Up until recently, USB-C was more of a fluke in my household—a strange visitor from a possible future, in which we all used small, reversible plugs. Sure, my iMac had a couple of Thunderbolt ports that use the USB-C ports and every once in a while a random cable might have a plug on it, but by and large we remained a good old USB-A household.

Even by late 2020, when I bought a new M1 MacBook Air that had only USB-C ports, the connector was still more of a curiosity than something in daily use. Truth be told, I didn’t plug many things into my laptop, so I wasn’t even really living the Dongletown lifestyle. I did have to buy a USB-C-to-USA-mini cables in order to use my ATR-2100 travel mic while I was on the road, but as the Air arrived during the pandemic, I wasn’t even really traveling.

Slowly but surely, however, USB-C has begun to creep in and take over. When I had some outlets with USB plugs installed in our new kitchen last fall, I made sure to buy ones that had both a USB-C and a USB-A port.1 Lightning cables packaged with new iOS devices now came with USB-C on the other end.…

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