A major change I see between the cables and connectors you describe is the move from parallel communication to serial communication. This has brought with it a

A major change I see between the cables and connectors you describe is the move from parallel communication to serial communication. This has brought with it a great improvement in speed. I suppose, we could have a large connector with just a few pins for serial communication, but then these individual pins would be vulnerable to breakage just as they were in the old parallel connectors. Maybe even more breakable due to their sparsity. Im surprised your connectors lasted so long. Contact based connectors rather than pin based based connectors as mentioned in some other thread might be the answer. I don't know what problems they might lead to though. Personally, I'm a huge fan of apple MagSafe 1/2 cables.