at any given moment.
Pin 1 would start off touching Contact A. As you rotate it, it would connect to A and B. Keep rotating it, it drops A and touches B alone. Then BC. Then C. Then CD. Then D. Then DE, and so on.
Assuming by "jutting pieces" you mean the pins, yeah, I could see that being difficult ultimately to manufacture into the 3.5mm jack configuration.
But translating each pin to a "band" (sorry I'm not very technical myself) on a jack with the form factor of a 3.5mm pin should be doable. You'd probably need 5 or 10 bands since (as I understand it) USBs use a 5 pin connection (again, as I understand it, most devices mirror the 5 pins on each side, but some more advanced/specialized USBs utilized the USB-C connector as 10 pins, hence the possible desire for a 10 band jack).
Again, I could see that being difficult to manufacture, but not impossible, and especially if it became a standard package. Might need a bigger jack than 3.5mm though.
USB C has a (soon to be) max power delivery of 240 watts. Shorting that onto a data pin would be catastrophic.
You can kinda work around that, but honestly the easiest way is to just not present the opportunity.
That seems like a particularly poignant concern. Lol, so I'm hearing "possible, but but difficult and undesirable"
Can you explain why the jack for my guitar to my amp has to be like 3 times bigger than the jack for a phone or computer to some speakers? It's literally doing the same thing, right?
Considering the 1/4” jack has been around for literal eons (1877, no joke), there’s sort of just tradition when you compare it to the 3.5mm from the 1950s. The primary reason being durability. Your guitar is probably going to be yanked on pretty rough a few times compared to something as little as a phone that will just rip out of your hand. On the guitar, it’d probably damage the port pretty quickly.
That's interesting. So there's no major signal degradation or limit between the two cable sizes? I always assumed it was something like that that would make the larger jack preferable.
Not really. Until you get down to really small sizes, the human ear can’t perceive the signal noise. If you’re recording at a full studio level, the lower the noise floor, the better, and thicker cables/ports are better, but for most indie stuff, 3.5mm would suffice just fine for audio quality. Also, if you amping the signal like crazy, that could theoretically help with noise.
That's cool, so you could just wire USB through these.
i used to have an mp3-player with only an audio jack, and a USB-to-TRRS cable for charging and data transfer.
i think it had 64MB of storage?
point is, it's been a thing
Edit:
also my keyboard! the two halves are connected together via audio jack.
I saw that prison laptops in the US can't have USB but can have an aux port and I've wondered since then if that couldn't be cheesed.
TIL. I mean, the headers on most boards are easy to find, so a few paperclips and some tape could be your USB port. And most built-in peripherals use the interface so it probably isn’t disabled. The rest depends on how thoroughly their IT vendor locked things down.
Wasn’t that how the later iPod shuffle’s did it?
Yup
This is one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard. I LOVE IT