Don't think of it as a tiny cable, think of it as a gender bender. You can put on the end of some female cable.
You're more likely to see dongles like this at fixed installations. Like somebody puts a USB port into a wall, like a speaker's podium, or a presentation stand. So one side is fixed, depending on what you want to hook up to it, you might need to have a gender bender.
USB is bi-directional. So it really doesn't care about the plug gender. Some other protocols are directional, then the plug gender is very important, so adapters for directional protocols tend to be more expensive, it may even require external power.
Once USB on the go was invented it cease to matter at all.
As long as the double ended dildo provided low impedance electrical through ways, and distinct electrical paths for at least four conduits, with minimal capacitive cross talk... then yes
But a serious answer is that these are sometimes sold in a kit of adapters that would let you change the head. Most kits like used a normal cord as the base cord, but some used USB extension cords as the base cord. So this is meant to be a replacement part, not useful in its own right.
Not that you probably need to know this, but for some other stranger: there's a max functional length to USB cables. At work I remember pulling my hair out troubleshooting a printer until we swapped cables for something shorter.
We have smart boards in most classrooms, but in an entire wing of my department the smart board doesn't work. Reason? When we built the wing, 8 or 10 years ago, the installers fitted their own low grade plugs on the USB connection for the boards, before figuring out that they snipped the cables too short. Instead of running new cabling the installers then introduced another extension.
Nobody cared to check it out before accepting delivery and my complaints went unheard by management, until it was too late to RMA it.
Such A-to-A adaptors and cables always have been prohibited by the USB spec, but people built them anyway. A common usecase for "illegal" A-A cables i remember was connecting PCIe cards (especially GPUs and mining cards) externally to riser sockets.
I bought a breadboard power supply and the options to feed it power are a barrel jack and usb-a. Considering the size of the thing mini or micro would have made way more sense.
An OTG setup needs all 5 pins of the micro-B connector. USB A cannot be used for OTG. If a USB-A port can act as a client, that's not OTG, it's a botched implementation.
USB-A to USB-A cables do not exist, the USB standard does not allow them, if you have a cable with two USB-A connectors then it’s not actually a certified USB cable. The same goes for USB extension cables and this adapter. Note how there isn’t a ‘USB certified’ logo on the package.
The cables exist; they just don't follow the standard. I've used them when developing consumer electronics: the host controller on the device switches to device mode in the bootloader, allowing a host machine to connect and debug/flash the device.
It’s not hard to imagine a product that would require one, though. It’s how every phone charging cable works, just with a different size male USB on one end.
Get 2 laptops, put them side by side with usb ports wide open and plug them bitches together. Likely will short with 5v being fed both sides.
But in reality its a usb coupler (plugging together 2x usb extension cables). Not a great lot of use from them in my opinion. I've seen shit bodged together in low budget it offices using edge case crap like this.
It's an Usb-A gender changer. It's not that useful but you could use it to turn an otg adapter (female usb-a to male usb-c) into a regular usb-c cable. I'd rather buy a usb-c cable though.
Not one that short but I do have A to A cord like that in use. In my case it's with a KVM that I lost and AC adapter for but found that if I plugged in to one of the rear console connections it could get it to power on from the USB device. Cable it to a USB charging port on the front of one of the UPS and away it goes.
I actually have a APC UPS at work that uses a USB-A to USB-A cable. You can look up the cable online, it's part number 940-0504. I was surprised APC used such a cable. I think if you tried to do something dumb like connect two PCs together with it, one of the USB ports would fry.
I have a cheap HDMI capture device that takes in video input, exposes it to the computer as a regular webcam, and then outputs it back to HDMI. It gets the job done.
It uses an USB male to male for power, and a regular one for data.
That said, not sure how a short one like that would help.
So you have 2 USBC devices you want to connect together, a laptop and a phone for example, but for some reason you can't find your USBC to USBC cable but you do have 2 USBC to USBA cables.
Well by breaking the USB specifications you can connect the 2 cables together to make a janky USBC to USBC cable.
Alternatively you can get single circuit boards with USBA ports on them and you can use this jank of an adaptor to link them together.