The new iPhone 6 could be released with a USB cable that can be plugged into a slot either way up. We tested the current non-reversible cable on 15 people in our office

The new iPhone 6 could come with reversible USB cables, according to unconfirmed leaked pictures.

Sonny Dickson (@SonnyDickson) Reversible USB port on the new Lightning cables! pic.twitter.com/bhVKjK3xKl

As Samuel Gibbs reports, Apple filed a patent in 2013 for “reversible or dual-orientation USB plug connectors” that can be plugged into any standard computer USB port to “reduce the potential USB connector damage and user frustration”.

Think about it: plugging one of the standard USB cables into a computer often results in a flip and a jiggle around the port but just how much “user frustration” is it causing?

Although a scientific study of this is pretty difficult we did manage to get 15 people from around the Guardian office to have a go and their timings ranged from lightning fast …

to a little bit more fiddly.

Some approached the task more competitively than others …

While those who managed to do it quickly were very pleased with their efforts.

It took those 15 people an average of 5.06 seconds to get their USB plug into any slot they chose on their work device. The quickest was actually Gibbs, who managed to do it in a nifty 0.8 seconds while the person who fiddled around for the longest took 8.6 seconds to connect up.

The bulk times are not important, though, as what matters is whether the journalist had to flip the charger before it entered the USB port. Of the 15, nine tried to plug the charger in the wrong way round first time.

We (very) roughly split the times at the point when we thought the first entry failed to measure how much more time was needed for those nine to get their USB wired up.

Unsurprisingly it almost doubled the time on average, with an additional 4.5 seconds needed for that second entrance. One rough observation we made was that those who had more USB slots in use when we visited them could turn it around much quicker after they had started with the cable the wrong way round.

What does that mean exactly? Well let’s take the rough hypothesis that you charge your phone once a day.

Apple do not break their sales figures down by type of model so it’s very much a guesstimate. We have not got the figures for the number of people who have bought iPhone 5S and 5C in the last year, but we do know that more than 150m iPhones were sold during the 2013 fiscal year, which we are going to use as a proxy here for the number benefiting.

If we take the proportion of owners missing their USB points first time round (60%) and multiply that by the total number of seconds potentially saved across the year (4.5 seconds per user for the 365 days of the year) then the new double sided USB might save the world’s new iPhone owners 147,825,000,000 seconds a year.

That’s 41,062,500 hours in all, and 4,687 years, but to take it back to how it affects you roughly 16 minutes per user.

The possibilities are limitless.