[susan53]

Sorry, but that explanation doesn't reflect how people actually use the two prepositions.
When I fed connect/with into a concordancer, there were 117 examples from a 3m word corpus, roughly half referring to people and the others not. Here are some examples of "things connecting with things"

They can connect their computers directly with any database in the company...
Research and development expenditures connected with the reconnaissance satellite..
... the East River that connected New York Bay with Long Island Sound.
A telephone line had been hooked up to connect the ship with the Base exchange.
...costly improvements such as extensions or better connections with other highways.

And even when the sentence involves people, they're often not connecting with other people but abstarct concepts or concrete objects :

...the SAC commander and other key men. All can be connected with the gold circuit from their homes.
Certain concepts, which previously had been connected only with the king,...
it is seldom indeed that anyone remotely connected with the cinema...

etc etc