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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

USB-C has no orientation so I don't understand. You can just flip the cable.

The cables have an led which assumes a single orientation for text. You can only read the text right side up if it's plugged in one specific way.

Flipping the cable would put the cables power display on the underside of your machine.

The little built-in screen on the cable is only on one side.

And? The GP talks about it being upside down when plugged in to the left hand side of a device.

Given that USB-C is Bi-directional, flipping it over would show the screen…

You're suggesting I plug it in upside down so I can't read it, or plug it in on the right side of my machines which have no ports on the right side?

I own this cable. You literally put the cable in the left side at an orientation that has the display facing upwards. I feel like I'm missing something!

It's bidirectional so you can just twist the cable so the display is facing up..

Looks like two definitions of up are being discussed..

- upside down the display is pointing towards the table (useless) - which you have a solution for

- upside down, the display is visible, but the text is rotated 180° (as people would say when a calculator is upside down) - you cannot twist your way out of this except facing the computer away from you (99=66, 70=0L 5537=LESS etc)

okay so this is people being bothered about reading numbers upside down, which my brain seems to do automatically. Got it.

I can read the numbers upside down, I just don't want to and I find it silly that these manufacturers took several years to notice and decide to fix a basic fit-and-finish issue that probably affected 90% of their customer base. Like, how on Earth was this not caught during the prototype phase?

Perhaps most people aren't bothered by it

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