USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops
theverge.com
theverge.com
But at least everything uses the same plug, so that’s nice.
I'm not enthusiastic about wading into the world of "every port looks identical but isn't" that USB-C has given us. I have to keep my cell phone charger cable with the charger at all times, because it's my only cable compatible with Qualcomm quick charging. Naturally, there's no visible indication of this.
you can get 3-metre thunderbolt cables if you want, you just have to pay a lot for them. all the problems with USB-C can be solved by spending more money. if you want to go the cheap route and buy cables that don't support all the various modes, then you're going to end up with a bunch of cables that don't support some modes and have to keep track of which ones those are.
if you regularly use devices that need higher-spec cables, it's probably worth keeping one good high-spec USB-C cable in your bag, instead of three terrible ones.
I guess it's cheaper now but in what world is a $50 cable to power an accessory reasonable in any way.
Source: https://www.sweetwater.com/c1225--Thunderbolt_Cables
It carries probably 100W+ for power, multiple 4K displays, ethernet, half a dozen USB3 ports... I'd rather it not be the thickness of a 5W charging cable.
I'm fairly content with my current situation. My phone has 'WARP' charge, which fully charges it in less than half an hour, however it can also charge (at a slower rate):
* Earphones
* Shaver
* Handheld Fan
* MacBook
I rarely connect my devices to a display, but that is supported with my cable too. The only device I use semi-regularly that isn't USB C is my Bose QC35s, but they last ~20hrs so usually last a few weeks due to my low usage.
On the other hand, my Mac charger can charge my phone (and obviously Mac) but none of the other devices...
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD862LL/A/apple-thunderbo...
Correct link: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ4H2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...
What a mess…
I have a 2019 MBP 15". Every 'dock' I've looked at seemed to indicate that "you will see mirrored screens on multiple displays" - which is not what I'd want.
Perhaps all of this is because I'm 'only' using a 2 year old MBP, and this is somehow all Apple's fault?
Would love to know what specific $100 thunderbolt 3 dock you have. It seems to be a confusing mess of half-information whenever I go to shop for stuff.
I use this dock: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Thunderbolt-Dock-40AC...
After updating the dock to the latest firmware, I can run two 4k60 displays, although it requires a specific configuration: one display on one of the DisplayPort lanes, and one on an active USB-C to DisplayPort cable hooked up to the dock's unpowered Thunderbolt port.
I've done this setup multiple times with this dock model, and it has worked with every Thunderbolt 3 MBP I've used.
Unfortunately yes. Apple (or MacOS specifically) doesn't support DisplayPort MST, which allows using multiple displays over a single DisplayPort connector. Since non-thunderbolt usb-c video is just DisplayPort, that means many usb-c docks with multiple display outputs don't work. Now why MacOS supports multiple video outputs over Thunderbolt and doesn't support MST is beyond me, but everything else does.
Here are 10 different cables, you must accurately describe each of their features in detail (USB speeds, charging speeds/power delivery, video out? What version of Display Port does it support?). Make one mistake and you'll be executed.
Obviously I don't advocate for that but it's damn annoying you can have one cable do so many different things and not know by looking at it. At least USB 3 was often times blue to offer a distinction.
These days I plug in a cable and prey it functions as advertised (sometimes it's 50/50).
Awful mess.
This is more expensive too (eg there are generally chips in the plugs at either end to handle attenuation).
But there's obviously a use case for cables longer than that.
It is true that we have cables that support data but not power and power but not data or data at different bandwidths and so on. It's a mess. But it's not a case of simply choosing not to support optional features.
[1] For the longest time, this was the only cable to do it all. I think more are available now, but they're still very much non-affordable.
There are three alternatives: one cable type that does everything and is easy to use (but gets expensive quickly as it gets longer), multiple cable types that each do somewhat different things but use identical connectors, or multiple cable types that each do somewhat different things and use different connectors. The USB-IF went with the "multiple cable types, identical connectors" option, which is cheap but extremely confusing. The "multiple cable types, multiple connectors" is what USB was created to avoid. So the only remaining option to remove confusion is to have expensive cables.
Are you preying on the folks at USB-IF?
I have USB micro cables that “work” to charge phones or for data but will give voltage throttling errors if used to power an RPi3 or later. This is presumably from using wires internally of too small gauge. I can’t see things like that stopping.
Was comparing TB2.995 vs TB3, not TB vs USB.
And that's after you solve the problem of people trying to cut out a couple pennies of copper. And the people that want thinner cables just for charging.
Physics is a problem here.
Not the best source - https://old.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/87vmud/the_...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/heres-why-nintendo-sw...
If the port fails open—meaning pins just don't make electrical contact—there's usually no real harm done. But if they fail short—meaning pins are bridged electrically to pins they have no business connecting to—you may easily overvolt a pin. Remember that 6V absolute maximum rating on the Configuration Channel of the Switch's USB-C PD chip? Well, it's only 0.5mm away from the VBus (main power line), which carries 15V.
I guess it is not completely trivial though, and would probably end up costing a fair bit due to the max bandwidth etc.
Just measuring resistance accurately enough for short cables for all conductors sounds hard.
Resistance is most important for power connection. To determine if voltage drop is acceptable does not need high accuracy.
In older USB cables you used to have four, five, or nine pins that were directly connected via copper wire to the pins on the other end. With the exception of charging-only cables that didn't connect the data pins.
Is the issue just that the new cables tend to only connect a subset of the 24 USB-C pins?
However, when it comes to power delivery. For both old style USB and newer USB-C, the thickness of the copper matters for how much amps the wire can carry.
IE apple has a 30W charger that comes with a different thickness than their 61W charger. And using the 30W cable with the 61W charger.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201700#usbc
> For the best charging experience, you should use the USB-C charge cable that comes with your Mac notebook. If you use a higher wattage USB-C cable, your Mac will still charge normally. USB-C cables rated for 29W or 30W will work with any USB-C power adapter, but won't provide enough power when connected to a power adapter that is more than 61W, such as the 96W USB-C Power Adapter.
The best part is that the cables look nearly identical with some very small print on the cable that says they are different.
My (by now) ancient laptop simply won't charge (or boot if cold) if the wattage of the psu is insufficient. This will easily solve that problem as you find out when the battery runs out of juice. I noticed this as it originally came with a 45 watt charger but after a processor upgrade the required power would be at least 60 watt.
Note that it will charge the battery when off with any charger, it is just slower.
> The best part is that the cables look nearly identical with some very small print on the cable that says they are different.
One would think that after nearly 2 decades of USB cable confusion the standards bodies and vendors would make an effort to make the cable identification easy, but no.
I suspect it's because they actually want consumers to end up buying lots cables and the churn it causes.
These read out the e-marker and tell you the supported power delivery and USB data speeds.
The irony that their product comparison table has 30+ rows should not be missed!
Also I've destroyed probably half a dozen of them by accidentally stepping on or rolling my chair over the connector and smushing it flat.
