Yeah, my last two printers have just logged into my home network, which is handy, because we can access them through any of the 7 computers we regularly use. (And also the cell phones, although the cellphone client is mediocre, compared to that of the MacOS, Windows, and Linux devices.) I wouldn’t be surprised if my printer has a place to physically connect it. I neither know not care what connector that is, though.
My Xerox color laser has USB, Network (RJ45) and Wireless. It is very handy. I haven’t used the USB in a long time, but I did have someone hook up to it with their laptop about 6 years ago.
Mostly we do network printing.
What prompted this question was my GF buying a new printer. It is wireless but her WiFi password is 13 characters longs (set by the internet provider and she never changed it so it is a random mess of 13 characters).
She lives alone, has one computer and the printer is on her desk about two feet away from the computer.
A cable connection would have been infinitely more simple for her to use. And more reliable. But despite her having a box-o-cables like most of us have she didn’t have that one oddball USB-B cable. So, fart around slowly using the panel on the printer to put in a 13-character password.
It works now but the cable would have been so much easier and better.
YMMV of course (as it seems it does for you…seven…really?..used at the same time or one or another?).
ETA: I too live alone and only have one PC. While I have WiFi in my place I absolutely use a wired connection to my router and printer. That said my PC is connected to my phone and tablet via Bluetooth/WiFi. I am not opposed to wireless. Far from it.
I will never, ever opt for WiFi over wired internet if I can do so though (which is really just my PC…everything else is wireless but they have to be).
I’ve used USB to print in certain situations. Network printing can be flaky, but with a cable connected and the printer driver installed you’ll get your printout. I leave the cable plugged into the printer for “printing emergencies”.
We had a Brother printer that supported ethernet and wifi, but it took me several years to realize that you couldn’t “wake up” the printer across subnets without having the software suite installed. There were no error messages so to my family it just appeared to work intermittently. I broke out the USB cable around midnight when one of my kids couldn’t print out their paper for school the next day.
Our current printer when installed out-of-the-box required 100’s of MBs of software bloat, a Microsoft store account, and then an HP account to print. Fortunately you can still download the software direct from their website.
Printer software has been terrible for 5 decades, but it was made worse when it became an ink / toner business instead of a printer business.
Same here. I just had the cable punt and am seeking to replace it. I can use the one that came with my digital camera but what if that one goes belly up?
How would a printer with a USB-A be an improvement? It’d mean that the user would need a two-ended USB-A cord to connect it, which is very rare, instead of the A-to-B cord that they probably already have lying around.
Mostly two at a time (one by me, one by my husband.) We each have a work laptop and a travel laptop (which sometimes get used at home). I have a primary laptop, and he has a primary desktop. I also have a laptop i use for gaming.
And despite the toxic behaviors of printer manufacturers, printer software keeps getting better. I used to need to download an app from the company. Now they just work through the default printing apps (on all three of MacOS, Windows, and our Linuxes) as well as my employer’s laptop. The scanning function “just works”, too, although i did have to Google to learn that on the Mac i need to use “Preview” to access it.
Yes you do, unfortunately, at least in the past*. They’re colloquially called “suicide cables” because they’re super dangerous. But you can find them in various places, the stereotypical use case is someone puts up Christmas lights and then afterwards realizes they put them up backwards. Cue terrible purchase. Or they’re for generator-powering a home as a lazy (and again, dangerous) solution.
*Surprisingly, Amazon, who doesn’t seem to give much a crap about consumer safety, seems to keep them off as of now.
Because the Consumer Product Safety Commission woke up long enough to ask Amazon and others to stop selling them.
Yeah, our Canon D-570 was easy to connect to the network (my sweetie did it), and it automatically just shows up on all devices connected to the local network; an assortment of Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android systems. No external drivers or software needed.
My main use of USB-B is for either my mixer (essentially an overpowered external sound card) or for my synthesizers (usually provides both MIDI and multi-channel output over the same cable.) Considering that the cats like to walk all over both types of device and investigate the cables coming to/from them, I am quite glad that the designers of these devices chose the larger and more stable connector.
Hey, is this mike on? 
Can they wake up and tell them to police counterfeit items?
Discourse’s ability to search a thread with any accuracy certainly isn’t.
They’re not. Anything that used Mini-USB or Micro-USB was also using USB B. As devices got smaller, the original USB-B plug was too large, so they came up with smaller variants. Printers and scanners are larger, so that was never an issue.
Micro-USB had its problems: it wore out quickly and didn’t leave enough space for the extra pins for USB 3.0 (which runs faster). It eventually got replaced with USB-C for smaller devices. But printers and scanners, the workhorses and legacy equipment they are, didn’t reinvent the wheel.
