What purpose would this be used for?

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.

Ass to ass

Have you never just wanted to plug 2 PCs into each other back to back?

If you think about it, this is the USB equivalent of a double ended dildo

It turn@ a usb extension cable into a regular usb

I guess that could be a use case?

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’ve used them for extension, as it allows you to attach a second, regular USB cable to it.

Sometimes you have a female to female cable.

You ever watch Requiem For A Dream?

LUSBian sex obviously!

Say gex

I dunno but it bothers me how much plastic wrapping that fucking thing apparently needs.

To connect two USB-A ports.

Basically the same as a USB-A to USB-A cable, just really short.

I used to have a portable hard drive that had a usb-A/ e-sata hybrid connector and I had to use a USB A to A cable (or e-data) to use it.

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.

Ass-to-ass.

Many cheapo sata connectors need a cable like this(I use a male A to female micro b and then a female micro b to male A, it gets the job done)

But connector, idk

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.

Causing fires

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 would definitely find a couple use cases for these

Angering the USB-IF

So your pets can't chew the hard-disk cables.

Unless you have a pet rabbit.

Finally! USB Direct Connect!

The way these are called male and female has always been so wild

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.

I had an old Medion digital camera that used USB-A - USB-A cable for synching with PC.

This could be a shorter version of it, tho idk why would anyone use this for thus purpose, would be awkward

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.