How to Tell if the USB Plug Is Right-Side Up

David Pogue
·Tech Critic
Updated

USB, man. That Universal Serial Bus connector has become—universal. Every computer built in the past 15 years has USB jacks. Into them, you can plug printers, scanners, cameras, phones, tablets, speakers, and on and on.

USB can be frustrating, though, because you can plug the jack in only one way, and there’s no obvious, universal way to tell which side is up.

Many USB jacks display the forked USB logo on one side of the plastic—but not all of them.

Here, at last, is the universal solution to that problem: Only one side of the metal USB connector itself has a seam, a line, going down the middle. That’s the bottom.

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Adapted from Pogue’s Basics, Flatiron Books. Order here.