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USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

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Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#181

Post by izacus »

anfilt wrote: post #161
izacus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly am I going to charge my phone, headphones, gamepad, tablet and bunch of other devices from a barrel connector? USB-C has pretty much eliminated forlorn MacBook users shambling around our office and looking for another soul to give them a compatible proprietary charger. Let's keep it this way.

None of those devices you listed need 240 watts... That's quite a bit power to just trust some protocol to negotiate correctly.

And yet they will charge from the 240W charger all the same. Which is what makes the standard great.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#182

Post by andrewmunsell »

skybrian wrote: post #174
cletus wrote: post #11

I look forward to USB 4.1a Type C.2 Phase iii.b Gen 3E and the 482646282 different cable capability combinations that all plug in and have no distinction of those capabilities whatsoever. I also look forward to all the necessary and helpful posts telling me how the identical ports on my laptop are in fact diffferent despite their identical appearance. But at least everything uses the same plug, so that’s nice.

It actually is sort of nice, because "works" isn't binary. It's nice to be able to charge a laptop with what you have, even if it doesn't charge quite as fast. You can transfer data over a cable at lower speeds even if it doesn't run at top speed. Using the "right" cable is performance optimization. This isn't like the old days when plugging things in the wrong way might damage your machine.

Explaining to my aunt or uncle or grandparents that, no, the cable and charger they bought isn't the right one for their phone/laptop/whatever even though it fits isn't ideal. Sure, it might just charge slowly (cue family tech support call), but it could also just show "not charging" on OS X for example, which is just confusing for most people.

It's a real problem, even if tech savvy people are fine with lower charge speeds because we know that the charger/cable/device combo only supports PD profile whatever.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#183

Post by [deleted] »

skybrian wrote: post #174
cletus wrote: post #11

I look forward to USB 4.1a Type C.2 Phase iii.b Gen 3E and the 482646282 different cable capability combinations that all plug in and have no distinction of those capabilities whatsoever. I also look forward to all the necessary and helpful posts telling me how the identical ports on my laptop are in fact diffferent despite their identical appearance. But at least everything uses the same plug, so that’s nice.

It actually is sort of nice, because "works" isn't binary. It's nice to be able to charge a laptop with what you have, even if it doesn't charge quite as fast. You can transfer data over a cable at lower speeds even if it doesn't run at top speed. Using the "right" cable is performance optimization. This isn't like the old days when plugging things in the wrong way might damage your machine.

[deleted]

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#184

Post by throwaway894345 »

skybrian wrote: post #174
cletus wrote: post #11

I look forward to USB 4.1a Type C.2 Phase iii.b Gen 3E and the 482646282 different cable capability combinations that all plug in and have no distinction of those capabilities whatsoever. I also look forward to all the necessary and helpful posts telling me how the identical ports on my laptop are in fact diffferent despite their identical appearance. But at least everything uses the same plug, so that’s nice.

It actually is sort of nice, because "works" isn't binary. It's nice to be able to charge a laptop with what you have, even if it doesn't charge quite as fast. You can transfer data over a cable at lower speeds even if it doesn't run at top speed. Using the "right" cable is performance optimization. This isn't like the old days when plugging things in the wrong way might damage your machine.

Meh, I would rather know that what I have is going to work correctly. Now we're going to have many more calls to customer service complaining that our devices aren't charging/transferring-data at the advertised rates and every rep is going to start by telling us to use only the cable that was provided with our device. I, a technical person, don't enjoy dealing with this stuff, and it's going to be hell for my non-technical family and friends (who will naturally come to me with their problems).

That it won't damage their device is certainly wonderful, but I definitely think the cons outweigh the pros.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#185

Post by mavhc »

unnouinceput wrote: post #172
mavhc wrote: post #52

Powering 90% of the things in your house via DC power should be the future, no more switching from DC solar/battery back to AC and then back to DC again for no reason.

At 5V and your household needs: 1- refrigerator (400W when it motor is running); 2- vacuum cleaner (1000W when running); 3- TV's/PC's/light-bulbs (around 1000W in the evening when all are running at the same time) - all these amounts to at least ~2.5KW power. Now divide that by 5 and you get the intensity at 500A. Do you have any idea how thick the copper would need to be to allow 500A? a full 1cm x 1cm. Any idea how…

Who's running their vacuum cleaner all evening?

