Oh, I missed the “micro” part. Yeah, micro-B is awful.

When Apple was dragging its feet about moving to USB-C, I remember people talking about how terrible a connector Lightning was. I was confused, because yeah compared to USB-C Lightning was terrible, but Lightning was miles better than micro-B and mini-B, which were the standards when Lightning was created.

Apple held onto it too long because they were greedy. But when they made it, it was a damn good connector for the time.

For a particularly egregious example take a look at the DualShock 4

Oh! That is USB micro-B, usually just called “USB micro” or “micro-USB” (because essentially nothing used USB micro-A). There was also a USB mini-B, usually called “USB mini” or “mini-USB” for the same reason.

USB micro-B is indeed janky.

USB-B is the square one, which I mostly encounter with printers. It was intended that the host end would always be A and the device end would be B (hence mini- and micro-B, which most often just saw a regular USB-A connector at the other end of cables).

(With USB-C, the host-device dichotomy was killed and both ends use the same connector.)

It's ok for consumer stuff but it has a lot of problems in professional environments. I'm not talking peripherals and laptop docks.

It's hard to extend/convert, has a cap on hubs, and there's compatibility issues. Enforcement of the standard is understandably lacking when it's supposed to work in every application. But it's like every company invents their own proprietary way to use it so there only thing standard is the connector itself.