Hacker News Reader

Comment by xaduha | Hacker News Reader

In practice it has never been smoother for me. If I come across a crappy cable that isn't up to snuff I can easily get rid of it, I already have more than I need. It's not like previously when you had to keep some rare cables in case you needed them once in a blue moon.

View on HN

I'm the same way in that I just have a collection of quality cables that do pretty much everything one could reasonably ask (i.e. excluding obviously special things like "I needed an optical thunderbolt cable to deliver 40 Gbps 20 meters why isn't it delivering 90 watt PD as well!") however I can see for those that don't want to spend a lot of money (keep in mind "a lot" is extremely relative) on a bunch of cables and just want to use the cheap cables they accumulate the lack of being able to easily look at such cables and see what they are capable of without a secret decoder ring as a frustrating thing type c brought. At least with the older ones either looked like it would fit or it wouldn't or the color of the ends matched.

You made me think of my own experience and indeed I realize since usb-c how much better connecting things has been. I'm down to one micro USB device and connecting to it is so annoying. USB-c is great, and I hope Apple products switch too so there is truly a single cable type to connect everything.

I use a little usb-c to micro USB adapter for my only remaining devices, though I plan on converting them to usb-c.

Agreed. Being able to drive two 4K monitors, charge my laptop, and attach a USB hub via one USB-C connector is well worth the tradeoff of occasional incompatibility with cheap cables.

In an initial flurry of enthusiasm I bought a bunch of high-quality cables and I'm very glad I did. I can keep duplicate cables around in certain pockets etc. and I know I can always connect stuff. I had always used default supplier cables and these fancy ones feel much better in daily usage.

It's awesome being able to plop down on the couch and plug my laptop into a Nintendo Switch charger, that I also use to chargey phone. Charging a laptop before USB-C was an ordeal because I only had one specialised charger with a proprietary plug. Now I have half a dozen spread around the house and car.

Between the proprietary plugs and USB-C, we had the dark ages of micro-USB which somehow always came loose after a few weeks of use

Funny that you mention Nintendo Switch, because Nintendo made a non-standard implementation of usb-c there and connecting console to the standard compliant cable and charger can brick or fry the console. Perfect example of USB-Confusion :)

I never had an issue with bricking but it is a bit hard to find power bricks that output 15V, which is what the dock requires.

The rant about "proprietary chargers" for laptops was also untrue, there was uniform 19V brick-type power supply units with uniform 5.5mm barrel connector for at least 15 years.

We live in a different world. I'd like to live in yours! Prior to usb c my Hp Dell and Lenovo, all in their enterprise line favouring practicality over fashion and looks, all used wildly different chargers. Even Lenovo alone, in that 15 year span, had round and rectangle tips with 12 and 20v.

That's simply not true. I had three different laptops from 2010 to 2021: an Acer Inspiron (I think that's what it was called), a Dell Latitude, and a Surface Pro 3. All used different chargers. The Surface used Microsoft's proprietary magsafe connector, and the others used different-sized barrel jacks. I currently have a Dell XPS 13 which charges over USB-C.

Oddly, the Acer charger was the same as for an Acer 27" monitor I had, which came in handy once or twice.

Charger for monitor? Curiouser and curiouser.

You could call it a power supply, because the monitor obviously had no battery.

I love usb-c to death but "occasional incompatibility with cheap cables" is a bit misleading.

There is frustratingly little relation between price and quality. I have literally spent hundreds of dollars on usb-c-cables and I haven't even attempted to do displayport or thunderbolt through one, and I still don't own any that I'd expect to work on a lot of scenarios.

If price isn’t a primary consideration, get a Thunderbolt 4 cable and be confident it will work everywhere, particularly if it’s an active TB4 cable:

https://chrisbergeron.com/2021/07/25/Ultra-fast-Thunderbolt-...

I’ll second this. I follow this advice and have never been let down.

They cost $30 and still not support 240W. It would be an easier advice to consumer if they were $19.

> They cost $30... It would be an easier advice to consumer if they were $19.

It'd be easier if it were $0 too but what does that have to do with anything? $30 is what it costs to make a cable that can do high speed data, high speed display, and high power. If you want a cable that does all of this it's going to cost more than a cable that doesn't. If you want a cable that's cheaper and doesn't do everything that is also an option. Apart from both options being available anyways this problem has nothing to do with USB standards.

> and still not support 240W

When the brand new standard actually hits the shelf you'll be able to get a TB4 240W cable, as of now there just aren't any 240W cables in general. Also not supported: USB 6 and 2 kW PD or anything else from the future instead of present.

Type C is an interface specification not a guarantee that you're $19 cable will be compatible everything man could desire to implement in your lifetime.

>Type C is an interface specification not a guarantee that you're $19 cable will be compatible everything man could desire to implement in your lifetime.

Except that is exactly what a lot of people think Type C will and should provide. And whether you agree with that they think or not is an entirely different question.

My other reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29452173

Whether people think it will or won't isn't the question - it's not the USB standards that make this ask is impossible.

Won't you still need rare cables in case you need them (idk, a usb-b cable for instance...), and couldn't you already throw away whatever cable you wanted and buy some more as it pleases you ? What I mean is, the previous situation also little issues if you were willing to throw money at it, as you seem to be doing now.

Even as beard shavers and display monitors have come to support USB-C, I still don't see how people can get rid of their A->C cables, or not keep around lower standard 3m long cables because thunderbolts ones aren't sold in these length, or still need a cable for their camera etc.

Replace throwing away with putting in box if you like. There's less need for those cables, because there are fewer devices that need them. But you gotta work on that, I also have a bunch those magnetic cables, so it's either USB-C or device with a magnetic adapter plugged into it with a cable.

I switched to usb-c as much as I could. I recently travelled for a month with all my battery-powered work and personal stuff (2 MacBooks (one Intel and one M1), 2 iPhones, Nintendo Switch, game controller, mouse (that one is micro usb), headphones and shaver). I brought only the following as a trial: 1 Anker 45W GaN charger[1], 1 30cm usb-c lightning cable, 1 1m usb-c cable, 1 usb-A to C adapter, 1 usb-C to A adapter which went unused, and 1 usb-c to micro adapter.

It went better than I expected. Sometimes I used the A-C adapter to trickle charge stuff in the hotel when I was out, taking my own charger with me for the day, and other than that just rotating what I was charging. The 45W charger is not much bigger than an OG iPhone charger and had no problem with my 16” MacBook. The difference in charging time to the Apple 87W charger wasn’t noticed.

One bonus I did not anticipate. You know how some cheap devices have usb-c charging that only seems to work with a USB-A to C cable? The adapters I mentioned can work around that.

One thing want to do but not tried yet is convert a few micro-usb things to usb-c. You can get convenient little breakout boards for it on Aliexpress.

[1] https://us.anker.com/products/a2664111

I have a similar packaging when traveling, except with two chargers instead of one (macbook’s fast charger and one for the rest of the divices). For comparison, before USB-C I needed the Macbook magsafe charger, two USB-A to lightning cables and a 4 or 5 USB-A to micro USB cables for the appliances. When the Switch arrived it shared the USB-C charger of the 16” macbook when traveling.

Basically I feel the type of cables changed but I am not traveling much lighter not has it become that easier on managing stuff. I still think USB-C is fine, better than micro USB on so many respects, I just don’t feel the revolutionary aspect yet.

Perhaps we’ll be there in 5 years? If we din’t end up with new fragmentation on the wireless charging part.

this is the solution, the only problem is that it requires you to spend money (the full-featured USB-C cables are expensive) and throw things out, two things most people hate doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com