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Comment by nightfly | Hacker News Reader

Is that really a problem?

Imagine a world where the reliability of your devices significantly depends on how much you paid for your USB 3->4 adapter. Is that a better situation than what we have today?

It already does in terms of USB cables. Buy a wrong cable, and your device won't charge, or won't charge fast enough, or won't communicate. And you can't tell the good/correct cable from the bad ones visually.

The standard can have any number of optional modes to be implemented by devices. I don't care. What I want is for it to have one cable type. Because it's kind of a point of an universal port that people will use cables from one device with another.

It's unreasonable to expect one cable type, because the additional costs for cables that support very high data rates or very high power delivery are prohibitive for cheap devices that don't need those.

What they do need to do, though, is minimise the different cable options and make them easy to distinguish. My suggestion would have been to have a basic USB-C cable with exactly two optional designations: +FAST and +POWER. It's then easy enough for a device to say "this requires a USB-C+FAST cable" and consumers to then look for the same.

> What I want is for it to have one cable type

Cables have conflicting requirements:

-- high current requires thick wires and heat dissipation (if long cable). Possibly other safety-related requirements

-- high frequency wants more wire surface because of skin effect

-- flexibility and cost don't like either of the above.

I personally prefer to have a choice of a thin flexible cable when situation allows, and am ready to pay for it.

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