Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 158 posts

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#91

Post by flukus »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #22
CamperBob2 wrote: post #10

Something has to be done to stop these people. What, I don't know. But their Joker-like approach to USB standards and practices is costing us all dearly.

I just had a thought USB is now more of a clusterf^H^H^H^H^H^H^H complicated than the mess of cables interfaces it was meant to replace back in the mid 90's.

It's amazing how much that mess of cables either wasn't solved or wasn't solved by USB. My power, network, sound and display cables weren't replaced by USB, my printer was replaced by a phone/tablet. It replaced the PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse, saving about 2 seconds of setup time at the cost of more latency.

It his (or has been) handy for connecting gadgets and drives over the years, but maybe we should go back to PS2 and just use it USB for "front of the machine" ports.

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#92

Post by microtherion »

koala_man wrote: post #78
EduardoBautista wrote: post #19

Lightning, although proprietary, is an amazing port compared to the mess that is USB. I am going to miss it once Apple phases it out.

It's easy to make a universal port when your universe is a small handful of your own devices with no numbers to live up to.

The "small handful" adds up to about a billion devices, but it's true that they were made by a single manufacturer.

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#93

Post by zokier »

Honestly, the USB-IF guidance is pretty sane here. The "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1" or whatever simply should not appear anywhere in the consumer space. Everything should be labeled and using "SuperSpeed USB X Gbps".

I'd go as far to say that articles like this exactly help keep the confusion up because the way they keep bringing up the term "USB 3.2" etc as something that consumers should care about, when it is something that should be avoided.

> What this branding meant is that many manufacturers say that a device supports "USB 3.1" even if it's only a "USB 3.1 Gen 1" device running at 5Gb/s. Meanwhile, other manufacturers do the sensible thing: they use "USB 3.0" to denote 5Gb/s devices and reserve "USB 3.1" for 10Gb/s parts.

Both manufacturers are doing the wrong thing: referring to the USB standard version at all. Devices should not say that they support "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1". They should say they support "Superspeed USB" or "Superspeed USB 10 Gbps".

Superspeed might be a silly name, but the branding there is almost perfectly unambiguous, and nicely explicit about the data rate in a way that "USB 3.2 gen 2x2" is not.

What is the most surprising is that USB-IF isn't able to keep the vendors in line despite being industry consortium and owning all the relevant trademarks and other IP. They really should start enforcing their policies more aggressively.

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#94

Post by ulfw »

protomyth wrote: post #2

Who the heck came up with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2? That has got to be the dumbest idea. No one cares how it works, we just have to go through the utter crap of buying a cable. Does the low end manufactures pull the most weight in this org because that's the only way this makes any sense.

Totally agree. I’d much rather have. Simple branding such as USB A5, USB C10, USB C20 to indicate the maximum speed and connector possible for each iteration.

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#95

Post by zokier »

peterlk wrote: post #32
hsk0823 wrote: post #3

USB 3.X / USB-C / Thunderbolt 3, all of it together is confusing enough for those technical, add marketing speak to the mix and it's just going to end up with a mish mosh of different words that mean absolutely nothing and tell the end user very little. Add to the fact that everyone is skimping on the actual USB 3 standards and a large amount of shitty products on the market that don't do what they say they do (due t…

For real. Why not just call it USB 4.0 and divorce the branding from the technical specification? You can put a thing on the back of the box that says "implements USB specification 3.2.16a-rfc#4619" or whatever.

> Why not just call it USB 4.0 and divorce the branding from the technical specification?

That is exactly what the "SuperSpeed USB" branding is all about. The technical spec is USB 3.whatever and the brand name is " SuperSpeed USB". But neither the press nor vendors seem to be able to stay in the line and actually consistently use only the branding, so here we are

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#96

Post by zokier »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #84

So the very same device can be accurately labelled "USB 3.0", "USB 3.1 Gen 1" and "USB 3.2 Gen 1". Those are all actually the same thing? Do I have this right?

No, it shouldn't be labeled any of those. Instead it should be labeled "SuperSpeed USB" and nothing else. And that hasn't changed over the different USB revisions.

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#98

Post by kanox »

mmanfrin wrote: post #77
kanox wrote: post #75

> For reasons that remain hard to understand, the decision was made to retroactively rebrand USB 3.0: 5Gb/s 3.0 connections became "USB 3.1 Gen 1," with the 10Gb/s connections being "USB 3.1 Gen 2." The consumer branding is "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps." Does anyone care about Gbps for USB? I've never hit the bandwith limitation on USB and see USB type-C as just an annoyance making me buy new cables. > And 20Gb/s devices w…

> Does anyone care about Gbps for USB? I've never hit the bandwith limitation on USB You have if you've tried to used multiple external monitors over USB (a la macbooks).

HDMI over USB sound like hardware abuse to me. All systems I've only ever owned had write_mostly interfaces for video display.

Really, USB speed limits are mostly bound by flash memory limits so manufacturers struggle to justify a replacement. I guess faster charging is nice?

Re: USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse

#99

Post by gok »

hakfoo wrote: post #76
gok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And USB-C 10 Gbps cables aren't much cheaper, especially if they do 100W power delivery. Both probably could be cheaper if there were more demand for them, but siren song of cheap slow cables seems to have made it impossible to scale production up.

Well, realistically, you don't need 100 watt power delivery for a keyboard, so you might want a less robust cable. The big mistake IMO was a lack of obvious keying. Very little stops me from using that 2w-capacity keyboard cable to try to charge my laptop. If we're lucky, there's signaling at the device to tell me what's wrong, but if they had made a different plug on the 100W cable, it would eliminate a lot of cockp…

So you'd want a low speed connector, a high speed connector, a high wattage connector and also a high speed + high wattage connector? So 4 plugs, or more if you want to add even faster speeds in the future. And then you need cables which have one of each of those connectors on each end, so we're talking about dozens of variants.

No thank you. The drama around USB-C is insanely overblown; the vast majority of use cases are fine with the 60 watt + 480 mbps required minimum configuration for USB-C cables. In the few rare exceptions where you need >60 watts or higher speed, you're generally going to have purpose-built hardware anyway, so just devoting a special cable to that isn't such a big deal.

Post reply on HN