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We won't solve the device incompatibility, but it seems we (as individual users) could solve the cable problem by always paying more to buy USB-C cables the were made to handle ALL of the allowed protocols (incl. power) up to the limit of each protocol. In other words, universally usable USB-C cables, where any failure was an incompatibility between devices, not the fault of the cable.

If I'm going to need a lot of cables, it will probably be worth it to me to invest in making them ALL the universal kind, so when trying to set up any system, I can just use any of MY cables for anything.

Of course, this will then fail if they introduce another protocol that uses the same connector but won't work through my "universal" cables, but unless they do, this could make life easier (at the cost of more expensive cables).

"but unless they do"

> If I'm going to need a lot of cables, it will probably be worth it to me to invest in making them ALL the universal kind

The problems will not only be the cables and connectors, but for a large part also the devices people will be trying to attach. When it doesn't work, is it a bad cable? Does my laptop even support the device I'm trying to attach? If it's a display, do I need displayport 1.3 or HDMI 2.0 What would be optimal, and what does my laptop support? That's the biggest part of the mess.

Cables that don't support everything can easily be sold as "this is a bad cable" and have a user replace it. Your $1000 storage box you just bought can't be connected to your 2 year old laptop even though they both have the same connectors is a harder sell.

> We survived having RJ45 jacks

We survived the 90s in general. Every damn cable was basically designed for one task.

RJ45 wasn't the worst one in my experience. The worst cable was the Serial cable. Null Modem, male-to-female adapters, DB9 vs DB15, and every combination thereof.

Some of the serial cables would work for mice, others for modems, others for printers, some for gamepads. We lived, we learned how to swap cables and label them.

---------

And once you got the right cable, then you may have to configure the right settings. 9600 8N1 is common, but maybe there were 2-stop bits, or maybe the baud-rate was 4800 or some other value.

Uggghhhhhhh.

I know someone who got a lot of smoke out of mixing up his VGA and gameport ports.

This precisely - I smoked a mouse plugging it into the video port circa summer 1988.

I've seen countless people of the years plug their phone cable into the Ethernet port.

I believe Apple never used the blue convention on their MacBook Pros. I think they even mocked the competitors for uglifying their devices this way. Hell, I’m writing this on an rMBP with USB 3 and it uses a white plastic bit.

Heh, they certainly kept to the standard USB length even if by default the keyboard is going to have difficult reaching the computer....

I think it's fine in that case, since Macbooks never mix USB port types. As far as I know, all the USB ports on any given Macbook have identical capabilities, so there's no need to distinguish them visually. You just need to be informed when you buy the device what port type you're getting.

This is not true now, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824447

Not sure if it was true before.

The two USB 2.0 ports on my 2010 MacBook Pro also run at different speeds.

That difference in Thunderbolt bandwidth is annoying, but there's no standard color or symbol to indicate it, so marking the port would at most vaguely signify that some difference exists, which is less useful.

Apple has never shipped a laptop with both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, which is what the blue convention is for.

I mainly meant that all the slots spoke the same protocols. So anything that works in one slot will work in every slot. However, I wasn't aware that the speeds were different, so thanks for that information.

> Is it a phone, a token ring, or an Ethernet?

I remember the first one or two times I went to IBM's then meeting facility in Palisades, there were warning signs in the rooms to NOT plug your laptop's Ethernet into the token ring jacks. Eventually they rewired the place and put in Ethernet. :-)

"We will survive this"

But why do we have to play this game again?

Why haven't we learnt from previous mistakes?

Because the reality is not straightforward and to break many catches 22 it is required to make decisions that not everybody happy about.

A few years ago, when i was a grad student at Indiana University, I was told that one of the dorms required students to use a specially wired ethernet cable as recently as 10 years ago because the building had been wired before the ethernet standard was finalized and they chose the wrong wiring order.

couldn't they 'undo' the mistake between the wall and the switches in the basement?

A common mistake back in the early days of Ethernet was to wire them as four sequential pairs, instead of the required (1-2) (3-6) (4-5) (7-8). This worked most of the time on 10BaseT networks, but would get flakey at 100Mbit.

If they got the pairs wrong at the wall jacks, there's not much you can do without repatching the whole thing. If they realized that they could make short cables that fixed it so that the pairs were mapped properly to port pins, that's quite clever in my books!

At one of my local universities (also in the midwest US) ethernet jacks in the dorms were intentionally miswired so that only cables supplied by the university (and more specifically, their favored vendor) would work.

Of course you could always make your own cable, but this was in the 90's, when the tool for that was very expensive.

I would think so but I don't really know the ins and outs of wiring. I think about 5 or so years ago they remodeled the dorm and made it so you didn't need the custom cable.

They had a classroom in that dorm I taught in and remember near the end of the semester seeing signs telling people to remember to return their cable.

I agree on the "we will survive" fact. When buying something, of course the buyers they must be careful and get informed.

Having only one plug shape simplifies a lot, and this doesn't change how difficult is to choose a product. At all.

My concern is that within two years they will realize that the C plug doesn't support some new 2019 protocol and they will create USB Type D.

