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USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

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Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#221

Really? I find it to be a game changer for me. The fact that my laptop, Switch, iPad, and several other devices can all share a charge has made my life much easier. I can just sprinkle a few of them throughout the house and never be without power. Before it was always a hunt to find a cable, or I had to be in [x] room to charge [y] device because that's where the charger lived. Plus, I can charge my MacBook on either…

Did you read the article? USB-C is not just a charging cable. I can understand you are happy, but your happiness could have been achieved with ubiquitous micro-USB with extra power delivery capability.

The real disappointment is that USB-C could unite power and data delivery so that you won’t have to think about using a different shaped input for display/power. Due to patchy support this is not possible. It is explained in the article well.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#222
I like that with USB-C my wife and I can share a hotdesk office with monitor and peripherals connected by a USB-C hub, despite her using a windows laptop and I a Macbook. No more dongle hell.

On the other hand I was incredibly meticulous about vetting this hub before I purchased it because I know the positive experience is not universal.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can not take advantage of the new features? I didn't throw out my USB 3 flash drives when USB 3.1 came out. There's no compatibility problem here that would make you change anything at all, just ignore it.

Tell that to switch owners who have had thier devices fried by incomparable chargers. Tell that to the devices that claim "not charging" unless plugged into chargers with specific features. Usb c is a compatability mess. I would not assume backwards compatability to be universal.

USB 4 is USB-C connector only and Power Delivery is a mandatory part of the spec instead of being optional. This won't stop Nintendo or somebody else from fucking it up, but it does mean everything marketed as being USB 4 is required to support standard chargers.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#224
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely and we should blame Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. Speaking about Thunderbolt via USB-C it is incredible to sit in my work desk, connect a single cable to the notebook and suddenly having a desktop computer with three external monitors, keyboard, mouse, and many other ports. I have not tried an eGPU yet but will be happier if thunderbolt evolves faster and gives more extensibility options to not…

Until they manage to get Ethernet through that cable without a converter - it's no bueno. As for an eGPU user - the issue with eGPU is the cost of setup, but Thunderbolt docks are also stupid expensive(above $200 for one). I built my eGPU setup for $350(PowerColor+RX550), as a good Thunderbolt dock is in the range of $300.

I have the Ethernet usb dongle hanging off my monitor, so it is one cable to my MacBook Pro.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I charge my Switch with various USB PD chargers (mostly Anker but also Apple, Google and others) and haven't had a problem so far. I was trying to find some information about what would cause PD-compliant chargers to fry the Switch. It appears that while the switch is PD-compliant itself, they used a slightly non-standard connector that reduces tolerances and could, in some situations (most likely worn cables) cause…

I found that Switch cannot use Apple's charger with the dock. It literally complains about the cable being wrong.

Which of Apple’s chargers? Each of them has different power capabilities.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#226
USB-C isn't a utopia in terms of fixing the USB complexity. All it truly solved was the connector problem which by itself is HUGE in retrospect and not something I appreciated.

If you thought the transition from ATA -> SATA or PCI, PCI + AGP, PCI-E path was bad, imagine trying to move an industry like USB that has USB1.0, USB2.0, USB3.0, USB3.1 and deals with peripheral components that change at an even slower cadence than internal ones (computers are something like 3-5 years, peripherals are like 3-10). By comparison mobile has had a life span of ~1-3 years (slowing down I think as there's plenty of 3-5 year users now & their numbers grow every year). The 1-3 cycle only happens for as long as you have a growing user-base & the churn is required for rapid change to be possible (the market economics support it).