Oh hell no and none of the packaging actually explains what features a cable supports, none of them actually explain what the cable is actually compatible with. The little android logo doesn't mean shit. Sure, you might be able to slowly charge your phone with a particular cable, but it doesn't mean it'll do anything else it's supposed to do.
Though ofc the design challenge is for users to feel comfortable that putting red into blue won't break anything, it just might not give the expected features.
Cable manufacturers are going to do whatever is cheapest.
Resistor style stripes on cables would be fun, a stripe for each feature such as bandwidth, power, etc; perhaps already suggested (and ignored). Though complement for ports would be trickier.
Embossing symbols in the style of thunderbolt might be the way to go, even if the standard is not fully adopted.
My first attempt was different colors for each device, but was too tedious.
Three categories - low power, high power slow USB2, and 100W Thunderbolt.
- Low power: generic cables from wherever
- High power slow: cables that came with reputable charger (the vendor's cable, like Apple or Samsung; my favorite 3rd party charger is https://www.ravpower.com/products/rp-pc112-gan-tech-61w-wall...)
- Thuderbolt: I buy from https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt
Honestly that's about all you need.
Even just a bandwidth indicator would be suitable 90% of the time.
Decades ago, when your TV was behaving badly, you would take the back off (unplug first!), pull the vacuum tubes out, and take them in a bag to the nearest convenience store. They had a "tube tester" the size of a washing machine. You'd plug each tube into a connector, one at a time, press the "test" button, and the needle on the dial would show good/poor/fail. The body of the tester was a cabinet containing replacement tubes you could buy (and which you could even test right there).
We might need to start using USB-C cable testers. Plug in a new cable, get a good/poor/fail analysis of each potential USB-C feature, then you mark your cable yourself with some labeling scheme.
I've been having to implement tons of my own testing because no cable ever works the way you think it will. I've got a giant pile of thick super beefy USB-C cables which only transmit data at USB 2.0 speeds. Which per the USB standards committee is apparently Working As Intended, but that is definitely not ok.
I remember going through the tube testing ritual with my Mom. Good times. It was really interesting to me, how my Mom could take things apart and figure things out.
(She taught me that the inside of a TV was dangerous, and kept the screwdrivers up where I couldn't reach them.)
Maybe non-standard connectors are actually a feature, not a bug, because everything having the same connector but not the same functionality will lead to confusion as described above.
You can find all sorts of different connectors on a cable to connect two devices together, but you still only knew that devices are/are not compatible by trying to plug them in
At least with the current setup, you are unlikely to burn out the devices by trying a cable.
"I thought I needed a USB cable"?
Also it's a huge waste if say an HDMI 2.1 cable cannot be used on an HDMI 2.0/1.4 device. People would complain about that too.
At least the nature of the problem is immediately apparent to such people the moment they attempt to plug the cable in. If the cable won't fit, they know there is nothing wrong with their computer; they didn't misconfigure anything or click the wrong button. The problem is unambiguous.
Some USB-C cables not working with some USB-C sockets leaves users feeling gaslit.
You'll get people complaining about the cable not working with their new device, and then people complaining it didn't work with their old device.
Eventually USB-C will be so capable and ubiquitous, this will be a non-factor. I don't miss the days of trying to track down the right barrel connector, micro-HDMI cable or proprietary and fragile network dongle adapter. Those weren't easier days.
At a certain point on the usability continuum, user error becomes so severe that only dementia can explain it. But USB-C incompatibilities are so far from that point that arguing otherwise seems like bad faith. These USB-C incompatibilities can bite technically inclined people with sound, sober and healthy minds.
How does it help when someone inevitably buys the USB-C cable with shape y when they need USB-C cable with shape x? It physically doesn't fit, great, but they still have the wrong cable and their device still doesn't work, not even in a degraded fashion. They still have to take it back to the store.
Typically these issues bite people who bought cheap junky cables that weren't USB-IF certified off Amazon by sorting for lowest price. If it's not working, check that your cable is certified for what your intended use case is. This applies to everything, not just USB-C.
> How does it help when someone inevitably buys the USB-C cable with shape y when they need USB-C cable with shape x? [...] They still have to take it back to the store.
It helps because they know they have to go back to the store, and aren't left wondering if the problem is actually with themselves somehow using their computer wrong. As I mentioned earlier: "Some USB-C cables not working with some USB-C sockets leaves users feeling gaslit."
People will also ignore the color coding even if it existed. Counterfeiters would add the color to add legitimacy to their incompatible products. Color coding would not physically prevent you from plugging the cable in.
The people who feel gaslit over a USB-C cable not working would probably also feel gaslit over buying the "wrong USB C cable", because they bought a "USB C cable" and "USB C should just work, why do I have to remember which of 12 different connectors my computer uses, I thought the point of USB C was a unified connector".
They might feel deceived or mislead by the packaging, but they won't have to wonder if they are somehow using their computer wrong. Particularly for people who lack confidence with computers, this means a lot.
In particular, if my Thunderbolt ports didn't support bog-standard USB, that would suck. I would need special ports which weren't as powerful, or even more dongles, or both.
As it stands, things are.. fine, actually. I have one TB cable that works on everything, and a small handful of USB-C cables which work on most things. and a USB-C-or-Thunderbolt-and-I-don't-know-or-care to DisplayPort which stays plugged into my monitor. and a USB-C-or-Thunderbolt-etc to microHDMI for my camera.
You'd need a cross product of different cable shapes for all the different available features, since the cable could support any number of them.
On top of that, the connector has mechanical constraints to handle, and some of these connector shapes will be suboptimal and undertested
Power: 18W, 30W, 45W, 60W, 100W, 240W
Data: No Data, 480Mbps, 5Gbps, 10Gbps, 20Gbps, 40Gbps
You also have a potential variety of modes that could influence your ability to achieve those speeds with certain devices.
Also there are no power ratings below 60W, and I don't think "no data" is a valid cable.
There are definitely "charge-only" cables being marketed.
Two markings with each having multiple variations. You will have a dozen plus combinations, that will only get more complex.
Every voltage below 20 maxes out at 3 amps. As far as cables go, 60 is the minimum watts supported.
> There are definitely "charge-only" cables being marketed.
Are they valid though?
> Two markings with each having multiple variations. You will have a dozen plus combinations, that will only get more complex.
I don't really care how many combos there are. I won't need most of them. Most of the time I just want speed or power, sometimes I want both, and it's always a minimum requirement rather than anything specific.
Perhaps for PD 2.0/3.0 but there is also legacy USB PD 1.0 and USB-C BC. During that era I believe 1.5A was minimum.
>Are they valid though?
Probably not, looks like USB 2.0 data is minimum required.
>I don't really care how many combos there are. I won't need most of them.
Just because you don't need specific combinations, doesn't mean you won't have to wade through all possible combinations to find the cable you're looking for.
> All EPR cables shall be Electronically Marked and include EPR-specific information in the eMarker as defined by the USB PD specification. As defined in the USB PD specification, EPR cables are marked as 50 V and 5 A capable. All EPR cables shall be visibly identified with EPR cable identification icons as defined by the USB-IF. This is required so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to as high of PDP = 240W as defined in the USB PD specification."
