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...
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 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.
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.
This is 100% Nintendo's fault for using the USB-C connector type but not actually bothering to adhere to the USB-C specification.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Why are comments here always so deliberately vague? I'd like to know which manufacturer. It seems like an important detail.
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.
I need assurance though that my cables were carefully designed.