USB-Crummy

About a year ago, my old Mac laptop died and I had to buy a new one.  I was pleased overall with my new machine, as far as the software and operating characteristics went.  And at first I wasn't too concerned that the only physical ports it had were one 3.5-mm phone jack for a headphone and four USB-C jacks, two on each side. 

I wasn't familiar with USB-C, although like anybody else who's dealt with computers, I knew about USB (Universal Serial Buses) in general.  I had nothing in my possession that would work with a USB-C connector—no printer cables, no external hard drive cables, no headphones.  So I went to Best Buy and bought a docking station that promised to solve all my interface problems.

It has a single USB-C connector plug on a short cable that goes to a flat aluminum box that has nearly every kind of jack you can think of:  an old-fashioned VGA (Video Graphics Array) connector for your ancient video projector, large and small HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connectors that work with our medium-screen TV, an Ethernet cable port for hard-wired networking, an SD/MMC jack for flash-drive cards, a micro-SD for the teeny flash drive cards, three USB-2 (regular size) jacks, and another USB-C jack in case you need it.  And for most of a year after I bought the new laptop, I used these ports on the docking station whenever I wanted to connect anything to the laptop other than the USB-C power supply that came with it.

Then a month or so ago, I began to have problems.  First it was an issue with downloading data to a flash drive.  I would be downloading something and then all of a sudden I'd get a message on my Mac criticizing me for removing the flash drive before ejecting it.  Only I hadn't touched a thing.  I could take it out and put it back in and it would start working—sometimes.  And sometimes it would drop out again without warning.

That made me wonder if something was wrong with the docking station.  So I bought a simple adapter cable that has just a USB-C connector on one end and a USB-2 regular-size USB jack on the other, and used another adapter to get to a flash drive.  That worked for a while, but then I began to have the same problem. 

The worst thing was when I would do a backup to an external hard drive.  That takes a while, and in the middle of the transfer I'd get an error saying I'd removed the drive without ejecting it.  Only I hadn't.

Finally, I went online to see if other people were having these problems.  Turns out they were.  And amid all this wonderful stuff that USB-C is supposedly capable of doing (it has six modes of operation, including everything from external display support to power and 20-GB-per-second data transfer), there is a smelly fly in the ointment:  mechanical unreliability.

If you've never looked closely at a USB-C connector, get a magnifying glass and do so.  Inside that tiny rigid plug there are twenty-four pins, twelve on each side.  And apparently, for the high-speed data transfer to work, a good number of them (either four or eight, the best I can tell from online information) have to make perfect contact with their mating members in the socket you plug it in to.  Or else it looks to the hardware like you've jerked out the connector and you get an error.

From various online forums I read, it appears that the mechanical design of the consumer-grade USB-C jack is unreliable.  I saw tales of people with Macs like mine who had to take theirs in to get the USB-C jacks replaced because they simply wouldn't work for high-speed data transfer anymore.  I also use them (of necessity) for low-speed stuff like connecting to my keyboard and my printer, and I've never had any problems with those functions, because evidently they use different contacts than the high-speed ones.  But even if you get new jacks, they're just as unreliable as the old ones, and you're likely to have the same problem show up again in a few months.

As one online forum writer commented, every connector engineer knows that other things being equal, the more contacts you put in a connector, the less reliable it becomes.  Squeezing twenty-four pins into a tiny USB-C connector and expecting all of them to work all the time was one of the dumbest standards decisions I've come across in a long time.

The proverb saying a chain is only as strong as its weakest link applies in spades to connectors, and I am now stuck with a system that has a known weak link:  the USB-C connectors, which are the only practical physical way I have to get data in and out of my Mac. 

Now that I know it's a mechanical problem, I can do things like trying not to use one of the four USB-C ports for anything except the occasional backup, for example, and tiptoeing around any time a long data transfer is happening for fear I will set up vibrations that will break one of the eight vital connections and ruin the whole process.  This is not progress.

It may be too much to hope for, but maybe whoever devises the next standard after USB-C will come up with a fail-safe approach, or at least one that will be as reliable as the larger USB-2 standard was.  The old Bell System, which for much of the twentieth century relied on electromechanical relays for all of its network switching functions, found that the only way to make a relay reliable was to duplicate every one of its contacts, so that if a piece of dust got into one contact you had the other one that would still work.  Whoever designed the USB-C evidently forgot that hard-earned piece of wisdom.  I hope the next standards committee working on whatever comes after USB-C will not forget, but it looks like we may have to wait a while before that happens.

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on USB-C connectors and the website of the USB Implementers Forum (usb.org), as well as several online discussion boards about the unreliability of USB connectors. 

A Trip To the Genius Bar

It is a sad fact of life that even the best-engineered system breaks down from time to time.  Hence repairmen (or should I say repair people, these days) are assured of job security, although the types of repairs they make have changed radically over the years.  For a few summers in high school and college, I worked as a repair technician at an audiovisual services shop, fixing tape recorders and dealing mainly with mechanical rather than electrical troubles.  But when my Mac laptop started acting up the other day, I decided to take it to the 2012 version of Mac’s fix-it shop:  the Genius Bar.