Both are important. I also wish devices had some UI to easily show the capabilities of a connected cable to the user. I could not find actual visual representations of the the "identification icons".
[1]: (page 143) https://usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-conne...
I haven’t done the speed test in a while but last I checked I think it was 3Gbps? Not quite the theoretical max for the port/cable but easily enough for the few hundred megabit video feed.
Its been over 5 years already
If your phone is about to die because yiu checked out of a hotel in the morning and your flight is at night and you are just cruising around in a car, you will not be able to stop anywhere and get a USBC car charger.
So anyway LPT: get USBC accessories on Amazon in advance and dont rely on them to have any particular feature of quality control.
Yes, they're more expensive. But they'll essentially handle everything you throw at them, and behave as expected (due to the large protocol support [0,1]).
Of course, this won't always be the case. But it's generally a safe assumption for now.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/io/thu...
[1] https://thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/default/files/Thunde...
Is this really true? My Thunderbolt monitor (LG Ultrafine 4K) came with two cables: Thunderbolt 3 (for connecting to Thunderbolt laptops) and USB-C (for connecting to iPads etc which don't support Thunderbolt). Why would two different cables be needed if the Thunderbolt 3 one can do it all?
Using the "right" cable is performance optimization. This isn't like the old days when plugging things in the wrong way might damage your machine.
It's a real problem, even if tech savvy people are fine with lower charge speeds because we know that the charger/cable/device combo only supports PD profile whatever.
I'm actually TERRIFIED of pluggin anything in to my kids Switch other than Nintendo's official cable, incase I brick i t.
Does anyone know if they've patched this? I have some Dell laptop charger USB-Cs which I use alot, and I've had to caution everything in the family to never plug the Switch into it despite it fitting and despite every room in the house having such a charger...
- a pixel charger - macbook charger - HP charger
and the Switch works fine with all of them.
OTOH, if you try to use one of those for the docking station, the docking station will refuse to work
I heard that it's because it supports only a lower amount of Watts than what the Macbook charger can provide, for example... (60W or 85W) While other chargers, like the pixelbook's (45W) work just fine
But I agree that it's unnerving: I connected a disposable switch to the cables that I didn't trust, before trusting to use my main Switch with them
For what it's worth I sold the official charger/dock that came with my Switch more than a year ago and have been using only third-party chargers/cables plus a Covert Dock since then. No issues :)
They were right being mistrusting apparently.
I think people are either too young to remember this disaster, or have just outright forgotten.
Now you have to carefully see what the packaging says, which can range from inadvertently unclear to downright misleading. And to add to that, you don't know what to look for in the first place if you don't have prior experience with thunderbolt/usb-c. Example, I didn't know that a cable must explicitly mention DP in order to connect to an external monitor. Because it was the first time I had an external monitor that can use usb-c.
Not really complaining, usb-c is very very nice. Just pointing the minor annoyance of learning its warts.
That it won't damage their device is certainly wonderful, but I definitely think the cons outweigh the pros.
My current laptop (an XPS 9310) has USB-C for charging. But I would be very reticent to ever charge it with somebody else's cable, and without a 'usb condom' I wouldn't even consider charging from some random public cable (e.g. airport charging kiosks.) USB charging for laptops has the same "untrusted cable" problems as USB charging for cellphones.
Spoken like a true gaslit tech user.
And it's not a remote possibility. It happened to me with a fast charging phone power supply and the phone, and the cable was the one provided by the manufacturer! The type-C connector at the phone side was red hot and started to melt, probably caused by a bad connection caused by dirt in the phone connector. Fortunately I was there, and smelled the burnt plastic and disconnected the cable, but what if that happened at night?
And it's not something trivial that power supplies and phones can detect, there is not a way to determinate the voltage drop in the cable built into the standard (basically all they needed to do was to add a voltage sensing pin on the connector, to be shorted with VCC at the load side, so the power supply could sense the voltage at the other side and determinate if there too much drop, but as far as I know it doesn't have it).
Are we?
I'm not sure how they deliver more power in this specification. But traditionally, the additional power (from 5W to 20W to 100W) was through additional *voltage*, not current.
> And it's not something trivial that power supplies and phones can detect, there is not a way to determinate the voltage drop in the cable built into the standard (basically all they needed to do was to add a voltage sensing pin on the connector, to be shorted with VCC at the load side, so the power supply could sense the voltage at the other side and determinate if there too much drop, but as far as I know it doesn't have it).
Surely we just set a current-limit, written into the specification. Then we choose AWG wires / connectors as appropriate to support that current.
Voltage can't go up arbitrarily, but voltage can safely be increased to ~48V or so in most applications. After 48V, humans start to get shocked / hurt, so that's probably the reasonable limit.
-----
And I'm pretty sure you can sense the voltage drop across a cable. USB-3 delivers 5V by default, and then you send protocol commands to increase your voltage to 12V or whatever. If you detect that the power-supply is only supplying 11V (after the 12V command), then its either a PSU-error or a cable-error. And I'm not sure if it even matters which is which (either way, you're not getting enough power, so your device needs to probably shut off)
You can then disconnect / reset your device and maybe stick to 5V default specs.
Car batteries in ICE cars are nominally 12v. Grab both terminals and tell me it doesn't hurt.
12v can't exceed the resistance of human skin so it doesn't matter how much current capacity it has. You can hold onto those terminals all day.
It's settled science. If you doubt it, tests of this are all over YouTube. It's just true.
Now your tongue, perhaps...
But yeah, 9V and 12V don't hurt your skin at all. The worst you'll get typically is when you accidentally short it with some metal, and something becomes burning hot really quickly.
But this "burning hot" issue can happen even with 1.5V NiMH batteries or 3.3V Li-Ion batteries (even hot enough to start a fire in your pocket! Like all those vaping accidents).
That's not "shock" or "electricity", that's literally heat from some other thing messing up the battery pack. So its not really the same.
We used it to make jacob's ladders. That was fun.
Until I touched the two bars.
I woke up on the other side of the room, smelling burning...me.
That wasn't fun...
> If you receive a shock, if can affect the rhythm of your heart and cause problems later. We’re taught to go and get an ECG after receiving a shock. Like jump in the car and go to the doctor or hospital, and have someone else drive you. If you’ve received a shock - go get checked out. -jaidan
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658458/
Bing's answer-mode points here:
https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_esno...
Always hard to know how cautious to be, with so many variables.
You can go into tachycardia or bradycardia (fast and slow heartbeats), so feeling sort of okay isn't the end of it.
That was nowhere near the stupidest thing I've done...
That level of power delivery is negotiated after the devices are connected. The cable also has to advertise that it is capable of that power delivery.
Only if the cable or device is defective or damaged. Which is true of every type of charging cable or connector.
Yes, that's my experience with USB-C as well.
(Seriously, my Dell laptop and Dell dock connected by a Dell cable can't keep up a reliable connection. People are saying that the spec is fine, but a spec that's this hard to implement well is maybe not fine.)
