Barrel jacks were awesome, they could go in any orientation. The only downside was the many different forms of barrel jack and lack of a standard. My question is: why isn’t there a cylindrical USB port? You would be able to rotate it any way you want within 360 degrees!
As a matter of fact, why isn’t there a cylindrical power plug? You’d get the benefits of a recessed plug like Type-C (EU) and Type-F (Schuko), you’d get the benefits of reversible plugs like Type-A (North American) and more so as you get 360-degree rotation, and it would be MUCH harder to break/bend compared to two flimsy pins (the UK plug has three thicker pins, but a chunky cylinder would be much more difficult to bend than the pins)
If it was a hollow cylinder (a bit like a vacuum-insulated water bottle), you could feasibly fit some small electronics in it, so things like flush low-power USB chargers and smart home sensors could be made.
The contacts would likely need to be outside the cylinder, similar to the “neutral” pins on Schuko plugs. There would likely need to be some plastic tabs to keep the power bits from touching the non-power bits, and then the socket itself would be able to freely rotate.
Actually, why don’t regular sockets freely rotate? Then it would solve all the issues of non-reversible plugs not able to go upside down and reversible plugs not able to go sideways.
Speaking of cylindrical objects, what happened to camcorders? They sound like the most comfortable and easiest way to record videos, with straps and everything. They were compact, portable, and wasn’t heavy as all heck.
this is my rant about cylinders, thank you for your time.
Usb c has 24 pins. A typical barrel / stereo style jack has 2 - 4. The connector would have to be absolutely huge to carry the number of wires.
Power plugs are similar problems. You need 3 wires and you can’t risk the pins crossing over each other and shorting out. You don’t care about that on your headphones due to the low voltages. Wall plugs need to be fully isolated and safe.
oh yeah usb has loads of pins for data. no wonder barrel jacks were never used to transfer data…
oh yeah designing an idiot-proof power plug that can be rotated 360 degrees would be challenging ad well
Round connectors were absolutely used to transfer data, for example audio and video in the form of RCA plugs and many other examples back in the day. Another example is coax cable for TV signals (both analog and digital) and also LAN.
However the lack of distinct interface channels leads to a bottleneck in bandwidth. So as the need for bandwidth increased many of those were replaced with multi pin versions. This is much harder to do with round connectors and there isn’t that much benefit, so they mostly got ditched.
However round connectors still have their place, for example tiny little coax connectors found in many devices to carry signals. Wifi antennas and such are connected this way.
Coax has only 2 conductors and it keeps impedance constant, unlike audio jack
The 3rd gen iPod shuffles used the headphone port for USB, definitely uncommon though.
to add to this answer, those 24 pins would have to be aligned correctly.
so, you’d have this problem, but worse because because it’s round and not basically flat:
power plug with 3 wires or 5 wires (3-phase) could be made safe-ish if there was a button at the very end that connected to a relay or something. but plug like this would be comically long for any practical power
Cordless kettles manage to connect mains power with a round, freely turning connector, so it can be done safely
Well, those ones does it at the cost of size. In order to ensure separation they are comparatively huge.