That’s an inspired name, by the way, evoking images of a drinking establishment with a bouncer that lets in only MENSA members with IQs above 140.  What it is in fact is a counter at the rear of an Apple retail store in an Austin shopping mall.  I had heard recently that Apple retail stores have the highest sales figures per square foot of store area of any type of mall store, and after visiting one, I believe it.

The display windows showed life-size cutout profiles of two people enjoying some of the latest Mac products.  Just a few minutes after the store opened at 10, it was as crowded as a discount clothing store during tax-free weekend.  And about half the people inside wore identical blue tee-shirts with Mac logos:  the sales staff.  Someone greeted me as soon as I stepped in the door.  I explained that I had gone online and made an appointment for 10:15 at the Genius Bar, and the man referred me to another sales associate, a young woman carrying an iPad (clipboards are so twentieth-century), who looked up my name and said it would be just a few minutes.  I was early, so I didn’t mind waiting.

Customers, or potential customers, were everywhere, trying out the wares displayed on clean, simple white box-like tables or browsing through the accessories for iPads, iPhones, and i don’t know what all else.  I wasn’t in the market for any of those, so I poked around where they had custom-made cases for iPads.  The one I found most amusing was made to look like a codex:  one of those pre-printing-press books with thick hand-painted leather binding.  It gave me the same kind of feeling I had when I first heard a student’s cellphone in my class emit a classic mechanical-bell ringtone.

Pretty soon yet a third salesperson hunted me down.  “Karl?  We’re ready for you, have a seat right here.”  It was just a bare counter with four high stools and barely enough elbow room to separate me from an older woman with a German accent who was explaining what her Macbook Air wasn’t doing right.

My genius (I’ll call him Biff) was a late-twenty-something man who was distinguished from many of the other salespeople by not having any tattoos.  He asked me what the problem was.  I told him my Magic Mouse did all its magic except scrolling, and it wasn’t the mouse because it would scroll fine with my wife’s computer.

He tried some obvious things first.  Logging in as a guest, he discovered that when he did that, the mouse worked.  That was progress, but he explained that all it told him was that some of my custom library and root stuff was corrupted, because when a guest logs in the library is empty.

I will not bore you with what all he tried in the next half hour.  At one point, because no one had mentioned charges or fees, I asked him what this would cost.  “Nothing unless we turn a screw.”  So software fixes were free.  That sounded good.  Every so often he’d spin the computer over to me and ask me to enter my password again.  I must have done that fifteen or twenty times.  It gave me a nice but entirely spurious sense that I was assisting in the repair.

At one point he turned to the fellow genius next to him, an older guy with a short beard, earrings, and many tattoos.  The guy said, “Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing,” went into some mysterious part of the file system where all the files were labeled with incomprehensible abbreviations like “ertx” and “infpro,” but failed to fix the problem.  My genius reset something on the machine that took a few minutes and excused himself to go in the back and consult with the web, I suppose.

When he came back, I said I supposed they wouldn’t let him work on my machine all day, would they?  Was there a time limit?

“Not a time limit exactly, but a goal.  We can be somewhat flexible, and there’s one more thing I can try.”  Saying thus, he opened some files and started selectively wiping out whole sections.  I got a little nervous and recalled Mark Twain’s saying that “a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it.”  But this wasn’t the first time the machine (a fairly new one) had been in for repairs, so it wasn’t really relevant to the case.

Finally, Biff turned my Mac back to me and said, “Now, one more password entry, and see what it does now.”  Then he tried stroking the mouse’s back, and this time it scrolled.  And we were in my library, not the guest’s empty one.  I congratulated Biff, thanked him for his time, packed up my Mac, and walked through the crowd surging around the thousands of dollars’ worth of retail merchandise I steadfastly refrained from buying, and went about the rest of my day.

Was it ethical for me to take a half hour of a genius’s time and get a repair that probably would have cost me upwards of a hundred dollars at a non-genius shop?  Well, I look at it this way.  If they really sell five thousand dollars a year of stuff from that place for every square foot in it, they seem to think they can afford to give away free software repairs in the back.  And if some customers take advantage of this service without leaving some of their cash behind for other more costly attractions on display, well, it’s just a cost of doing business that way.  I for one thank Apple for being so generous, and only wish there were more Apple retail stores nationwide.  But that would spell trouble for all the other Mac repair shops, so maybe things are just as well the way they are.

 

Sources:  The statistic on retail sales in Mac stores (their figure of $5,647 per square foot, presumably per year, is seventeen times the U. S. mall store average of $341) is from an MSN Money article published on April 19, 2012 at http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=f87ebfd7-fcf1-4bdb-9489-d752d85293b6.  Mark Twain’s comment about horses and watches, which he attributes to his deceased Uncle William, is in his short story, “My Watch.”