Universal USB-C charging: How the dream is coming true
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
Even using an iPad charger is good enough for travel a lot of the time. Sure it'll still discharge while in use, but it effectively doubles the battery life of my MBP when its plugged into it, and I don't have to carry another charger with me.
Also cables are dirt cheap, and I don't have to worry about anything fraying and having to spend $88 for a replacement.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-p...
Before charging with a non-Apple USB-C source? Starting with a full battery, the system can sleep for at least a week without running the battery completely down.
After charging with a non-Apple USB-C source? Starting with a full battery, the system makes it for 1-2 days sleeping before the battery is totally discharged.
I can restore this to the original state with a PRAM + SMC reset, but that's a pretty big annoyance. And I've tested with a completely clean system without any 3rd party software at all in order to validate this pattern. Something is definitely screwy about charging a Macbook with a non-OEM USB-C power source.
In my opinion, tolerable behavior includes:
* Not charging at all (should indicate incompatible or disconnected cable)
* Charging (at any speed) only while off/asleep.
* Charging, but in some slow mode.
* Charging "quickly".
I don't think we'll see the USB-C connector change again soon, but everything else about the standard seems somewhat in flux. There's already competing standards for fast charging over USB-C. Once Apple hits the market with a USB-C iPhone, that's going to tip the bucket over.
See chart: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2017/02/usbcchar...
There are at least 10 different official USB power specs, the latest being from last year, called "USB Power Delivery revision 2.0 version 1.2". Each spec may have multiple revisions, and versions of revisions, and each revision version may have up to 6 power profiles. There are more unofficial specs that are hacked by vendors. Fast charging has even more variations and incompatibilities. And then some ports get some other standard tacked onto it, which may have their own incompatible power spec.
We keep getting new specs and new devices with new uses. Laptop vendors can only push out new hardware supporting new specs after a lot of R&D, and at considerable new cost. Because of this, in order to support some new feature without as much time and money spent making it compatible, it is vendor locked so it doesn't catch on fire. We saw the same thing with wifi.
So are things getting better? Yes, we finally have support for enough of the baseline standard so at least most new things will charge now. But will they all continue to work compatibly in the future? Probably not as long as vendors continue to make their own power adapters.
Everything you just said applies to normal power adapters (USB or not) the issue is that USB-C is newer so less market saturation of quality, cheap, goods.
It'll happen - until then go with already proven products in the market.
From https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/LQ5df94bERb:
> One trend I will highlight is that more cables are getting USB-IF certified compliant. In fact, I see a number of cables on Amazon that not only claim to be USB-IF certified, they list the TID (Test Identifier) assigned by USB-IF for the cable in the product description.
Also, as for
> There's already competing standards for fast charging over USB-C.
Not really. There are proprietary options, yes, but USB Power Delivery is THE standard. Google even strongly recommends OEMs not implement anything besides Power Delivery (https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_7_usb):
> * Type-C devices MUST detect 1.5A and 3.0A chargers per the Type-C resistor standard and it must detect changes in the advertisement.
> * Type-C devices also supporting USB host mode are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to support Power Delivery for data and power role swapping.
> * Type-C devices SHOULD support Power Delivery for high-voltage charging and support for Alternate Modes such as display out.
> * Type-C devices are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to not support proprietary charging methods that modify Vbus voltage beyond default levels, or alter sink/source roles as such may result in interoperability issues with the chargers or devices that support the standard USB Power Delivery methods. While this is called out as "STRONGLY RECOMMENDED", in future Android versions we might REQUIRE all type-C devices to support full interoperability with standard type-C chargers.
Were there issues early on? Yes. Will there be many issues going forward? I don't think so.
This is why people pay the Apple tax (although Google does just as well). Why are the other manufacturers so incompetent?
(This was last year's tests though, this year's look better across all manufacturers).
That doesn't mean it's OK, but that's my guess as to why you see the lag in quality.
Have you ever tried to charge an Apple phone or tablet with a charger for a non Apple phone?
No, but it is that their engineers seem to just consistently get things right. I doubt they cared about third party chargers at all. I would imagine they maybe even never tested with third party chargers.
But they engineered the system so well that they just worked anyway.
What track record? USB-C is their first officially supported open charging standard.
It is much smaller than the Apple dongle and allows you to carry just the Macbook charger and a standard Micro USB cable to charge older cellphones and the kindle.
I did have one die on me after about a year of abuse and immediately repurchased it. Hopefully it will last long enough for me to upgrade my phone/kindle/smart-card-reader. Anker batteries also support USB C and happily charge the Macbook, they also make nice braided cables.
Next up would be next-gen tiny chargers like this (65W): http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/2/10/14581300/fi...
Unfortunately that specific one has a proprietary connector on one end but probably the next version will be fully standard. One tiny charger, one high quality cable, for all your devices. We're almost there.
I'm not talking about abuse, just expected use. Though if particular vulnerabilities to abuse or whatnot are showing up, that would be of concern.
Standard big USB plugs are supposed to have a design life of 1,500 plugging cycles - though I've never had one die, and never heard of any die.
Mini-USB are designed for 5,000 cycles, Micro-USB have a design life of 10,000. Ditto, only ever breaks if you try to bend and snap it off deliberately.
USB-C is also supposed to be able to last 10,000 cycles (which ought to be enough as a minimum spec - plugging in thrice a day for a decade).
No way. I've had many Micro-USB cables die because the connector gets bent. Trying to plug in devices in the dark or without being able to tell which way the cable is facing, not to mention the tension put on the connector when your device is in a bag or something, means the design is not very reliable in general.
My USB-C cables feel much sturdier, but we'll see.
I wonder whether (well, suspect, I guess, that) crap cables can negatively affect this, e.g. through inferior materials and manufacture / specifications adherence producing more friction. (Anyway, I do my best to ascertain what are quality cables and then, if necessary, pay a bit more for them.)
I recently compiled all my usb devices and the result is depressing:
https://github.com/paradite/my-usb-life/blob/master/README.m...
I have a phone with a USB-C port, but when it came to buying a laptop, ended up skipping the USB-C port. For the same specs, a laptop with USB-C 3.1+Power Delivery is almost twice the price. Acer's budget line include USB-C, but not necessarily USB 3.1 or power delivery (so basically it's just a more cumbersome usb 3.0).
Meanwhile, the Lightning+MFI specs put required tolerances on all of these factors. It's not just about the connector; it's about what having the connector guarantees about the device. That's why Apple will never replace Lightning: it's there to indicate that a device or cable or dock compliant with it won't wear out any other device or cable or dock compliant with it.
And the interesting thing is, the design of the connectors forces the hand of at least the knock-off cable manufacturers, into obeying those tolerances. Even if you don't bother to get an MFI license, just making your Lightning cable's male end fit female Lightning connectors means making it structurally-sound—since the male connector is just made out of thick aluminum, and aluminum is already the cheapest metal you can get, and it also needs to serve as a grounding pin as well so you can't just replace it with e.g. plastic. So a bad Lightning cable is never going to break your phone physically.
Will a bad Lightning cable be able to break your phone electrically? Probably not; AFAIK, the the device-side board around the female connector is required, according to MFI, to detect the negotiated-current signal using an optoisolator before switching on the current path to the rest of the device. So you actually can't make a "Lightning killer" cable the way you can make a "USB killer" cable.
I've thought it would be good if there was a charge-mode selector of some description for when your laptop is low but you know you won't need a full charged battery until tomorrow. Or if you could tell the battery to stop charging at a particular capacity, say by intentionally shifting the 0% and 100% battery levels.
Maybe in another 5, 10 years.