Either way, this is an incredibly common device that can be damaged by incompatible hardware where it's difficult to determine compatibility without bricking the device.
This is the problem! This is what everybody talking about the specs doesn't get - it's difficult to (1) tell which spec a device claims to support and (2) verify that it actually supports it (see: a lot of cheap devices on Amazon) and also (3) in real life many devices do not support the specs (i.e. this isn't a theoretical problem).
In practice, people aren't going to stop buying nintendo switches, unfortunately.
Still, its not entirely necessary to support all specs or have that be entirely clear, what does need to be clear is if you can expect safety specs to be followed. If I plug in my nintendo switch to a charger thinking it'll charge at lightspeed but it takes hours, oh well. If I plug it in and it destroys the device then that should be pretty much an unforgivable problem. Personally I'd be happy to abstain from buying such a device due to that, though also personally I did buy one, expecting no issues, and only found out months later when seeing it mentioned somewhere online. Ideally research is done on every product to ensure things like this aren't the case, but again in practice, that doesn't always happen.
I'm not sure what the fix is, other than outright making USB not so universal by requiring a license for any and all vendors using the design, if the license is cheap enough, maybe that could work? I don't know the legalities so much but maybe a free license could be required for any implementation, which would only have the spec of "make sure it doesn't brick charger or device, and make sure it doesn't catch on fire"
I'm beginning to suspect The Great Filter is Jony Ive's minimalist design influence: any sufficiently advanced culture will annihilate itself before it discovers interstellar travel when someone connects two devices together that aren't compatible with the equivalent of a One True Connector™ USB cable.
I just took my Samsung A50 out of the case, no USB logo anywhere on the device. There's the Samsung logo, some recycling logo and a CE logo, and that's it.
This is 100% Nintendo's fault for using the USB-C connector type but not actually bothering to adhere to the USB-C specification.
The issue is that they're both not compliant AND fail in a non-safe bad way.
Nintendo doesn't claim compliance, but if they're using the connector shape, it should comply with the spec for power delivery (which is honestly not even hard to do).
MicroUSB devices can also be bricked by using non-conforming cables and power adapters, but fortunately devices like that are rare because the spec has existed long enough that all the bad devices have been flushed out of the market. manufacturers having made stupid decisions in the past does not mean we shouldn't make USB-C better now.
A) Follow the spec
B) Make your off-spec interconnect physically incompatible with standard devices
Going off-spec with a compatible and physically indistinguishable connector is an "attractive nuisance," to use the tort term.
While it's anecdotal, I've been charging Switches in my household with all sorts of USB-C sources for a couple years now as well (20W Apple chargers, 18W Anker bricks, a MacBook Air, external battery packs, 12v car adapters, etc) and they're all still working.
I need assurance though that my cables were carefully designed.
Some people here talked about the Switch; but it's a general problem. For example: I have an external USB drive that has a Type A USB 3 host socket on the back of it (???). It came with a cable with a Type A USB 3 plug on one end and a USB C plug on the other end.
Now that's a combination of connectors you will definitely see elsewhere. I have such a cable that came with my PS5 for charging its controllers - but I know for a fact that it's not interchangeable with the one for my external drive.
Power negotiation applies to USB-A just as it does with USB-C... (I think)
Nope it doesn't.
Then there's the crap offered for sale on Alibaba which somebody will resell on Amazon and which will show up on a checkout rack at the gas station. USB-C has very tight tolerances and unusual material requirements. Dirt or water can create a conductive path all too easily with USB-C pin spacing.
"Decreasing the risk of fire in USB-C connectors" is worth watching.[1] It's an ad for a plastic material, but covers the problems.
https://wccftech.com/macbook-survives-disables-all-usb-ports...
Researchers even developed an exploit for some USB-C fast chargers that forces it to deliver max power and try to catch the connected device on fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es2SqubYSfo
Some of them were designed for chargers with attached cable, and not disconnectable one.
Many charger ICs emulate the fast charging signalling to trick phones into charging faster, but they of course have no way to check if wiring is ok on micro-usb.
So you can end up with 5A-10A going over flimsy wires/contact pads. Or if they use type-c, they can end up using fake 5A cables. Or in case of VOOC, they don't check if the cable is an actual VOOC cable, which goes over 5A.
Actually they do. My OnePlus wich uses the same VOOC tech will not charge at full power with its fast charger if I don't use the cable from the box.
VooC A to C has a fifth pin mapped to CC pin on C side.
Rogue VooC C to C chargers just send VooC signalling directly on CC.
Red hot metal and smoking plastic.
Of course I suppose products that actually are UL listed on Amazon will already mention the fact somewhere in their description.
That being said I’ve had more issues with low voltage crap letting the magic smoke out than mains powered devices.
[1] https://www.dsm.com/content/dam/dsm/electrical-electronics/e...
That is a fairly significant list of conditions. As an example, I have encountered significant heating in a damaged power cable on the original power supply of a laptop from a reputable vendor. It's easy to argue the owner should immediately replace the damaged power supply, yet many people will continue to use problematic hardware until it no longer functions. It is also the case that many companies will manufacture components down to a price (or, in the case of this vendor, for aesthetics) rather than make something that is robust.
I find it a bit disconcerting that we're talking about delivering 240 W over a cable that consumers are unlikely to differentiate from a 15 W cable (i.e. USB-C specification) or even from a 2.5 W cable (e.g a USB cable they would have used fifteen years ago).
Yes, exactly! It’s foolhardy.
And maybe unnecessary -- haven’t Apple just shown that you can get amazing performance with very low power requirements? And shouldn’t we all be trying to minimize power usage, to try to reduce CO2 emissions, mining of rare and toxic elements, plastic waste, etc etc etc?
There are many domestic devices on 110 / 220v AC using less than 250W. They are native DC, but source AC because they must.
These devices are not likely to go away soon. In fact they'll proliferate so long as the developing world is still developing.
We can also expect proliferation of domestic battery and solar: both DC sources. A standardised domestic micro-grid of DC sources and consuming devices could be a boon to efficiency and reduction of single-purpose conversion devices such as power bricks and inverters.
As an example, every type of e-bicycle currently has a different proprietary adapter. Just as mobile phones once did. Most e-bikes charge at around 40v.
With 250W USB available we will likely see a switch to USB by e-bile manufacturers, resulting in more common lower cost equipment and better interoperability.
USB-C is presumably not the final word in USB connectors. Let's hope for both vision and better implementation.
What's wrong with having multiple set voltages? If it's the necessity of semiconductors, is that really so terrible in this day and age?
On a separate note, I hope they'd have properly managed EMI in this standard. USB has so many makers of varying quality, I can imagine cheap, badly-shielded cables and connectors playing merry hell with noise.
It is, but it's a list of things that could fail even if there was only one kind of cable. The added risk from having a bunch of different kinds of cable with varying capability is quite small.
> I find it a bit disconcerting that we're talking about delivering 240 W over a cable that consumers are unlikely to differentiate from a 15 W cable (i.e. USB-C specification) or even from a 2.5 W cable (e.g a USB cable they would have used fifteen years ago).
