I’ve made a Cursed USB-C 2.0 device

I used them for plugging into public power supplies, but they were never sold to consumers labeled for that purpose.

Firstly, reversible plugs are harder to make structurally resilient, they only become feasible cost-wise as stronger materials become cheaper and manufacturing grows more efficient.

Secondly, reversible plugs are a lot more complex. Compare the 4(ish) pins of USB-A to the 24 pins on USB-C. Not all of them are strictly necessary for parity with USB-A, but you could cut that number in half quite easily if the plug were not reversible! Sure, this complexity impacts manufacturing, but, less obviously, it also pushes that increased complexity onto the USB controller hardware/firmware.

Neither of these issues were necessarily dealbreakers, but... for a long time they certainly did conspire to make reversible plugs into a pipedream. I have to imagine that were always bigger problems to solve and fewer resources to work with! We're just now seeing reversible plugs really take off because we've finally crossed that magic threshold where it makes sense to try surmounting those barriers.

A one-way plug would be fine if the profile were sharply asymmetrical, to the point where one could find the right orientation by touch alone. Maybe something like an even more pronounced trapezoid than hdmi.

Though, in all seriousness, it would make an interesting security through obscurity feature. Everything works fine with the device, but only allows/shows certain features/files after Satan's rotation pattern. More secret squirrel than "security" in reality.

Before: "Here in the back of the computer we have PS/2 ports (1 for keyboard and 1 for mouse), a parallel port, serial, 25-pin serial, game port".

Introducing USB: "Everything is USB now! Plug anything anywhere!"

USB version whatever: "Well the sockets look all the same, but you can only plug your display in here, to charge it you have to connect it here", etc, etc.

You could geek out and learn the difference of upstream (A, host) and downstream (B, device) ports, the various types of B port sizes, and that was it. Later USB 2.0 was introduced and just (bam!) made it all 40 times faster, but it still logically worked pretty much the same.

Then USB 3.x came and just blew all that to h-ll, which is frustrating for both old bearded geeks, and* new/non-technical users.

With USB-A and -B, there is a physical indication of the direction of flow (data and/or current). Just "connecting" two things is sometimes unambiguous, but sometimes it's not.

You mean that one can hold 15A and the other - 20A? If so, they do work the same, they just have different capacities (like a tap, some of them will provide more water, others less but they work the same (especially if they look the same))

You do see NEMA 5-15R receptacles on 20A circuits in residential applications, but that's probably because most appliances don't require 20 amps. A 5-15 connector has two vertical prongs, a 5-20 has a horizontal and a vertical, with the special case of receptacles with a T slot that fits both 5-15 and 5-20 plugs.

It goes a bit deeper than that though: A NEMA 6-20 also has a horizontal and vertical prong, but they're reversed from a 5-20 so you can't plug them in in an incompatible (and likely hazardous) way.

The whole standard is really well thought out. I went down the rabbit hole when I got an old table saw with a 6-20 plug and had to figure out what the hell to plug it in to (dryer outlet, via a "custom" extension cord).

I feel like I haven't seen too many uses of Schrader valves that are likely to cause havoc. Most of the use cases for them besides tires are pretty obviously special and distinct from one another. I mean, I'd hope nobody's ever hooked a bike pump up to their air conditioner or a can of R134a to a tire...

Speaking from experience, I don't think most end users are liable to pay enough attention to their ports to notice the color coding. I remember family members being confused by the blue 3.0 ports when those were a thing--now there's also red ones, and different color C ones, and some C ports have the little lightning bolt and some don't, and most users don't know what THAT means.

The value-add of USB C was supposedly you didn't have to buy different cables for different purposes now, you could just slap everything on a C port. But of course that's not truly the case, and we're now in a messy soup of standards and capabilities that even to seasoned tech professionals are hard to disentangle, much less for end users.

Calling this a solved problem 'cuz they slapped some colors on some of the ports is missing the forest for the trees.

You would think so, but no. Colors don't help.

Not just because a good chunk of the population has color vision issues. But people for some reason the average person can't latch onto that sort of thinking.

We went through this back in the 90's. Your PS/2 mouse plug was one color, and the PS/2 keyboard plug was another color. But people still tried to stick them in the wrong places.

Same with the sound card. Microphone, speakers, line in, line out, all had their own colors that matched the wires that came in the box. Regular people screwed that up all the time.

Going further back to the 70's and 80's, if you looked at the back of anyone's rack system, there was a 50% chance they had the red/white pairs of RCA plug backwards. Then when video started getting carried over the same plug, but colored yellow, things got worse.

Maybe if the next standard has colours to start with, and they are unambiguous, and somehow not even ambiguous if confused with a previous port version, and they are adhered to by all manufactures, consistently, and nothing new arrives that someone adds a colour for before the standards body makes a decision...

Some USB-C ports have DisplayPort output, so there's a DP near them. Some do Power Delivery, so there's a battery near them. And some are also a power input to the laptop, so there might be other random symbols near them.

It's chaos. I just juggle plugs until I get the expected behavior, and sometimes I never do because it's not implemented. I've given up.

But yes, I agree the USB-C plug mess is probably the worst. It has became worse than what it "wanted" to solve. The only way to make it work as broadly advertised again would be if all plugs supported all protocols (that make sense for a given device) and PD options, etc. on all devices and with common cables, at max bandwidth everywhere, but not only I'm not sure this is technically possible, this would probably be cost prohibitive.

And so what is the point? The net number of ports decreases on laptops, and there is no need on most gadget devices (beyond data+PD). The only point is for manufacturers to economize 50 cts and make the new inferior laptops pass as better than the old ones because they use the shinny new USB-C plugs. I would be happy if the price was actually 1/2 of the old models.

USB 3 introduced blue plugs, complicating things slightly but still everything basically worked, and if something was operating slower than expected it was at least obvious by the color.

Then 3.1 and USB-C came out, and apparently USB-IF lots its collective mind. Now you have you pay attention to see if your ports, cables and devices are "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1" or "USB 3.2 Gen 1" or "Superspeed" or "Superspeed 5Gbps".. (Btw, trick question: all of those are the same thing).

Edit: as long as you're not using a needle-like piece of metal to dig at or bend the contacts, it should be fine.

Ok, sarcasm aside. Technicaly you dont need separate plugs for different connection levels and power transmission up to certain powers. Initial data exchange at some base speed and minimum power requirements can provide necesarry information for devices to establish or refuse connection