Question about cable conductor placement.

[Morpheuskibbe]

Almost all modern cables have the design of the female end has its conductors on a raised bit of plastic in the middle, and on the male end the conductors are contained inside the tip.  This applies to all USBs, as well as HDMI and display-port.

 

Lightning is the exception, with the female end having its conductors around the outside, and the male end also having the conductors exposed on the outside.

 

Is there a reason to do it one way or the other?

[Kisai]

Pins are arranged so that the ground makes contact first. When a connector has a metal shell, that's the ground already. Lightning does not have a metal shell, so it's ground pins have to make contact first which is pin 1 and 8 (the outer most pins).

 

Basically the design of lightning and USB-C was to make the connector idiot-proof by not having people insert it upside down blindly like in USB-A. HDMI and Displayport also has the same problem of people being able to slide a USB-A connector into their respective ports, breaking them if fumbling around blindly. Which is why you have to be extra careful with the iGPU's ports. The ground shell of the USB-A will short all the pins in a hdmi or display port connector if you attempt to insert it there.

[Thomas53]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

Basically the design of lightning and USB-C was to make the connector idiot-proof by not having people insert it upside down blindly like in USB-A. HDMI and Displayport also has the same problem of people being able to slide a USB-A connector into their respective ports, breaking them if fumbling around blindly. Which is why you have to be extra careful with the iGPU's ports. The ground shell of the USB-A will short all the pins in a hdmi or display port connector if you attempt to insert it there.

That putting a LOT more faith in people then me.

[Thaldor]

Because the Lightning style connector is expensive. Or more like "expensive" since we are talking about couple of cents more with the volumes but either way making it is more expensive. USB-C, HDMI, pretty much every other connector you have the plastic inside with the connectors and conduits and the metal is either single extrusion "pipe" pushed around it or just a piece of metal wrapped around it. With Lightning you either need to precise stamp the housing or make it from 3-4 pieces (plastic inside with the connectors and conduits, outer rim, and either one piece of metal wrapped around the plastic or two pieces sandwiching the plastic within the outer rim). You don't need to worry about a weak "tongue" within USB-C port because the plug and the housing ensure the connector cannot bend enough to break the "tongue", with Lightning that "tongue" is the connector and so needs to be reinforced and you get the problem of how to wrap metal around it.

 

Again it's just couple of cents, most likely hardly a cent, per connector price difference in the volumes they are made. But when you order 10's maybe 100's of thousands of them at one time, you can calculate how much you're going to save with different production and marginal (if none) difference in practical use.