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this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Doesn’t matter much. Is it a 7.5W cable, or maybe a 15W, 45W, 60W, 100W, 140W or 240W cable ? Does it support USB 2.0 (480Mbps), 3.1 gen1 (5Gbps), 3.1 gen2 (10Gbps), does it support Thunderbolt, and if so the 20Gbit or 40Gbit version ? Does it support DisplayPort alt mode?
You can’t tell any of this from looking at the cable. It’s a terrible mess.
The worst part is, I could accept that as a generational flaw. The newer ones get better, the olds ones lying around do less. OK, that’s the beast of progress.
But no. They still make cables today that do power only. They still do cables that do everything except video. Why? Save a couple cents. Make dollars off multiple product lines, etc. Money.
What could have been the cable to end all cables…just continued to make USB a laughing stock of confusion.
Don’t even get me started on the device side implementations…
That’s because it doesn’t make sense to use an €40 cable when a €1 cable would do.
Agreed, but not requiring labeling or some sort of method to identify was a real fuckup on their part.
My problem isn’t the existence of different tiers of cable, it’s that there is literally no way to know if the cable you’re using supports something until you try it.
Yeah, we used to have that. It was great. They even made it so you couldn’t even fit the wrong cable in a port. They did that by having different connectors for different cables.
Cable hell
Yeah but with modern thin & light mobile devices, that’s a bad solution. Then you need multiple holes to serve multiple purposes, which impacts waterproofing and requires extra space & hardware.
One port to rule them all makes sense. But it should have had a way to identify cables capability at a glance. I still prefer having one cable that can charge all my devices, even if the trade off is some confusing situations when it comes to cable capability.
Is this true? There's no app to test these by plugging them into your phone? No chip in them that encodes a spec sheet?
I feel the only place for a €1 cable is met by those USB-A to C cables that you get with things for 5V charging. That’s it. And it’s very obvious what the limits on those are by the A plug end.
Anything that wants to be USB-C on both ends should be fully compatible with a marked spec, not indistinguishable from a 5V junk wire or freely cherry picking what they feel like paying for.
Simply marking on the cable itself what generation it’s good for would be a nice start, but the real issue is the cherry picking. The generation numbers don’t cover a wire that does maximum everything except video. Or a proprietary setup that does power transfer in excess of spec(Dell, Raspberry Pi 5). But they all have the same ends and lack of demarcation, leading to the confusion.
But those are useless to me as my MacBook doesn’t have any USB-A ports anymore and since the PC world usually follows a few years later they will basically disappear in the near future.
But there is no single spec, there are lots of optional parts. Options that also come with limitations. Anything above the bare minimum needs an identification chip in the connector so the computer can determine it’s capabilities. That adds cost. A 240W cable is necessary thicker and thus less flexible than a 7.5W cable. A passive cable that supports thunderbolt 3 or 4 cannot be longer than 2 meters, above that it needs to be an active cable which is a lot more expensive.
So if you want to make it mandatory for all cables to support all features, that means that if you want a 5 meter charging cable so you can use your phone on the couch while it charges you have to spend over €400 for a cable. Or, you could not make it mandatory and have 5m cables that do not support 20gbit for €10.
I’ll take a compromise where “3.1” is etched in each head end, and I can trust that “3.1” means something, and start with that.
The real crux of the issue is that there is no way to identify the ability of a port or cable without trying it, and even if labeled there is/was too much freedom to simply deviate and escape spec.
I grabbed a cable from my box to use with my docking station. Short length, hefty girth, firm head ends, certainly felt like a featured video/data/Dock cable…it did not work. I did work with my numpad/USB-A port bus thing though, so it had some data ability(did not test if it was 2.0 or 3.0). The cable that DID work with my docking station was actually a much thinner, weaker feeling one from a portable monitor I also had. So you can’t even judge by wiring density.
And now we have companies using the port to deviate from spec completely, like the Raspberry Pi 5 technically using USB-C, but at a power level unsupported by spec. Or my video glasses that use USB-C connections all over, with a proprietary design that ensures only their products work together.
Universal appearance, non-universal function, universal confusion.
I hate it. At least with HDMI, RCA, 3.5mm, Micro-USB…I could readily identify what a port and plug was good for, and 99/100 the unknown origin random wires I had in a box worked just fine.
This is also a problem. That 3.1 is the same as 2.X for some X that I don't remember, that is the same as some number in the original standard.
It would certainly be better than not marking, but no, that 3.1 doesn't have a clear meaning.
In practice I've only had these types of issues with a couple of (shitty) devices. Maybe one or two cables. Otherwise it just works.