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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I would pay another thousand to retrofit USB-C or even microUSB onto my OP-1.

The choice of mini-USB, the RAZR charging port, in 2011, was a bit baffling to me. I have to buy another cable each time I want to charge and use it.

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>I have to buy another cable each time I want to charge and use it.

Wouldn't it be easier to just keep the one cable you bought to charge it? It's not like the cable depletes itself during the charge forcing a new cable to be purchased per charge.

Probably hyperbole, but I assume OP is implying they lose the cable between charges due to infrequent use.

Are we implying the battery life is so good that one only needs to be charged once every long often? Otherwise, how cluttered are you to lose a cable every time in between charges? Stick it in a drawer with all of the other ones. Just seems like a really weak strawman

In fact, the battery life really is good enough to cause this issue. Similar problem with Garmin watches and their proprietary cables.

I assumed OP implied they device was used very rarely.

Op-1 is known for ridiculously long battery life

I have one and have a similar problem. These things take months to lose battery. I often change around where I put cables and etc between the times needed to charge it.

I have literally bought mini-usb cables on 3 different occasions to use my OP-1. I lose them all the time, as I have about a thousand (no joke) USB cables and 3-5 mini-USB among them.

I bought 20x mini-USB as my new mobile phone uses it now and I didn't want to keep not finding them when I need them.

Just wondering, what phone do you have that still uses mini-usb?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00XAF4J04

I've stopped putting SIM cards in my smartphones entirely, but I still have one SIM I still need to receive SMS on.

I'll eventually put it into a rpi shield/hat/whatever and make an SMS to email bridge. Until then, this has amazing battery life.

I feel kind of like I'm being trolled with this one, but it is kind of awesomely bad that I sort of want one.

I feel the same way. 32 GB of storage??

Dual SIM, too. You can even use it solely as a bluetooth headset paired to a normal phone to look like Gordon Gecko while on a call on your yacht if you want.

I bought two for less than the AppleCare+ on my iPhone 12 cost. (One as backup, as I can't imagine these are going to be in production for much longer.)

I understand that sucks, but that doesn't really sound like the fault of the device to me. It really sounds like one of those "you're holding it wrong" type of excuses.

This is why I bought dollar store plastic boxes for my cables and put them in specific categories. I have one box for microUSB, one for USB-C, one for mini, one for HDMI, etc. It's been great in reducing clutter and finding a cable.

Cables create tangled messes in a way that most things do not, and it's been great that my drawers are mostly free of cables now.

I bought the plastic bins a few months ago, now I'm just waiting for having an uninterrupted attention span long enough to sort all of my cables (or the pandemic to be over so I can pay someone else to come over and do it for me).

I have two mini-USB cables I keep around as the PS3 Dualshock 3 controller is mini-usb.

Otherwise I too would have lost them.

I typically don't keep older generation consoles around, but the original launch PS3 was a marvel for its time (despite being a relative flop compared to the Wii-360)

The original launch PS3 contained the hardware emotion engine, so it had 100% backward compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. Later revisions removed the PS2 hardware, in favor of software emulation, and iirc, eventually backwards compatibility was removed all together.

It also supported Super Audio CD format as well, and before it was patched out, had the ability to dualboot Linux.

I would love USB-C (not micro though!), but the mini USB port is still really common in music gear for whatever reason. My audio interface, DAC for my other PC, midi keyboard, etc all use mini USB. It's really weird.

Strange, I've never seen mini USB on any audio gear. (Nor on anything else I've owned since my T-Mobile G1 ten years ago.) I've found "standard" connectors [1] to be much more common (and welcome, due to their better sturdiness over micro).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#Standard_connecto...

I'm no good with a soldering iron but I know a bunch of people who would be very happy to replace that socket for a thousand euros :)

Interestingly, I currently have devices which use mini-usb and type c cables, but I have no use for micro-usb.

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