All these voltages are low enough that you can expect any cable to support them. What really matters is the amps, and the difference is much smaller there. Specially marked cables support 5 amps. All other USB C cables support 3 amps. Old USB cables will vary, but it's been standard fare to push 2.4 amps over them for a long time.
Why are comments here always so deliberately vague? I'd like to know which manufacturer. It seems like an important detail.
I = V/R
And just this past weekend, a close friend of mine had their Galaxy S6 drain completely to 0 in a minute or two, and then claim water damage in the boot screen (which tests resistance across the port). The phone wasn't wet.
Both times, the phone wasn't even plugged in. I am beginning to look very askance at USB-C ports.
There is so much variation in the USB spec that a data transfer or a battery charge could take a few minutes or a few hours depending on which cable and which port/adapter you use, with no foolproof way to make sure you're putting together the right equipment, because regardless, it still "works", just not very well.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that it "works". I just wish it was clearer what I need to make it work optimally, aside from just using the one brick and cable that came with my device (assuming I was so lucky).
The fact that power doesn‘t just go through a data cable, but actually in all kinds of voltages, useful power levels and in _both directions_ is nothing short of awesome. Fun fact: Didn‘t really find the charching port on my new USB-C power bank until I realized it‘s the same as the output port...
The fact that even degradation is graceful is great. I don‘t always have the 90W brick with me when I‘m on the road with the MacBook, but more than one time I‘ve not regretted at least having a lightweight USB cable in my backpack in order to use a phone charger over night. Granted, I can‘t play games on it in that configuration, but hey, it‘ll still hold up nicely over many hours and I can still work.
Good times!
If it started making physically different cables or sockets to add new features, people whine how nothing is compatible anymore and if it stopped adding new features to stay compatible, you call the standard dead and not forward thought.
Instead it's gradually upgrading the standard with the same physical socket, so that at least some compatibilities are kept and it's still moving forward.
Can it be better than that?
A bit of confusion on which version you need is better than not being able to plug it in at all.
Please bring the barrel jacks back. They were virtually unbreakable. I break about a USB-C cable a week because the connectors are super weak and supported only by 2 dots of solder on a PCB instead of a solid cutout on the housing.
USB-C should have at least standardized the shape of the rubberized housing around the connector, made a matching inset shape on the equipment, and have that take the brunt of all mechanical stress, just like an IEC power cable, which you can drop bricks on and they won't break.
I understand the problems of different cables, I've run into them already. One cable can do Thunderbolt, the other cannot. One cable transmits 4K video signal, the others doesn't transmit anything. And so on.
However, it is sooooo much better than anything before because at least _most of the time_ stuff works. Chargers charge. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but things mostly work.
If only they had proper labeling and specs, all of this could be avoided. If you make all cables look the same, why on Earth would end users believe they are different?
“All EPR cables shall be visibly identified with EPR cable identification items,”
No they won't! Just like all the other stupid confusing and incorrectly implemented "rules" for labelling and orientation and everything. Even if they do it consistently, nobody will know which of all the many confusing logos means what and for some reason OSs don't show the user which component is incompatible in which way so you'll be happily enjoying 100W from your 240W charger unaware it's not actually 240W.
It is still a rather new phenomenon. Most of HN used to be USB-C supporters. Especially those on Apple camp. For years mentioning every single problem listed in this thread would get downvoted into oblivion.
Since most of them didn't bother jumping in to defence their beloved USB-C, I guess they changed their mind.
Why bother? USB will remain dominant and there's nothing to be gained from the millionth iteration of the argument.
I don't understand how you can possibly call it an "echo chamber" when there are (1) reasoned arguments (2) supported by facts with (3) dissenting opinions. That's almost the opposite of an echo chamber.
I have yet to come across an issue with USB-C either personally or externally. But maybe some day it will happen. And I still won’t care because it’s better than it used to be.
No, just another day in IT. I'm hoping they get their crap together eventually.
My USB-C devices are: a wireless charger, two MacBooks (one intel, one m1), a Pixelbook, Nintendo Switch, Oculus Quest and Quest 2, iPad Pro, and the charging case of some earphones… I think that’s everything. Oh, and my partner’s phone and headphones too.
Anyway - I’ve cables and chargers dotted around the house, plus some A-C ones for use with power bricks - and never had any grief powering/charging any device from any of them. What am I doing right? I’m definitely not only plugging Apple devices into Apple cables and so on.
Obviously my phone charger will charge a laptop more slowly, but I had that issue with micro-USB and Kindle chargers that couldn't charge a phone faster than it used the power, so hardly anything new or unexpected.
Maybe not buying the cheapest cables available on the bottom of the Amazon barrel.
But I can't know that. Maybe you are and your place will burn down next week. Who knows?
That is definitely true. Given how many of my devices came with their own cables - presumably decent quality - I haven't needed to buy any 3rd party cables.
It’s the paralenz dive camera. There might even be good reasons for it, but I couldn’t guess.
Still generally stuck with an array of cables (hard drives, charging cameras, headlamps, legacy iPads, etc).
Sure, basically any cable can _charge_ a device at some speed, which is absolutely my common application, but for shoveling bits around it's much more complicated.
For everyone else, their life is all wireless and cloud based, and they just want to charge their devices.
Meanwhile, Apple's M1 chip is showing us that 240 watt laptops are the problem, not the solution...
Myself and most people I know always considered USB connection to be safe-ish - that is, you can keep the cable connected on the supply side, and have the receiver end just lie on the desk on the floor, and the worst that could possibly happen is some tiny sparking if the stray end touches something conductive in a very unlucky way. But the more power I see pushed through these cables, the more I start to look at them as live wires hooked to mains power.
Additionally, such wattage sounds like a serious fire hazard if the cable is damaged, which means the cables themselves need to be handled with care. Something that wasn't the case with typical USB charging until recently.
I have very little worry that my carpet can accidentally negotiate 60w and up.
I _am_ worried about cheap USB-PD devices that forgoe this negotiation as it is complex and expensive to implement.
If you buy a fake cable that pretends to have display-port alternate mode or something but doesn't, meh, you're out 10 bucks. But if it pretends to be able to carry 200 W but isn't and burns your house down instead, you might be out a tad bit more...
USB-PD has bidirectional communication, so at least in theory both ends could know how the cable is performing by comparing voltage and current measurements at either end.
If the cable drops too many Watts, the load can be disconnected.
As I've commented elsewhere, I wonder if, at that point, there still is that much of a point in sticking with USB-C for what seem like fairly specific applications.
I mean, if we're at the point of carting around such a monster of a laptop, will an additional, dedicated, power-only connector make that much of a difference? Don't get me wrong, I'm actually somewhat tempted by such a thing, but just because it would be easy no move around, not for actually carrying on my back all day every day.
There are some mitigations though, like the cables must identify what they can handle (else the high current modes can't be used), and both ends needs to verify the plug and cable etc.
In theory though I don't see why they couldn't include this in the standard.
