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Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

A big mistake was turning the cables from passive wires connecting two ports into things needing active circuitry in the plug. Average consumers don’t think like this. They just want the “iPhone to USB” cable. Some consumers won’t understand why cable A is any different than cable B. After all, they both have the USB C thingy on both ends.

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The problem is that on the one hand they want to enable USB-c to be low cost and universal for all devices. But on the other hand you want USB-C to support 100W and 240W charging but it’s not cost effective to put enough copper to carry 100-240W in your average low cost phone cable.

So the cable needs something active to indicate it’s capability. So you don’t melt it.

I imagine you could do this passively with some differently valued resistors in the cable.

Or even actively by the charged device reporting the voltage on its end. Too much current, high voltage drop, better decrease the current.

That would only occur during the overcurrent event. Robust engineering would not only try to correct existing overcurrent events but also to prevent them.

That's just reality and there is not a way around it. If you want the cable to be removable at both ends, more than an inch long, and really really fast, then it has to be active.

Aren't passive DisplayPort cabbles really really fast, and longer than 1 inch?

DisplayPort cables don't carry PCIe lanes.

True, but DP 2.0 is 20 Gb/s/lane and PCIe 4.0 is 16 GT/s/lane. Unless I'm missing something, those data rates aren't that far apart.

They could mandate icons, same as USB, USB 2 and USB 3 all have their own icons, usually displayed on cables and receiving ports.

That would require actually acknowledging versions like "USB 1" and "USB 2", but the standards group would rather use retroactively-changing nonsense like "USB 3.2 Gen 1".

So, if we all close our eyes, the problem goes away.

That would open them to liability of being sued by disabilities groups, because the tiny icons will be very difficult to see on the increasingly tiny connectors.

As I see it, if there are these active circuitry in the plug (and there is) it should provide "answers to questions", I don't think that the final user would be overly upset if he/she attempted to use a cable to (say) connect to a monitor and the OS would interrogate the cable and:

1) OK, this cable is fine for sending video to monitor xxxx

2) Sorry but this cable is not suited for video transmission

3) This cable seems to be monodirectional, try reverting it

...

etc.

The issue is when you have a bunch of cables, all either white or black that you cannot distinguish, and you have to try all of them, hoping to have a suitable one (alternatively they could have made them "colour coded", like, say, black 5 V charge only , yellow dual voltage, green charge + video, etc., even with just a small colour dot on the connectors )

And at the prosumer / pro level people don't even want to think at all.

Complex, fragile connection are just a chore for the average person. It means failure on the job, delay, stress.

Unless they invest in more marketing so people get the message and stronger builds (alas for instance DELL thunderbolt docking station are not solid yet)

> for instance DELL thunderbolt docking station are not solid yet

Neither are their USB-C docks. IT wraps the USB-C connector with tape by default, because it will otherwise break in 4 weeks after handing it out. It's a shame considering the price for those docking stations.

Oh yeah I was quite shocked to see the price.

It's mostly a fail because it does too much and the part people need it (rapid and sturdy docking/coupling) is absent.

Alas

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