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Comment by jeremymcanally | Hacker News Reader

I did read it, and for my use cases, I don't have issues. I understand others' use cases may not match mine, but this situation seems basically like any other connectivity standard in the history of technology. Except this time, the universality for what most people use it for has actually managed to catch on. :)

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"Universality" that involves many people finding that cables that look identical don't actually work the same way.

Interesting definition there.

Universality of physical plug, I guess?

I'm not sure I see how this is an interesting definition. How is it different from HDMI or LAN cables? There the cables also define capability so "cables that look identical don't actually work the same way".

> How is it different from HDMI or LAN cables? There the cables also define capability so "cables that look identical don't actually work the same way".

In theory yes. In practice most of the cables are good enough for most users - e.g. in a home LAN cables are probably 10m at most, so even a cat5 cable can probably give people a connection that's as fast as their internet uplink. If the problems with USB-C are common enough to impact normal users (and I think lack of thunderbolt falls into that category) then that's a major difference in practice.

Buy shitty products, get shitty outcomes. This is not the fault of the connector standard.

Quick check: how many of your USB-C cables can actually carry the 5Gbps (3.1) or 10GBps (3.2) bandwidth? Because I've had to try multiple products, all claiming USB-3 speeds, before I finally found one that delivered more than 480MBps (USB 2.0 speed).

It sounds like you've experienced either just pure luck or that you've carefully selected your components (which degrades the "universality" claim), at least for the Switch, since it doesn't fully implement PD and can short out.

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