Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Can someone, in a relatively simple fashion, explain why USB 3 uses so many pins ON ONE END, yet the other end still has what looks like 5 pins?

Because the other end has the extra pins hidden at the back of the connector. USB3 signalling is so different from USB2, that to preserve backwards compatibility, they leave USB2 running on all the normal USB2 pins and just add extra pins for the high-data-rate USB3 signals. To the extent that if you have a USB3 PC and a USB3 hub with both USB2 and USB3 peripherals plugged in, your PC talks USB3 via the hub to the USB3 peripherals and USB2 via the hub to the USB2 peripherals.

Peter