It’s baffling. When APC first added native USB support to their Smart-UPS series, they chose a standard USB-B port. When they introduced “SmartConnect” a few years ago, this port was replaced by a USB-A port which requires a non-compliant USB-A male-to-male cable for monitoring. The only ‘good’ reason I can think of for this change is that someone realised that these new cloud-connected UPSes would be easily bricked by some bad firmware update (since apparently that’s a feature now), and wanted to use USB thumb drives as a recovery mechanism, but I have no idea. I think even though they have a built-in Ethernet port now, one still needs to buy their network management card for non-cloud remote management, so it could just as easily be another attempt at some weird vendor lock-in.