My fridge/freezer uses 25 watts average, but the 90% of things I was thinking about was ignoring the heaters and motors, just the lights, computers, speakers etc.

Next question, why 5V, when they're talking about 50V. That brings us down to 1/10th the amps.

Also this is only inside your house, not for power distribution. Generate your DC power with solar, store it in your car/battery, and power your LED lights, Smart speakers, computers, all the stuff that converts power to DC before it uses it today.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#186

Post by danhor »

cletus wrote: post #68
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't the number of things supported, it's that there are optionally-supported things. If every cable needed to support everything, and every host port needed to support every valid device type, it'd be fine. But instead you get cables that don't properly work with alternate modes, host ports that don't implement DisplayPort, etc. It's cheaper, but ridiculously frustrating.

Sorry but not true. To get full bandwidth really limits how long the cable can be. Like I don't think you'll find 40Gbps cables longer than about 0.5m. This is more expensive too (eg there are generally chips in the plugs at either end to handle attenuation). But there's obviously a use case for cables longer than that. It is true that we have cables that support data but not power and power but not data or data at d…

The Apple Thunderbolt 3 Pro Cable (2 m) is one of the only cables that can support everything usb-c over such a long distance [1]. But that costs 129$, which just wouldn't work for smartphone charging for which cables (usb-c 2.0 & 60w, the least you can do while still being spec-compliant) cost 7$. I think I haven't seen such a clear & easy to grasp demonstration of tradeoffs anywhere else.

[1] For the longest time, this was the only cable to do it all. I think more are available now, but they're still very much non-affordable.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#187

Post by djrogers »

asdff wrote: post #163
shepherdjerred wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most users the M1 is fast enough that a nicer user experience (no fan noise) is more worthwhile than slightly better performance. My friend recently purchased a MacBook Air with M1. There's no fan at all. It's incredible. It's a block of metal that just works.

I think most users would at least appreciate the option. For example, windows has power settings where you can adjust the clock of the CPU to however you like when plugged in or unplugged. Consider also that gaming has never been a silent prospect, on a desktop, or a laptop, and especially a game console. The switch is silent, but gamers know nintendo is compromising on graphics fidelity compared to competitors to ma…

> I think most users would at least appreciate the option

The M1 Macs are the first and lowest-end Apple Silicon Macs we'll see. There's a reason they only replaced the cheapest devices with them so far - wait until we're done with the 2 year transition period and I doubt you'll have anything to complain about.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#188

Post by danhor »

flyinghamster wrote: post #26
cletus wrote: post #11

I look forward to USB 4.1a Type C.2 Phase iii.b Gen 3E and the 482646282 different cable capability combinations that all plug in and have no distinction of those capabilities whatsoever. I also look forward to all the necessary and helpful posts telling me how the identical ports on my laptop are in fact diffferent despite their identical appearance. But at least everything uses the same plug, so that’s nice.

USB-C sure turned into a mess, didn't it? So far, I only have two such devices (a cell phone and a set of headphones), and there's no problem charging either. But even there, we already have proprietary extensions (Qualcomm quick charging, for instance), and then there's Thunderbolt, and now this. I'm not enthusiastic about wading into the world of "every port looks identical but isn't" that USB-C has given us. I hav…

Quick Charging 3.0 is more-or-less a hack and shouldn't be done on usb-c (unfortunately, cheap manufacturers still do). Quick Charging 4.0 is just USB-PD, so a different name but compatible.

Re: USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops

#189

Post by imtringued »

magicalhippo wrote: post #43
vladvasiliu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the cheap devices but even more worrisome are cheap, possibly not up-to-spec cables. If you buy a fake cable that pretends to have display-port alternate mode or something but doesn't, meh, you're out 10 bucks. But if it pretends to be able to carry 200 W but isn't and burns your house down instead, you might be out a tad bit more...

Should be detectable though, at least in many circumstances. USB-PD has bidirectional communication, so at least in theory both ends could know how the cable is performing by comparing voltage and current measurements at either end. If the cable drops too many Watts, the load can be disconnected.

Now you will run into WiFi type problems where your cable gives you different charge speeds depending on the season and time of day. Service will degrade and you may not notice the problem and may never figure it out in the end.
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