What I don't understand is how the cable doesn't have a way to detect a short circuit. I'd imagine that a 250 watts capable cable would have more safety features hopefully though.
Yes. Moving critical safety limits into software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 Let's hope they're all up to the challenge ...
It's a good question. Generally speaking, DC is considered a shock hazard at or above 60V, but OSHA recognizes 50-60V as being potentially hazardous. It's certainly an arc hazard when disconnecting as the article notes. And 5A at just about any voltage will start a fire in case of a short circuit.
In practice, I find the loss of convenience compared to USB-C negligible. You still only have one cable hanging around.
Plus, as those are PCs, said connector wouldn't even need to be something specific, I suppose a random (big enough) DC barrel plug would do and be compatible with different manufacturers' products.
For me, my monitor powers my laptop.
More specifically, my two 32" 4K monitors are plugged into the wall, and then both have USBC cables into each side of my 16" MBP (2019). I keep my MBP power cable in my suitcase for when I travel.
I love the setup - only two cables on my desk, and there is a nice symmetry about it.
I also have an Intel desktop computer with a thunderbolt port. I'm able to switch from my desktop to my laptop with just one cable.
It still has a few rough edges, but overall it works better than anything else I've tried.
Paying $700 for a monitor was a bit painful but I have no regrets.
Feeding the Caldigit dock I have a thunderbolt cable going to my laptop (a 2019 Macbook Pro) and i have a second thunderbolt cable run from my desktop (A HP Z4 with a thunderbolt card) which i can swap in at a moment's notice if I need more horsepower or want to play games etc.
Thunderbolt for both computers enables a single cable setup. It really is super convenient
My friend recently purchased a MacBook Air with M1. There's no fan at all. It's incredible. It's a block of metal that just works.
The M1 Macs are the first and lowest-end Apple Silicon Macs we'll see. There's a reason they only replaced the cheapest devices with them so far - wait until we're done with the 2 year transition period and I doubt you'll have anything to complain about.
(Sometimes a desktop is not practical, like on a remote photo assignment, but there is a power outlet.)
Because there's a upper limit on how much power (voltage, clock rate, etc) you can shove though a CPU before it starts malfunctioning or getting damaged by purely electrical effects, no matter how effectively it's cooled?
It's entirely possible Apple has set the nominal limits fraudulently low for business reasons, but there are actual physical limits here, and depending on how the CPU is designed/optimized, it's quite possible that it's easy to build a cooling system that significantly exceeds what those limits allow to be demanded of it in a significant range of cases.
M1 GPU beats most other integrated GPUs, but that doesn't magically make the demand for more performance go away, and that demand is likely to increase as there become more and more non-gaming applications for GPUs (machine learning, video editing, etc).
The Mac has a very dedicated audience of video and design professionals who are going to be left empty-handed here, even if they double or triple the amount of GPU cores in the SOC.
I've seen no evidence that the M1's GPU is anything but best in class for integrated graphics.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an... [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-Vega-8-Ryzen-400...
No, it was a technology limitation. The reason I know is because of the M1 Macbook Pro, a device explicitly designed to reap the maximum performance benefits of the M1. It was designed with active cooling and still didn't really manage to score much better than the M1 Macbook Air.
Either way, Apple can't just magically increase the wattage of their chip and make it run faster. They had every opportunity to do that in the M1 Mac Mini and the new iMac, but they didn't. It's a very obvious limitation of the SOC's capabilities, and I honestly can't find any evidence to suggest otherwise.
>Apple can't just magically increase the wattage of their chip and make it run faster.
Because that is not how it works.
The M1 GPU has a maximum TDP of 11W. That is by design. They could push it with higher Clockspeed beyond their optimal level with higher voltage, but that has other testing and reliability implication with cost. It doesn't matter whether you have a large Fan and heat sink sitting on top of or no cooling. You run at 11W Max. That is part of the design. M1 MacBook Air would allow it to run 11W for a fraction of time before heaving TDP headroom to CPU. MacBook Pro allows it to use at its maximum for longer. Since it has a 25W cooling capability.
You want higher GPU performance, throw in more Core. GPU workload are inherently parallel, the only limitation are interconnect and Memory bandwidth. Both of these are are not technical barrier but cost concern.
On a 10W GPU comparison ( And why would you compare GPU that are running at higher watts ) The Apple GPU are doing fairly well in all Metal optimised benchmarks. Compare to AMD Radeon GPU which also has been optimising on Mac platform. ( Although at a larger node )
Good luck.
USB port just isn't physically ready for this. This is going to end with some spectacular fireworks once you factor in cheap Chinese engineering for cables, ports and chargers.
I personally own an electronics lab but whaddaiknow.
On more serious note, the USB-C just barely has dimensions to deal with 5A 50V. You need thick enough cables and traces, you need clearences and you need margins.
If you look at breakdown voltage for USB C connector, it is not a lot above 50V. Usually, you would want many times your working voltage. It just begs for a tiny speck of dust or condensation, manufacturing fault, bent connector, etc. to cause bad day for the owner.
Now, in a properly designed device, it technically should immediately detect the situation and cut the power. But there are two catches. One, is that at that power the short might be just about right resistance for this safety to treat is as valid. Second, this assumes properly designed device. If you cheap out on silicon you use for your charger it might just not have the capability to stop it before it gets to far and melts a bunch of stuff.
More voltage will require larger clearances and better safeties (like thicker isolation on cables).
"In industry, 30 volts is generally considered to be a conservative threshold value for dangerous voltage. The cautious person should regard any voltage above 30 volts as threatening, not relying on normal body resistance for protection against shock." https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/electriccircuits/chapter/chap....
Now, if the voltage is dangerous, it stops just being problem for the device but becomes safety hazard with all implications.
On the other hand increasing current is not without problems. It quickly requires thicker cables and traces for which space is just not available in tiny USB C connector. If conductor is not thick enough the result is heating and possible melting, degrading the material over time which could lead to shorts.
Lots of discussion about detecting unplug and limiting slew rates. In practice that will cost pennies to implement and will therefore be skipped in many designs. ("I got a great deal on this charger on Amazon!")
Time to develop some user superstitions around USB C:
"The withdrawal velocity is a factor in whether an arc will occur or not. If it is fast enough, then there is insufficient time to reach the voltage differential needed to form an arc. In practice, the withdrawal rate may not always be fast enough to keep the differential voltage below the threshold of arcing."
So, tell your informal tech support clients (family and friends) that they just didn't unplug their cables fast enough when their cables and devices start breaking. I look forward to everyone's sleight of hand moves where they unplug cables so fast you can't see it.
Even more humiliating is them looking at me as if I was complete idiot after me suggesting to them that the selection of cable itself may be cause of their problems. They had some physics at school and from their point of view the cable is just a bunch of copper and it should absolutely make no difference for how fast their phone charges.
Now I have to ready myself to have those "Universal" chargers which can only ever charge a single device but with no indication as to which device they can charge or which cable you have to use for this to work.
Which is pretty ironic because right now we have a bunch of laptops and it is much easier to explain that if the plug fits the socket you are ok and if it does not you need to look for the one that has matching plug.
