I thought another connector was dumb but USB-C is kind of amazing. .... Finally somebody got something right. And I think you can't screw up the orientation when plugging it in but I can't remember.
You can't screw it up -- the connector is physically symmetrical and the ports can figure out which way the plug is inserted.
It's not so much that they finally got it right, but that the requirements changed. When USB was first developed 20+ years ago, the existing serial-communication standard was called RS-232. It was used everywhere because it was cheap and easy -- one low-cost chip on each side, and possibly as few as three wires in the cable -- but its specification was very loose, so everyone's implementation was a little different.
As a result, "RS-232 compatible" came to mean only that two RS-232 devices could be connected without starting a fire. To actually communicate from one device to another, everyone had a box of cables, switchboxes, gender-changers, null-modem adapters, and 9- to 25-pin converters for handling the physical connection, and it was just accepted that once you got the two sides wired together, you'd then spend time figuring out baud rate, parity, and flow-control settings for the connection before you could actually use it.
To replace all the existing RS-232 interfaces, USB had to be capable of reaching all the way across the room to devices like printers or modems, and it also had to be cheap enough for a low-cost device like a keyboard or mouse. Those requirements drove the design, so we got a cable with only 4 wires plus shield, a generous 5 meters max cable length, and very low-cost connectors that were physically incapable of being mixed up rather than electrically self-orienting. But the price we paid was a strict host/device distinction (with the host almost always a consumer PC), and low speed across the wire, with only a few standard predefined interface classes.
But now we have Wi-Fi for medium-speed across-the-room communication, and Bluetooth for closer low-speed communication, and silicon costs have dropped significantly, and people are willing to pay $1000 for a phone anyway... So the latest USB standard prioritizes speed and convenience over cost and distance. USB-C requires at least 9 wires in the cable, and the expensive connectors have 24 tiny contacts, and the silicon at each port has to be a lot more sophisticated, and the maximum cable length is only 1 or 2 meters.
But it exactly fits our present requirements: PC-to-phone syncing of gigabytes at a time, very high bitrate uncompressed audio to a nearby DAC and/or from an ADC, high-speed charging, high-speed access to flash drives and other storage devices, etc. -- with the convenience of a cable that can be connected 8 different ways, all of which will just work.