When I think about the market dynamics, USB-C is a critical backbone you had to land first (which I didn't see when it was first being pushed on us in the consumer electronics industry). USB4 is going to clean some of it up. Without it we were never going to get away from the mess we were in. That being said, USB-C is still a big too big. That's why Apple hasn't moved. The question will be if the next push will be for contactless data transfer or a smaller connector. It'll depend on whether mobile needs the space (& again - even mobile is losing its power to power such a transition) & whether major consumer electronics will identify new small form-factor markets that require a smaller connector. If the Apple Watch/AirPods is any model for how these will work, then no. So we'll get USB5 & USB6, but it'll be "boring" transitions like it is with Ethernet RJ45 cables (Cat 4, Cat 5, Cat 6, Cat 6e, Cat7) etc. Some of the customer complexity will be trickier to navigate if the labelling piece isn't addressed for cables & ports (otherwise you get an alphabet soup of standard names supported by a given cable/port & what the peripheral requires). These are hopefully more manageable problems though (although more tricky than Ethernet). One could imagine where you have different classes to describe power the cable & port can run, a different class of the functionality supported (power only, peripherals, peripherals + displays). Peripheral speeds here would be > than ethernet so we're also potentially going to see USB-C consume the space of ethernet ports. This happened in laptops but it'll be trickier in PC form factors. Everything you'd plug into is RJ45 anyway & ethernet is significantly cheaper on a $/ft basis since it's cheaper. Maybe it'll intercept when consumer ethernet starts to be 10gigabit/s or 100gigabit/s (if USB4/5/6/ supports the speed & lengths needed & the cost is comparable, they'd probably just layer it over that). I remember working with 1gigabit and 10gigabit/s in 2009 at QCOM when the Cat6 standard for Gigabit had just come out & gigabit has only became prevalent in the past few years. You naturally want to consolidate these things as a business to simplify your costs if your sell-through is into a market with very long cycles. Any market that has more iteration. Wireless comms will be that a for a bit until BT & WiFi eat everything they haven't already (& potentially WiFi will eat BT eventually). Proprietary cheap connectors/wireless in the ultra low-cost niches will be the longest holdouts but even then they'll struggle as the customer demand will probably prefer the standard name it sees everywhere else.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#227
post #60

The solution, I believe, is rather simple. The standards group should require any cable/device with USB 3 support to include a label on its packaging detailing which capabilities of USB 3 are supported. Think of the nutrition labels on food packaging, instead showing what the device does and does not support, something like this: Power Delivery——–30w max Thunderbolt————No support Bandwidth————–800Mbps max Video——————…

That's not going to stop the cheap cables on Amazon from mislabeling their products. This happens all the time today. Off brand HDMI cables pretty much always state specs they don't really support.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#228
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a simple problem, and there's a simple solution. Problem: Physical connectors previous encoded information about data/power transfer mode support. When USB C unified the physical connector, that information was lost. Solution: Mandate visually encoded supported standards on the USB cable in colored ring form, a la resistors. Make them plastic, so you can snip them off if the aesthetic bothers. But I should be…

> Physical connectors previous encoded information about data/power transfer mode support. When USB C unified the physical connector, that information was lost. this is not strictly true, at least for USB. you can use a USB 1.x to connect USB2/3 endpoints, but you will only get 1.x speeds. there were power-only cables that didn't transfer data at all. they are all physically compatible. unless you're familiar with th…

USB 3 connectors and ports were pretty much always blue.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#229

It's honestly such a complete joke it's not even funny anymore. My USB-C MacBook Pro with it's pathetic two ports that my work bought for me is now old enough that the battery is starting to fail and we're still in a world where this single cable for power, screen and ports just doesn't seem to really exist. I'm starting to be convinced the port is fundamentally flawed, dongles with multiple ports are never reliable…

Its not USB-C so much as those MBP ports are a bit buggy. Depending on the model, you might have better success if you try the port that's on the other side of the laptop.

Re: USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

#230
I absolutely loath it. I have a new 16" Macbook Pro, I had a 2014 Macbook Pro.

I now have to buy a crap ton of adapters to get the same functionality as I had in 2014, and sometimes they don't work. I don't know why, they are meant to, but they don't.

Also, Magsafe was a game changer.

If I had a choice between USB-C and ports-o-plenty as I had on my 2014 MBP I would choose the latter.

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