Raspberry Pi admits to faulty USB-C design on the Pi 4

> Why design them to fit together if they won't always work right?

USB-C is designed for graceful degradation.

There are two main types of non-captive cables: USB 2.0 only and USB 2.0 plus USB 3.x. Hosts and devices have to support at least USB 2.0, so if you try to connect two USB 3.x devices with a USB 2.0 only cable, it'll fallback to a USB 2.0 connection.

There are two main current levels: 3A and 5A. Cables which can carry higher power have a small chip describing this fact; if the chip is missing, the power source will limit itself to 3A.

Then there are the alternate modes. If you try to plug a device which only understands an alternate mode (for instance, a DisplayPort adapter), and the host doesn't understand that alternate mode (or can't understand it, like in the case of a USB-A port with a USB-A to USB-C cable), that device will instead appear as an USB 2.x device (the "billboard device"), which the operating system can use to show an error popup.

And so on. At every corner of the spec you can notice an interest in making it degrade gracefully. Of course, that can only work when the manufacturers follow the spec correctly.

I've never bought into that reasoning on the automotive side. Selling "one million of this device," as you say, will bring in $20 billion. So yes, they can afford $20K to do the job right.

Also, SMT resistors at that quantity level are more like 1/10 of a cent, not 2 cents, and the PnP machine is running anyway. In fact you often end up using more resistors than strictly necessary, just because the machine holds a limited number of reels and it's cheaper to use more of the same part to arrive at a desired value than to add a new line item.

Things should be as cheap as possible, but no cheaper. Optimizing the cost of individual resistors is almost always a classic example of measuring the wrong thing. We should strive to avoid making excuses for doing that.

I have two RPi4B 4GB models. They work perfectly with the very cheap PSU/charger ($8) from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. $8 is less than a cost of a USB-C cable.

If you want to complain something about the product, I think unfinished software would deserve more attention. The current desktop performance doesn't reflect the capabilities of the system. I guess it'll significantly improve once OpenGL ES 3.2 (and hopefully Vulkan!) drivers will be complete.

Other minor issue I had was RPi4B not recognizing the HDMI display. I had to manually force it and this caused loss of HDMI audio. Using the official Raspberry Pi branded micro-HDMI cable.

I hope Raspbian will eventually have a 64-bit version. Out-of-order cores can benefit from more registers in 64-bit mode. More registers allows the compiler to reduce true and false dependencies, leading to faster code execution.

CPU wise it's nice, quad Cortex A72 is a huge boost compared to A53. Hardware accelerated omxplayer can play 4K HEVC content nicely. USB 3 ports have up to 4 Gbit/s bandwidth, and it's not shared with the now truly full speed gigabit ethernet.

I'm very happy with the product. RPi4B is a very capable system for its price. And it'll just get better over time.

Or vague, or just plain incorrect.

I could see making a mistake like this. The earlier USB specs called for goofy things like grounding the shield to the enclosure entrance via parallel RC networks instead of bonding it properly, as well as adding various bypass capacitors to the data lines(!). These guidelines were poorly thought out, widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored. They have conditioned engineers to make their own judgment calls in areas where they really should have been both more descriptive and more prescriptive, so maybe this is one of those cases.

I haven't looked at the post-USB 2 specs at all but wouldn't be surprised if they are nowhere near as clear, unambiguous, and well-thought-out as people here are saying.

I like RJ-45 for this. I can choose between several different cables that are all compatible and pay only for the features/speed I need.