The Hopelessly Tangled World of Wires

Wireless is still a luxury. But why is it so hard to connect things with wires?

Unwired is unraveling. By now anybody who thought we'd soon have a wireless world knows enough to think again. It's not just that dozens of overoptimistic companies have blown astounding sums in pursuit of riches in the airwaves. It's also that even on a supposedly unwired planet, we're still going to hang ourselves with plain old ugly cables.

For now, the much-touted Bluetooth wireless scheme is too slow, expensive, and clunky to take over the job of connecting most peripherals. (See Home Office for another take on Bluetooth and other wireless options.) That dumps us back in the wonderful world of wire, where nothing can be taken for granted. Example: The simple term "FireWire cable" can mean at least three different things, since the connectors come in two distinct varieties: 6-pin and 4-pin.

There are now at least four different flavors of USB plugs. USB 2.0 brings us the weaselly term "full speed," meaning slow old 1.1; at least 2.0 is not supposed to bring new connectors--thank goodness.

You once could be reasonably certain that a parallel cable would have a big honkin' Centronics-type connector on the printer end and a DB-25 connector on the other. No longer. My all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine has a mini-Centronics jack and a cable a couple of feet shorter than I'd like it to be. And a regular cable can't replace it.

Networking? Only the geekiest of geeks can tell a crossover cable from a standard one just by looking. Then there's the delicate matter of gender--having the right male plug for the right female connector. And don't get me started on what can happen when you insert a phone-style RJ-11 plug into an RJ-45 network jack.

The Awkward Brick

Even if all that nonsense could magically disappear into the ether, there's one type of cable that won't: the AC power cord. In North America, the end that goes into the wall is standard, even if it's stuck into the power brick in the worst possible orientation. But on the other end, anarchy rules--even in a single manufacturer's line. Hunt for external batteries on the Instant Power site, and you'll discover three separate connectors just for Motorola cell phones--but none at all for the even stranger connector on my Sanyo model.

PDA connectors aren't standard either, and neither are the ones for notebooks. When the AC power brick for an ancient, well-traveled Sony notebook of mine recently stopped working, I had to shell out $120 for a replacement. The one for a newer Sony model I own is of course totally different--and totally different from every other manufacturer's.

Sure, various products have distinct power and input needs. But not thousands of distinct needs. In fact, I bet a single adapter could easily be designed to charge a cell phone, a notebook, and a PDA, even including the extra wires that portable devices want for data. But I also bet that I'll be downloading high-definition, full-length movies to my wireless phone before I ever get to see such an all-in-one.

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes, a cohost of the public television series Digital Duo, has written about PCs for nearly two decades.