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Comment by sesutton | Hacker News Reader

The USB 3.1 gen1 and gen2 thing still really boggles my mind. It's almost as if the USB-IF was trying to confuse people. Who retroactively renames a standard?

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They should have just named things this way:

USB 3.1 gen1 => USB 3.1, USB 3.1 gen2 => USB 3.2

I don't know why they would do differently.

Agreed, 3 levels of versioning is too much for most users. Even 2 levels isn't ideal when dealing with a novice user.

  - Good: Thunderbolt 1, 2, 3
  - Good: USB, USB-2, USB-3
  - OK: DisplayPort 1.2, 1.3
  - OK: HDMI 1.2, 1.3a, 1.4, 2.0
  - Bad: USB Hi-Speed, SuperSpeed, SuperSpeed+
  - Bad: USB-3.1 gen 1, USB-3.1 gen 2, ...
  - Bad: LEV, ULEV, SULEV, PZEV, AT-PZEV

Yeah it's one of the stupidest choices they made. Also, the idea that not all cables must support 100W (20V, 5A) so now the cheap chinese cables are all going to report they can but will catch fire the instant they do.

Well they did change the encoding of USB 3.0 to become USB 3.1 gen 1. But that's about it. And it's backward-compatible so it doesn't matter.

Having the higher data rate be "same name gen 2" is beyond dumb.

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