When USB-c came out the whole world just shifted to it seemingly overnight to me – how does this happen?
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USB-C has a lot of advantages that USB-A couldn’t really provide. USB-A cables have 9 wires in them, and they are actually two USB ports fused together (if you look inside of a blue USB port, you’ll see two rows of pins. One actually connects to USB2 devices and the other one connects to USB3 devices. This is how they maintained backwards compatibility on the same port. Believe it or not, the computer actually literally thinks that they are two separate ports at the electrical layer!)
This split-port design meant that a USB port only really had 5 pins that could be used for any modern standard that was more recent than USB 2.0 (the other 4 pins were dedicated to supporting old USB2 devices and couldn’t be repurposed). This was limiting in terms of what they could develop the port to do. Things like displays, eGPUs, external SSDs, and other such devices require very large amounts of bandwidth, and USB-A was limiting from this front. USB-A also wasn’t designed to carry large amounts of power required to fast-charge cellphones, computers, or other devices.
USB-C came along to solve many of these concerns and has 24 pins, which gives it MUCH more flexibility and allowed thunderbolt, displayport, USB3.2, and other more recent standards to work over it. It also has the added bonus of being much more durable, less of a hassle (cables can be plugged in either direction), and it unified different kinds of ports into one port.
In short, there were a lot of different reasons to make the switch. USB-C was much more future proof and it could do things that USB-A couldn’t do.
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