USB A to USB A did exist, but they were special cables that were for hooking two computers together. Or some sort of proprietary interface. I’m surprised you have many devices with it. I have a couple devices from dodgy overseas producers, but nothing from any major brand.
Hehe, I should have actually looked before posting. My current mixer is actually USB-C. That actually explains my problem with the cats. 
I don’t think reputable companies do that, no. I guess I didn’t actually specify earlier, but one reason USB 1.x explicitly distinguishes between hosts and peripherals is that hosts supply power. A double-ended cable with USB-A plugs implicitly allows you to tie two hosts’ voltage together. This means that if you switch one off, it is having power backfed to it. Maybe that device is designed to manage that, but maybe not. Either way, the USB standard does not require devices to expect this possibility.
(Like how if anyone made double-ended mains power cords, I assume they would be called “suicide cables,” to coin a phrase)
This changed with USB-C, which is in my experience an entirely different kettle of fish. It is complicated enough to, for example, allow Nintendo to overload the negotiation protocols and prevent non-Nintendo docks and power cables from working with the Switch. Or, more relevantly: USB-C is supposed to be symmetrical. It is not. Raspberry Pis can enumerate as USB HIDs to Windows, but only have one USB-C port, so supplying them with power requires a passthrough adapter; this adapter requires the plugs to be connected in a particular orientation.
Older USB specifications greatly limited how much current a peripheral could draw (7.5 watts, eventually), which is partly why hard drives and other peripherals require supplemental power. USB-C permits the device to negotiate for how much power it is allowed to draw. If you have ever wondered how bright a 5V rechargeable LED flashlight gets when the power delivery module fails and it decides to negotiate for every bit the 65W supply can offer, let me tell you that the answer is: excitingly bright, but not quite as exciting as what happens to the battery later.
In theory, by standardizing connectors, USB-C solves the OP’s problem. In practice, I work with hardware often enough to have been burnt by a single physical connector that allows for cables that:
- Might deliver anywhere from 15W to 240W depending on software,
- Might charge your device or might try to charge itself off your device, again depending on software,
- Might support 8K video or just 4K,
- Might do it at 30Hz or perhaps up to 120Hz,
- Might have access to a computer’s PCI-E hardware over Thunderbolt or might not,
- Might fall back gracefully if one device expects 10Gbit/s and the other can only accept 5Gbit/s, might fail intermittently, or might simply refuse to connect at all
Or might do none of these at all because it’s one of those weird charging cables that only works when connected to a USB-A port. Of course, at this point in time, most devices and cables are pretty well-behaved and the difference between USB 3/3.2/4 ought to be irrelevant for most users. In theory (like most things USB), you can, like a 1920s style hobo, always look for the arcane symbols painted on the port to know if it will supply high current or if it will sic a guard dog on you.
Computers are generally tolerant of user misbehavior. The 6-pin PS/2 interface that mice and keyboards used to use was not intended to be hot-pluggable. In practice, at least by the time I was starting to use computers, most computers were robust enough that I doubt many people fried anything by plugging in a keyboard at the wrong time. Probably the number of components damaged by USB-A to USB-A cables is low, but it’s never impossible.
I have literally never seen a USB-A peripheral like a webcam. OP, can you post a model number?
The other use for USB-B D connectors is for musical equipment, like synths and midi keyboards. Micro and Mini USB would have been way too flimsy for how much abuse musical equipment takes. It’s still really common to see large USB-B connections on pro music equipment.
Huh?
Click the magnifying glass. Click the [in this topic] button. Type “suicide”. See posts 21, 48, 51, and 55 pop up.
And now this one, 57.
As to suicide cords themselves ...
I’m amazed to see that anyone ever manufactured and sold such things. It’s been years since I saw, or had, one, but they were all home made by cutting the female end off a normal male-to-female factory cord and attaching a hardware store male end in its place.
With the advent of e-commerce and liability-free Chinese products flowing into the rest of the world I’m not terribly surprised that somebody there has made some. But only as junk.
I had to make one once. It was for a children’s theatre play in which one character’s father was a wooden box which contained a light that flashed when “it” spoke. I would have wired it directly, but since it was a traveling show the director wanted it detachable; and at that time&place — Montana in the 1960s — the best receptacle I could find was a female twistlock (at least it wouldn’t fall out). I kept personal custody of the cable as a compromise.
Now, of course, I’d use LEDs, a battery and perhaps a Bluetooth controller. Times change.
Thank you for this~I stashed it in my Google Keep for future reference.
Amazon has computer adapters and cables that simply do not work – they are scams with fake reviews. I was looking for a firewire to USB solution and found a bunch of passive cables that can’t possibly function.
It makes me wonder how many other fake cables and adapters there are.
I also saw a (non-passive) USB-A to HDMI that had real reviews saying it worked. Then I got to a review that said the bundled software turned off the anti-virus…