The only solution I see is labeltown -- dust off my label printer and have every single piece of equipment, charger or cable clearly labeled.
Even if it is just a bunch of copper, there is thin and long copper and thick and short copper. I had a cheap, long micro-USB cable that was too thin to deliver 2A at 5V, my phone couldn't charge correctly. Using the Ohm's law, I could calculate that the voltage drop was enough to get it out of specs.
The cables you need to transport power at 5V can be surprisingly thick, and that's a reason why fast chargers are usually higher voltage. I ran the calculation to power a 5V LED strip over 10 or so meters, and came to the conclusion that I would have needed utility-sized cables.
At least as long as the cable doesn't catch fire from the resulting power dissipation...
Just keeps making the spec more and more complicated...
Also are the small contacts in a USB-C connector even reasonable to run with this much current? Is there enough cross sectional area on these contacts?
USB-C has pretty much eliminated forlorn MacBook users shambling around our office and looking for another soul to give them a compatible proprietary charger. Let's keep it this way.
I don't like having a large DC converter hanging off a switch hanging off an outlet. And I can't have a DC converter hang off a ceiling (nor do I want to wire it directly and hide inside the ceiling either).
You can install one, and connect a USB C PD to DC cable ~20USD to power your LEDs.
Your LEDs have to be 30W or less though.
There are LED fixtures that include the converter; you decide on what that you like the aesthetic of.
Of course, you could still have central DC conversion in your house (or maybe even neighborhood) and use USB or similar in your home’s wall outlets, instead of each device needing its own little power brick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Co...
My fridge/freezer uses 25 watts average, but the 90% of things I was thinking about was ignoring the heaters and motors, just the lights, computers, speakers etc.
Next question, why 5V, when they're talking about 50V. That brings us down to 1/10th the amps.
Also this is only inside your house, not for power distribution. Generate your DC power with solar, store it in your car/battery, and power your LED lights, Smart speakers, computers, all the stuff that converts power to DC before it uses it today.
Knowing Apple they would never offer both.
I mean, it'll probably cause some fires, but it'll be exciting!
And an ATX12VO power supply taking in USB-C would do… nothing?
Heh.
Also, don't use that near anything flammable.
Presumably this would be a negotiated system like USB-PD, where only a tiny amount of power is available at connection and with pins physically configured to ensure breaking connection in order you may be able to shut down the higher power before the main contacts disengage).
That's basically why. It's a computer you can take with you, without worry about packaging or needing to bring cables.
Gaming laptops that contain high-end GPUs can consume this much power while charging the battery and running games. And such laptops are still way more portable than a desktop. You can lift the laptop and keep it in your car, drive off and have a gaming PC ready-to-use where ever you end up. Same cannot be done with any desktop.
EDIT: Judging by notebookcheck, you should also check out HP ZBook Fury 15 G7, Thinkpad T15g, Dell Precision 7550, and MSI WS66.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P15-Gen-1-lapt...
One such machine is the ASUS Zephyrus G14/G15 and in the next month or two, M16 which weigh ~4.5lbs and come with Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs (up to 5900HS) and 95W variant RTX 3000 GPUs (up to RTX 3080). I've been using the G15 for the past month and it's not bad, kind of a midway between a Macbook and traditional gaming laptop. Its looks are low profile enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring it into an office.
If you're willing to push the slider a bit further in the power direction, there's machines like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro and Legion 7 16", which weigh about 1lb more than the Zephyrus machines (~5.5lbs) but come with significantly beefier cooling, a higher TDP CPU, and 130-150W variant RTX 3000 GPUs. They're a bit more of a desktop replacement but still fairly reasonable to lug around, nothing like the 8-10lb behemoth Alienwares of old.
I can find a laptop with a recent ryzen CPU and an RTX 2060 that gets 10 hours of battery life. At the same time, those parts could be pushed to 150 watts if you had enough cooling. And you'd need even more power to charge while using it flat-out.
Not everyone is just using laptops as a word processor/browser. Sometimes you just need oomph.
Because according to the comments here this won't work, will cause frequent fires and is an all around insane and unworkable idea.
The fact that in the real world, in 2021, it's still impossible to tell what standard a particular cable or device supports. I have several cables in my possession, and only through trial and error I can tell you which cable supports what, and I'm lucky enough that these cables are high-quality and fail "safely" but technically they don't have to.
Yes I know that technically the computer and USB-C controller knows which cable supports what, and yet so far no consumer-grade device has any kind of UI to tell me which cable supports what. I guess I can probably figure it out using the command line, but that would solve the problem for me but not the average non-technical user who just wants a cable that works.
In the old days, you could buy a USB-A to micro USB cable and have it work and charge your phone. You could buy an HDMI cable and have it work and send video to a monitor. With USB-C, you can't know which cable supports what until you've spent hours researching and understanding how USB-C works and the different alternate modes, and even then, cables might be mislabeled and you still can't be sure until you actually try it.
All the above is at least somewhat "safe" because the worst that can happen is that the device gets damaged, but if you suddenly start increasing power levels, non-compliant cables will start burning down houses.
You'll have different sections in shops, "fast charging cable", "fast transfer cable", or "fast charging AND fast transfer cable" (with a price to match)
Or stuff like "supports connecting a TV", etc.
People will understand that there are different cables for different jobs, because they understand that a universal cable will be way more expensive.
> In the old days, you could buy a USB-A to micro USB cable and have it work and charge your phone.
Some USB-A to micro cables charge way faster than others (thicker wire). So this supposedly new USB-C problem is actually not new at all.
Safety margins.
That's why Apple's largest 16" Macbook Pro has an exactly 100 watt-hour battery. If some laptop can charge at 150W or 200W, then presumably it would draw enough power during normal use that'll it need more than 100Wh of battery to be usable for a long time.
Their naming continues to be legendarily bad, why couldn't they just call it USB 4 instead of overloading the existing USB 2.1 version?
Everyone needs to learn from the Wifi and LTE standards groups which finally abandoned 802.11acxqyerwzdfqwrty naming and moved to simple version numbers like "Wifi 6" and "5G". Simple version numbers are so much more effective at getting people to upgrade as well, because they're much easier to market to the average person.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-usb-blog/us...
- USB-C power is negotiated over USB-PD protocol. Dumb devices are going to get 5v at low max. current.
- The sink device (laptop) must communicate and specifically ask for voltage/current it needs. Sources (power supply) aren't going to just push the max voltage to any device.
- All USB-C cables are required to support 3A of current. For any higher current, the cable must have a chip that advertises its current capabilities.
- The new spec imposes further requirement for the cable (in form of extra capability advertised by the chip in the cable). Power supplies will only enable 50v if such a cable is present.
Does anyone have a "meets all the damn specs" USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 cable they recommend?
Now we might have a standard for a broad range of DC devices.
Those USB coffee warmers might actually heat your coffee. :)
I just got a screen that delivers just 40W over USB-C that keeps my M1 MBP fully charged and it’s been a revelation. Suddenly the fact that this machine’s charger is unique in a house full of other MacBooks is irrelevant.