But it's still too thick for charging my wireless earbuds so let's include type D mini... Or was that micro? So much for universal. USB has lost its way.

That's a legitimate concern but I have to say USB Type C is about as future proof as you can be at this point in time. So 2019, at least, is probably safe!

There were a lot of smart people working on that standard. In fact, amidst the uproar over the introduction of Apple's symmetrical Lightning cable and USB's opportunistic announcement that "Hey we're working on one too, honest!" people seemed to overlook that Apple had people working on the USB Type C committee as well.

And we'll be better off in the long run.

we survived wired home networks because they are expensive, and a superior IO solution (wifi) caught up quickly.

Re usb-c: good luck not using the (only) io port on your device.

Superior if your a laptop user sitting on the back deck. I run backups/bluray movies/etc between my NAS and assorted devices. I will assure you that my desktop PC's, which are connected via 10GbaseT have ~30x faster access to said NAS than the small business class AC WIFI AP's I use. The latency, throughput and most importantly the reliability of a decent wired network is still far superior to wifi, and I have a far cleaner/stronger wifi system than the vast majority of wifi networks I've seen. Even so, I still run wires to my home theater devices because I don't have to worry about dropouts in the middle of streaming a bluray, or more importantly the random driver/etc bugs that seem far more frequent on wifi than boring old ethernet. Plus, with the advent of reasonable speed internet accesses (thanks google!) the WiFi is frequently the bottleneck. One room away and that AC 1200 router is only actually delivering 200Mbits, or for that matter the 20 closest neighbors APs/wireless phones/airport radar/etc are messing up the spectrum.

I think people are forgetting that most people (in the usa or globally) don't have the disposable income to (re)wire a house with ethernet. From a "humanity" perspective I stand by my point.

Now for the average HN reader, sure I'm wrong. Enjoy your first world problems :)

Depends heavily on the house and where you are putting computers. A surprisingly large number of people have their computers right next to their cable modems.

It cost me $250 ($100 of which was 300m of Cat6) and a very tedious, insulation filled, Sunday to wire my house up with 1Gbit ports in every room.

Comparing that to the price of the current batch of AC WiFi access points (that look like stealth bombers) I don't think it's too unreasonable.

Yeah these days even doing Cat 6 is pretty cheap. We ran Cat 6 throughout the apartment, and the biggest nuisance of it was figuring out the best way to do conduit (solid brick walls mean we can't just go in-wall).

You are not counting the cost of your expertise in networking and DIY. Most people don't get that for free.

What are you talking about? WiFi is not superior. It's easier to wire all the desktops in your home rather than hoping your WiFi reaches. Ethernet is not very expensive. USB-C is good because it can use many protocols and pretty much the only reasons it is bad are: people that don't know what they're buying and people making cheap, out of standard knockoffs that will damage devices. This is mainly a manufacturer problem and will probably be fixed by the time the majority of people have USB-C ports.

This depends entirely on the size of your house. We're easily covered by a single wifi router. We also don't have easy to rewire walls... (Yay 1910 era construction. :) )

If your 110V wiring is vintage 1910, you should consider rewiring anyway. I was involved in renovating a 1923 building, and the old wiring was neat, but terrifying. Pulled it all out, didn't even want to think about anyone trying to run power through it.

Yeah, we've already upgraded the electric. Definitely could have rerun ethernet then, but did not want to deal with moving any outlets. (Or, really, thinking about the problem hard. We have barely 1000 sq ft, so not hard to cover with wifi.)

You don't have to move outlets, just combine them.

If I want outlets where my computers will be, I would have to move outlets.

Depends on your 1910 construction. My house is 1920s wooden frame. Makes it easy if you're brave enough to poke holes in the plasterboard.

Fair. My point is a lot more valid if you are tying to put something that needs a lot of space, like hvac. Wires are probably not that difficult to get in.

My Grace Digital music player is nearly unusable with wifi (see the Amazon reviews on it). But with wired, it works like a champ. Wired is simpler, faster, more secure, and more likely to work.

More secure? Everyone on the network can see everyone else's traffic wherease wifi only communicates between the router and each computer.

I think you have that backwards

In what universe is wifi a substitute for a proper wired network, for serious bandwidth and reliability? I've got so many other wifi routers polluting the radio waves that I can't stream Netflix on my TV that is 15 feet away from the router.

It's so bad that I bought a 50' ethernet cable and tacked it up along the ceiling from the router to a switch by my TV to create a redneck ethernet network. Works beautifully - well, not beautifully in the aesthetic sense, but it gets the job done well.

I had to do this too. There are at least 30 networks in range of my apartment at all times, so 2.4 Ghz WiFi is useless in the evenings. I'm glad there are few 5 Ghz networks here so my newer devices are still usable.

5GHz has horrible range and wall penetration (by design), so it can't really get as cluttered as 2.4GHz which has decent out of line-of-sight performance

So why run your own Wifi hotspot? It sounds like your neighbours have already put the infrastructure in place for you!

you can have my ethernet cable when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

Exactly. Some WiFi is just too unstable, and I've decided that it's fine for a bit of evening web browsing. But in the office, I want the stability of ethernet.