If you weren’t really into mobile devices before 2011, you probably missed out on a really fun aspect of mobile devices. In 2011 I was working at Sprint. When selling a phone, part of my job was to transfer content from an old phone to the new one with a weird little machine that acted as the middle man. You’d plug in the old phone, plug in the new phone, and let the machine do its thing. That was the easy part. The hard part? Trying to find the right plug for the old phone out of what we dubbed the “cord bouquet” – a plethora of various chargers used throughout the years for various manufacturers, banded together with a zip tie.
That was right around the time that micro USB became the standard for charging smartphones. Before that, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Kyocera, Apple… almost every manufacturer had its own unique charging port. Obviously this wasn’t the bane of anybody’s existence, but anybody who regularly upgraded phones back then knows that it was a pain in the neck anytime you wanted to upgrade to a phone made by a different manufacturer. Suddenly your house is full of chargers that no longer work. Any additional chargers you wanted for work or your car you had to purchase separately. It was annoying, and a perfectly good waste of money until a universal charger was agreed upon.
The one exception to that rule was, of course, Apple, who was allowed to keep their 30-pin connector for whatever reason. Later they were able to change to the Lightning port, which I consider to be both a curse and a blessing. While I still had a plethora of iPhone accessories that worked with the 30-pin connecter at the time the switch occurred, the Lightning connecter worked eons faster, and I underestimated how much I would enjoy being able to plug in my phone without worrying about plugging it in the “wrong way”.
In fact, just last night that I found myself fumbling with my Galaxy S7’s micro USB charging port, figuring out after a couple of prods that I was attempting to insert the cable the wrong way in the dark. I initially didn’t mind that Samsung decided to forego moving to USB Type-C – the apparent “new” universal standard for charging – but yesterday, after resorting to turning on the light to figure out the problem, I did think to myself, “[expletive] micro USB.” And it was then that I started to reflect on how grateful I am that we’ve come so far in such a short amount of time. After all, micro USB won’t even be around for much longer; even so, my fumbling around was a minor inconvenience at best.
So here’s to appreciating the fact that we were able to adopt a standard across the board (for the most part), and while that standard may not have been perfect by any means, it was a good first step. Now micro USB is on its way out, making room for Type C, which joins Apple’s Lightning charger in being a faster method of charging with a reversible plug. What a time to be alive.
Personally, I’m just glad that I don’t have to upgrade cords every time I upgrade phones anymore. Now it’s just every few years, if that, which I'll gladly take.
