This is also the main reason why I'm switching everything back to cables. I can barely use my bluetooth headphones in my flat just because I'm using a USB 3 hub. Headphones randomly disconnecting in video calls is not a great experience.
The depletion of ports on computers and forced migration to dongles is a trend I am absolutely baffled by. Whenever I'm given the chance I will always go for a laptop with an Ethernet port and as many USB ports as possible - even if that results in a thicker profile. Weight is something I care moderately about, thinness is something that has zero value for me since we passed the inch and a half threshold.
I also, personally, have a strong preference for USB Type A connectors over the Type C and Micro variants, cable stability and port wear is noticeably lessened with the larger cable seating.
I think there is a bias now due to the higher usage with USB-C vs old USB. It used to be you'd either connect something to USB temporarily, like a flash card then back into your pocket after the file transfer, or permanently, like a USB mouse in the back of your desktop you never unplug again.
Now that the port is becoming a charging port, it's used a lot more than data-only USB, and in ways that torque the port worse. You plug your usb phone into a usb brick and it largely isn't going anywhere, but on a laptop, you are plugging and unplugging the device all the time. You might be leaning at angles with it on your lap and adding pressure on the port (something I inadvertently notice myself doing once a week). On top of that, the go bad part, the flimsy inner pin, is on the computer side rather than the cheap cable side. After a year of use, my usb-c port went from snick snick to wobbly, both on my macbook and my nintendo switch.
In contrast, I've never had this happen with lightning port on my iPhone despite all the abuse and lint I give it, because the design is inverted with the flimsy pin on the cable being inserted into a simple slot in the phone. The old macbook magsafe plug was just a magnet holding contacts firm against each other, not even inserted into anything, so if it got torqued or abused it would just pop off and there would be no harm to the computer or the plug really, and you spent no force or effort jamming it into the computer since the magnet did the alignment work and made the connection for you (Typically, I would just grab my magsafe cable a foot up from the end and loosely slap it against the port basically and it would seat itself).
With the shortcomings of the design of USB-C, in comparison to the older standards, you put on a lot more wear and tear on the port.
> In contrast, I've never had this happen with lightning port on my iPhone despite all the abuse and lint I give it, because the design is inverted with the flimsy pin on the cable being inserted into a simple slot in the phone
One point in favor of USB-C when it comes to wear is that the moving parts (springy tongues for metal contact and clips to hold the plug in place) are on the cable, whereas on Lightning they are in the plug. So in regular use with Lightning you are wearing out the port, whereas with USB-C you are wearing out the cable.
Anecdotally, I've worn out the Lightning port on my Apple smart charging case, but I don't have any USB-C phone to compare to (I have USB-C on my laptop but the use case is too different to draw any conclusions)
Also anecdotally, it seems due to required tolerances, it's much more difficult for third parties to manufacture lightning cables - if you buy cheap lightning cables on Amazon, they tend to have poor fit and get loose quickly. Whereas I've never had that problem with the cheap USB-C cables that get packed in with aliexpress junk.
I have a dongle hanging off my desk that has an ethernet cable plugged into one end of it and a keyboard and desk-fan plugged into the side. This dongle is attached to my laptop[1] and my laptop is effectively immobile 'cause quarantine. I plug and unplug my dongle perhaps once a month[2], otherwise it remains in place and my computer doesn't shift - neither is there any significant force on the ethernet cable other than gravity, there is plenty of slack. The cable is slightly cocked out of the socket with one side of the casing resting against the body of the laptop and the other side a few millimeters out. The gravity of the dongle hanging in this position for just over a year has slowly weakened the grip of the connector from what I can tell visually but there are no problems with the socket actually reading data off the connector that I've ever noticed.
The issue is a compounded one - most laptops come with two or maybe three USB-C ports with the expectation that you'll dongle the crap out of them - they may be more stable than USB-A sockets but they suffer a lot more wear from the need from dongles which comes about due to the lessening of ports available. So USB-C might be a lot more reliable if manufacturers didn't fetishize trying to provide the absolute smallest number of ports possible but as things are the UX today is far worse than the UX five or ten years ago when I'd have a litany of ports to plug in whatever I need.
I hate dongles and they work absolutely terribly with USB-C, give me a mix of USB-A and USB-C connectors so I can plug in everything without a dongle and I'd be happy as a clam. I thought I'd write this out just due to the fact that mistook a bad UX as a purely port based technical issue - I can't say I've had too many problems specifically with the USB-C connectors but every time I've had to use USB-C connectors it's been a terrible experience - if you follow what I'm saying? I think you may be quite correct about reliability but also missed the compounding factor.
1. Which rests on a laptop stand to angle the device to a better reading level
2. Every time the internet goes out the dongle fails to automatically reconnect for some reason I can't be arsed to figure out
I've never had a USB-A port die on a motherboard, but I seem to break USB-A ports on cases, and always the same way. The plastic support for the pins that also acts as keying breaks. Probably just that I tend to buy cheap cases.
Only port I've broken on my laptop is HDMI. Fortunately it has a thunderbolt port as well for video, but now I need a dongle.
Cables have another advantage: it's much easier to switch devices, just plug it in, no more connecting and disconnecting and figuring out how that specific device has implemented pairing.
At least the headphones I'm using Bose QC 35 can connect to 3 devices at the same time. If it's nicely supported it's not really an issue but as soon as I step away a few meters from the computer the connection starts to drop I'm better off with cables.
Kinda odd that you even have to think about basic features like that these days.
Mine do that and it's more an annoyance than anything.
I'll throw them on to listen to a podcast while I'm cooking or something. But then they'll connect to my desktop as well. Depending on what it's doing that day, sometimes it connects in headset mode instead of headphone mode which means it has exclusive control of the headphones and I can't get my podcast to play for hell or high water.
So instead I have to trek down to the basement, unlock my computer, disconnect the headphones from there, then get back to it.
Also using Bose QC 35’s, and only _today_ (oddly enough) I was getting incredibly annoyed at them for connecting to my phone and laptop (MacBook, in sleep mode, fwiw) and _not_ the Linux machine I had in front of me which was the “first profile” (the one that the device speaks about when powering on, “connecting to... <device name>“)
It seems mine can only be connected to two devices, and gets a bit weird when the secondary device wants to make sound but the primary device is already making sounds.
My Sony WH-1000XM4 only connects to 2 devices at once. That's mildly annoying since I would like to connect it to 4 (Phone, Tablet, Laptop, Desktop). It stays paired just fine, but I have to regularly go to the bluetooth settings of the device I want to listen to and press connect. On all but one of those devices that's more work than replugging a cable.
Related: https://annoying.technology/posts/08834ce6ea3edc5a/