Then I got a laptop (from work) which takes USB-C power port, not much different than any other custom power port.
Then, I got a docking station (from work). And the USB-C cable turned out to be capable of both powering the laptop and transmitting data via the same wire to docking station.
It was awesome. Otherwise, I would have needed two cables for power and data.
https://sneaktechnology.com/pentest-engagement-scenario/badu...
Better carry your original cable and device with you at all times.
Except the backplane implementations (i.e. the cables) are not uniform, so fun times.
At least with DB25-ended cables you could wire your own, albeit without the performance range.
Strong mobile CPUs like the Ryzen 5800H are usually in the 45W ballpark while mobile RTX 3080 class GPUs can go as far as 170W+ and that is still half of what the desktop equivalent can draw.
[0]https://www.1-act.com/resources/heat-pipe-fundamentals/diffe...
Don't search for the ASUS G14, the G14 is dead when plug too much power into it. Bold statement, but I've warned you. You need power, your going to hear the fans. There's currently no solution for cooling it quietly.
My desktop PC has a RX5600, which I understand isn't particularly power hungry (nor powerful), but I still consider it a decent GPU. And the card, with its heat sink and fans isn't all that thick and stays reasonably quiet under load, even though I have a 135W CPU next to it. Could probably be even better if the fans were pulling air directly from outside.
At work, we have HP EliteDesk 800 minis, which are fairly slim (for a desktop) too. They usually have desktop i5 and i7s and are fairly quiet and don't seem to throttle. They do get somewhat loud at full load but probably because the heat sink is ridiculously small.
So I'm wondering, why aren't there more thick laptops? I'm not sure a laptop that requires 200+ Watts would last all that long on battery, so I suppose the main use case is an easy to carry, all in one machine, not so much a use-it-all-day-on-the-lap affair. So does thickness come into play that much? Those seem to target a particular audience, so they wouldn't even have to play the thinness marketing game against more popular offerings, they probably wouldn't even be shown next to each other.
I remember my dad used to have a laptop around 2005 in the Athlon XP days which was definitely thicker than my desktop GPU and the HPs and was still fairly usable on the go. I can't believe that a laptop as thick would generate airplane-level noise.
Because the majority of consumers have voted with their wallets for thin, sleek and sexy devices with poor cooling that are loud and thermal throttle.
If you want bulky, well cooled laptops, there are enough to choose from. XMG makes them for example.
- Laptops have components that are very close together.
- The cooling system is sometimes shared between CPU and GPU.
- The other comment under your comment is also true.
- What is more tick laptops? There are "thick" laptops in the gaming laptop and business -department.
" I'm not sure a laptop that requires 200+ Watts would last all that long on battery,"
- Power/resources can be scaled up and down.
I can't be the only one having constant issues with USB-C, but I also haven't been able to verify that this is a common issue for other people so maybe I am just a reckless user of technology.
"Well its USB-C cable and a USB-C hole"
"... but no, it does not work"
Meanwhile, my M1 MacBook Air can charge and run at full bore on a 20W iPhone charger!
That aside, I'm looking forward to running my laundry room off of a dozen USB-C connectors hooked up in parallel.
If you want to test whether a cable will work with a certain protocol at a certain data rate, just plug it in and see if it works. Because the alternative method[1] costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[1]https://www.keysight.com/ca/en/products/bit-error-ratio-test...
I can't believe Microsoft and Apple haven't built this into their operating systems. Sometimes it's near-impossible to figure out what Bluetooth standard I'm using, or HDMI, or USB, and I feel like it wouldn't be a monstrously hard problem to solve, as long as the devices are already successfully talking to each other.
Next, people will want to be able to jump-start a car via USB-C.
- [ ] Create an industry standard interface for charging and using [power tool,] battery packs; and adapters
Your mouse, if using USB-C, is only going to have the current it needs to run. So it'll be super low mw at 5v. Its not going to be doing 240w on it. USB power delivery isnt like your wall outlets, it asks and receives power depending on the need.
5 Amps is getting into danger territory with cables that are bent a lot and heating is concentrated in one high resistance area. Heating => melting => fire => deadly. Fire kills 10x more than electrocution.
2000V is also well into danger territory for humans, but we now have technology to make it human-safe for a child to gnaw through that wire while in operation and avoid injury. All that's needed is for the spec to require current leakage detection. As soon as 1 milliamp or more is unaccounted for between charger and device, you need to assume it's flowing through a child's tongue and power off within a few tens of microseconds.
That requirement means you need MOSFETs at each device (to be able to power off quickly), and to have capacitance control of the cable.
Every device needs to Verify that the device on the other end and cable does these things, so that nobody can make a cheap cable or widget which kills people.
If you want a cable spec which is never the limiting factor for whatever new gizmo you're trying to design, and therefore want a high power limit, then it's really the voltage that needs to increase, since it can go a lot higher before engineering the insulation gets hard.
This is appalling design, and is a receipe for disaster.
As a general purpose power cord, USB-C is not a good choice.
Melting USB-C connectors at 65W are already bad enough.
The problem is that there is no way to detect a bad contact, and they tend to be.
Few specs of dust, and you have 5 amps going to a single pin.
Even if you have split seconds momentary disconnects, you can get welds in contact pads, which will over time degrade the contact.
On other note, Intel may be increasing laptop CPU power budgets into 60W-70W territory to counter Ryzen people say. I think it makes sense now why they do it.
Not everybody buys the best hardware in class. Most hardware is cheap Chinese garbage for which the only qualification is that it isn't bad enough to be brought down from Amazon.com.
Go explain your grandma or girlfriend why the charger they bought damaged their laptop irreparably.
The advantage of USB2 is that it's very hard to screw up. The design is so simple that even the cheapest cable is usualy "okay" because making an "okay" USB2 cable is so simple.
In contrast, making a USB-C cable is much more difficult, which means unscrupulous manufacturers flood the market with bad cables that fail with disastrous side-effects.
If my iPhone tested the cable was up to spec before charging and said "error, bad cable" if any test failed, then china-cables would be forced to pass all the tests.
Then any amount of dirt in the connector can cause whatever heating it likes, but the device can always calculate how much heat is being dissipated in the connector.
I don't think OnePlus makes incredibly high quality & safe chargers like Apple/Samsung, but they're not the cheapest Amazon garbage either.
This might be a rare issue, but it does happen. Combined with the mechanical degradation that USB-C ports go through (not as bad as micro-USB, but worse than full size USB-A - A does get loose but still makes good electrical contact), I specifically looked for wireless charging in my next device and try to avoid using the USB port as much as possible.
And since USB-C PD actually requires a micro controller we'll finally be able to run netBSD on unmodified toasters.
Oh yeah, and when it’s not being used with the dedicated graphics card, it gets 6-9 hours of battery life.
Oh, almost forgot - it’s lighter and about the same size as my 2012 13” MBP.
To be clear, I’m skeptical of pushing that much power over USBC.