331–340 of 544 posts
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Hah! I recently had to put ends on a Cat 6 cable for weird reasons, and spent a few minutes deciding if it needed to be crossover or not.
The worst is trying to repair one end of an existing cable and having to think really hard about whether to use A or B wiring.
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I had to do a double take after reading this comment to make sure I wasn't reading an old thread from 2014 or something. USB-C has been out for years now and neither of these predictions have come to pass. Your comment aged poorly before you even finished writing it. USB-C isn't without its problems, but neither of those are one of them.
I used a Bluetooth analyser once that had a USB-C connector that only plugged in one way. It had a dedicated "wrong way around" LED to tell you to rotate it. Kind of hilarious. It's the only example I've ever seen though so not a real problem IMO. The cables issue is real, but I don't really see the alternative. Would everyone really be happier if all USB-C cables had to be expensive thick 40 Gb/s 100W cables? No.
In a perfect world require every port to have the supported modes displayed beside it, and every cable to have the supported modes etched on the metal connector or something? Lightning bolt for PD, little screen icon for video, something?
It will fall apart as soon as cheap unlicensed electronics hit the market, but at least in general use “hook this brand name laptop up to this brand name monitor with this brand name cable” would not be a seemingly completely inscrutable trial-and-error problem.
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I had to do a double take after reading this comment to make sure I wasn't reading an old thread from 2014 or something. USB-C has been out for years now and neither of these predictions have come to pass. Your comment aged poorly before you even finished writing it. USB-C isn't without its problems, but neither of those are one of them.
I have many USB-C cables that don't behave like other USB-C cables. Just this past week, I had to buy another cable for my son's desk setup because of the many USB-C cables I had, I was out of the ones that would carry 4K video and USB-C 80+W PD to his laptop at the same time. (I had a couple that worked, but they were in use for my wife and I, and the couple handfuls of others I had were capable of zero or one of th…
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Have you never wired a plug? I'm baffled that it would never occur to you that the connector is replaceable.
I wired a plug for the first time in my life this past year. Nor have I ever known someone who has wired a plug. It's pretty rare to have to do something like that, in my experience. Certainly at 18 I wouldn't have had any reason to believe that was even possible.
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> trying in vain to reach behind a heavy computer and unscrew the two jammed retaining bolts holding in a serial, parallel, scsi, vga, or DVI plug with slippery bent plastic jacketed heads Oh yes, that brings back very bad memories. Only gradually did it dawn on me that nothing really bad actually happens if I didn't screw the connectors tight on DVI/VGA etc. :) (Yes, these are technically not plug-and-play, but the…
It's like VGA cables came with loctite pregooped on with how hard they were to unscrew.
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I had to do a double take after reading this comment to make sure I wasn't reading an old thread from 2014 or something. USB-C has been out for years now and neither of these predictions have come to pass. Your comment aged poorly before you even finished writing it. USB-C isn't without its problems, but neither of those are one of them.
I own a usb-c male to usb-c female extension cable that I connect to a yubikey. The yubikey only works in one orientation. I don't have any other bits to test hypotheses with, but I believe the cable was made with the symmetry problem described above.
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I think this is a bit hyperbolic. Once you try to implement any standard in practice to billions of people & devices you're going to find the same constraints and similar trade-offs everywhere. Manufacturers are going to cheap out, always . There's no way around the fact that goods can get on the market claiming a thing that it doesn't do (perfectly) in practice. Tech is littered with semi-compliance. I hate to kick…
"I have to buy a totally different cable" is something that most of us with over 20 devices with USB-C ports on them have probably experienced, only it's worse than that as it's more like "I have to buy several different totally different cables and try to remember to return the ones that also don't work". For a time at work, our desks had different docking stations for employees with Mac laptops or HP laptops. USB-C…
Because USB-C does a lot and touches a lot of things, I think there's a tendency to place the blame on it (and specifically its cables) for any circumstance where 'plug does not work as expected', which I agree is a frustrating problem that isn't fully worked out.
I bet your HP docks are like Dell power adapters, which only provide specific volts/amps and maybe use some proprietary negotiation and aren't great device-agnostic chargers. I've experienced this firsthand, and unfortunately the blame lines squarely with HP/Dell/your IT department. It's also a sort of 'stage 1' problem in USB-C's rollout, in that manufacturers are used to doing things their way (e.g. proprietary power bricks), and the feedback loop of customer expectations hasn't yet reached a point to pressure them to change. When customers say 'this sucks it doesn't charge my iPad', HP/Dell/whoever begrudgingly realize they need to up their charger game, and little by little the problem is solved.
I think politics might be the best lens to see USB-C through, because USB-C will only work as expected when consumers are providing that pressure. Hence my point about consumer education and clearer labeling being the unforced error of USB-C: moving up the learning curve quicker will minimize these problems and shake manufacturers into offering the thing that meet user expectations and the promise of USB-C. Ultimately someone has to make these things though and manufacturers all have their own misaligned incentives. It's the job of standards to meet them where they are and provide a path to aligning their incentives with better user experience. The reality is it's herding cats.
I haven't seen anything in this thread or other USB-C threads that has offered a solution that improves upon the spec itself that is realistically possible within the constraints USB-C is operating in. That's unfortunate but I think represents the idea that USB-C is, to paraphrase, 'the worst type of connector, except for all the others'.
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I wired a plug for the first time in my life this past year. Nor have I ever known someone who has wired a plug. It's pretty rare to have to do something like that, in my experience. Certainly at 18 I wouldn't have had any reason to believe that was even possible.
My class got taught it in high school age 15-16, shrug. (And I'd done them at home before that)
> Making USB reversible to begin with would have necessitated twice as many wires and twice as many circuits, and would have doubled the cost. This is... not correct. You can make USB reversible with 1 extra pin and 1 extra wire. Grounds on pins 1 and 5, data on pins 2 and 4, and VCC on pin 3. Then have those pins on both sides of the plug and a socket with a single set of contacts on one side. That's BASICALLY what…
The problem with USB-a isn't that it's non reversible, it's that it's non-reversible _and_ rectangular, so it's not clear at a glance which way round it should go. All they had to do was make the connector have a non-symmetrical shape so that it's immediately obvious which way round it goes when you pick it up - you could do it without even looking. Think of how much time we'd have collectively saved with this minor…
It's so bad it takes me 3 attempts to plug in USB-A blind, at least 50% of the time.