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Not my apple one.
Then it's either not genuine Apple or it's not Thunderbolt. This is what an Apple Thunderbolt cable looks like: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD862LL/A/apple-thunderbo...
Correct link: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ4H2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...
I genuinely don’t understand how I’ve managed to be so lucky. That is, I absolutely do not disbelieve the many tales of woe I hear on HN (like the many in this thread) - but I’ve literally never put any thought into what cable I plug in to what device, and had no trouble that I can recall. It really had lived up to its hype for me so far. My USB-C devices are: a wireless charger, two MacBooks (one intel, one m1), a P…
Apple and Microsoft's Surface had (does the Surface still have?) the perfect connector - the Magsafe. The more we dig into this power over USB-C garbage, the farther away we go from that perfection. The patent expiration cannot come soon enough, I seriously hope all portable device vendors bring it back.
The leaks say MagSafe is coming back on the MBP 14" and 16" laptops coming, possibly, at WWDC next month.
Knowing Apple they would never offer both.
Their naming continues to be legendarily bad, why couldn't they just call it USB 4 instead of overloading the existing USB 2.1 version?
Everyone needs to learn from the Wifi and LTE standards groups which finally abandoned 802.11acxqyerwzdfqwrty naming and moved to simple version numbers like "Wifi 6" and "5G". Simple version numbers are so much more effective at getting people to upgrade as well, because they're much easier to market to the average person.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-usb-blog/us...
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Ok, done. Many many many times. 12v can't exceed the resistance of human skin so it doesn't matter how much current capacity it has. You can hold onto those terminals all day. It's settled science. If you doubt it, tests of this are all over YouTube. It's just true. Now your tongue, perhaps...
If t you short a car battery, you might not get electrocuted , but the results are unlikely to be pretty.
5A, 50V Good luck. USB port just isn't physically ready for this. This is going to end with some spectacular fireworks once you factor in cheap Chinese engineering for cables, ports and chargers.
Of the 415 pages in the spec, 8 of them are devoted to arc mitigation in the "USB PD High-Voltage Design Considerations" section. Lots of discussion about detecting unplug and limiting slew rates. In practice that will cost pennies to implement and will therefore be skipped in many designs. ("I got a great deal on this charger on Amazon!") Time to develop some user superstitions around USB C: "The withdrawal velocity…
Even more humiliating is them looking at me as if I was complete idiot after me suggesting to them that the selection of cable itself may be cause of their problems. They had some physics at school and from their point of view the cable is just a bunch of copper and it should absolutely make no difference for how fast their phone charges.
Now I have to ready myself to have those "Universal" chargers which can only ever charge a single device but with no indication as to which device they can charge or which cable you have to use for this to work.
Which is pretty ironic because right now we have a bunch of laptops and it is much easier to explain that if the plug fits the socket you are ok and if it does not you need to look for the one that has matching plug.
The only solution I see is labeltown -- dust off my label printer and have every single piece of equipment, charger or cable clearly labeled.
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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…
I think people are either too young to remember this disaster, or have just outright forgotten.
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They could, at the very least, enforce color coding. Colorblind people would still be left high and dry, but with the status quo everybody is up shit creek. > How does it help when someone inevitably buys the USB-C cable with shape y when they need USB-C cable with shape x? [...] They still have to take it back to the store. It helps because they know they have to go back to the store, and aren't left wondering if th…
USB3 did have blue color coding on the plastic interior of the connector. That doesn't exist on USB-C. You'd have to color-code the metallic connector or the connector housing. Forcing a color-coding scheme on the connector housing would clash with branding, so you'd likely end up with companies ignoring the color coding. People will also ignore the color coding even if it existed. Counterfeiters would add the color…
They might feel deceived or mislead by the packaging, but they won't have to wonder if they are somehow using their computer wrong. Particularly for people who lack confidence with computers, this means a lot.
USB-C bashing threads represent the 'HN echo chamber' for me. :) I understand the problems of different cables, I've run into them already. One cable can do Thunderbolt, the other cannot. One cable transmits 4K video signal, the others doesn't transmit anything. And so on. However, it is sooooo much better than anything before because at least _most of the time_ stuff works. Chargers charge. Sometimes slower, sometim…
> USB-C bashing threads represent the 'HN echo chamber' for me. :) I don't understand how you can possibly call it an "echo chamber" when there are (1) reasoned arguments (2) supported by facts with (3) dissenting opinions. That's almost the opposite of an echo chamber.