The Curse of the Micro USB Port

I’ll be honest with you — I’ve never liked the micro USB port. It’s stressful.

Because it’s so small, I’m hopelessly unsure about which way to plug it. And, more often than not, I guess wrong. Seems like natural odds would give me a 50/50 chance. Nope.

Even when I guess right I’m not confident in my decision. It still feels weird, like I may have just broken it. So I pull it back out, try it the other way, only to discover that I was right the first time.

The micro USB is the most anxiety-inducing cord in my camera bag. I actually wait as long as possible before connecting it because my fear is that this darn thing is going to fracture at any moment.

So when a state-of-the-art camera hits the streets oozing with computational photography algorithms, ultrasonic sensor cleaning, and Nova Scotia like weather sealing, many of us were shocked, I mean shocked, when we pulled back the connector cover to discover that yes, what lurked inside was the demon itself — a micro USB port.

It was the photography version of the Psycho shower scene.

Reviewers across the globe shrieked as if they had just found a fly swimming in their cereal bowl or swarms of ants taking over Oreos stashed in the back of the pantry.

Why o Why? Even my car uses USB-C.

I know there was a moment when some project manager at OM System thought that repurposing crates of leftover micro USB ports for their brand new OM-5 camera was a great cost-saving idea.

It was not.

That bad seed of a USB port is going to curse an otherwise compelling device.

You don’t put Prius tires on a Corvette. And you don’t repurpose micro USB ports on a cutting edge camera.

It’s just wrong.