[londons_explore]

I think those 79 engineers should have paid more attention to compatibility and longevity. The cable should have been tested in a dirt tumbler. There is no way a cable should have 32 pins without some kind of built in self test of connectivity on all the pins every time you plug it in. Pins should be reassignable so that when 6 of the 32 pins are dirty/broken the cable still works at a slightly reduced speed.

All the Comms should have been done via an OFDM-like scheme rather than just a binary sequence over a twisted pair, giving far more throughput and allowing for compensating for conductive dirt in the plug causing crosstalk.

Overall, I believe such a design would have reduced costs, since there is no longer a need for such precision on cable and plug manufacture, which more than compensates for a tiny OFDM 'modem' inside the USB phy.