The issue with the Nintendo Switch is that Nintendo designed their own faulty USB-C charging implementation rather than merely using the reference design. It's not a failure of the spec, it's a failure to adhere to the spec.
[0] https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en_gb/-nintendo-switch-power-ad...
With the switch it's the screwed up USB-C implementation and the fact that you can't use bluetooth headphones (it has BT support, but only for the controllers)
With the DS, the wifi only supported WEP, not WPA, even though WPA2 had been released by the time the DS came out
The Wii famously didn't support HD output.
Multiple devices on one Bluetooth controller have to timeslice in 4 millisecond (iirc) chunks. Audio devices in a high quality mode consume a substantial amount of the overall bandwidth. It also doesn't matter if your packet consumes the full size of a chunk of not, all of them are equally sized. You'd have to do two audio chunks and one controller chunk * 2 controllers to maintain a 60 Hz sample rate on the controllers.
> the EU simply said that "consumers will be provided with clear information on the charging characteristics of new devices, making it easier for them to see whether their existing chargers are compatible.
Which is super disappointing, as the person who wrote TFA clearly didn't read anything other than the press release. The actual supporting documentation is here [0] and says:
> on the packaging or a label, manufacturers would have to provide information on specifications relating to charging capabilities, in line with annex Ia (amended Article 10(8) RED). This includes a description of the wired chargers' power requirements (the text displayed should read: 'The minimum power delivered by charger shall be equal or higher than [xx] watts') and specifications on charging capabilities ('USB PD fast charging' and an indication of any other supported charging protocols).
Which is still not great - this doesn't cover cables for example, and it doesn't guarantee that it will be printed on the device. Here [1] are apples chargers in the UK - unless they're side by side it's impossible to tell which one of those chargers is which, and even at that unless you know for sure one of the devices is X, its' really quite difficult to tell.
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BR... [1] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/accessories/all/made-by-apple?...
Nintendo will have to get its crap together and properly support Power Delivery, the burden is not on you.
- New, more secure boot sequence
- Updated Nvidia Tegra board
- ~20% better battery life
- Reinforced chassis design
It seems likely that they took the opportunity with Mariko to redesign their charging ICs to be more tolerant. I heartily recommend looking up some of the more subtle differences between the models too, it's really interesting to see how Nintendo updated a mass-market product without anyone really noticing.
As another poster mentioned, however, they will only dock with the OEM charger.
Seems like whatever is happening with the OG switch USB-C implementation it’s not straightforward.
[1] https://switchchargers.com/how-nintendo-switch-charging-work... -- scroll down to "Nintendo Switch Dock"
[2] e.g. https://skullnco.com/collections/nintendo-switch/products/ju... and https://www.gulikit.com/productinfo/506086.html
I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence.
The problem is that USB C is a massive spec with a lot of things that aren’t always needed in it (display, pd, high data speeds etc). You can either design your product to implement a lot more things (eg Macs) or skimp out and cause confusion (Switch). By breaking the standard, people effectively have to buy your charger or cables to know it’ll work. If I have to either buy a high end product or buy cables and chargers only from the original brand, we aren’t really any better off with this.
Really? You've never seen a power only micro-usb cable (missing 2 bus lines)? I have dozens from all types of devices that use USB as a charging only connector.
This has been a problem with every USB iteration (hard to have the U in USB if you aren't able to handle a wide variety of applications), but I vastly prefer it to the early 00s when you might have 5 different cables to each "specialty" application.
Afaik if you don't need these you can just implement the parts you need e.g. charging.
I'm sure that's not it. I'm sure it was
"Hey product manager. We can launch in 6 weeks if this port accepts power and connects to a dock, or 36 weeks if we need to conform to standards in section 17, subsection 5 part 41.2B of standard 1120 on European code B7"
"what does <standards> get us"
"Nothing, we don't need those features. Also it'll add $25 to the bill of materials"
"ignore it then, we want to launch sooner and increase our margin."
Maybe apple had it right originally to have “thunderbolt” as a super powerful all-in-one cable (except add power) and we needed a simple “reversible micro usb” for everything else.
Compare that with USB-A where even cheap Chinese cables from the lowest bidder usually work (work well enough at least - you might get voltage drop but it will still charge if you leave it on long enough) because the spec is so simple that even the worst manufacturers manage to do a good enough job, and it's something you can trivially DIY if you need to.
Now compare that with USB-C. So many moving parts that can go wrong and so much corners that can be cut by unscrupulous manufacturers. Not to mention that even the most expensive devices (Apple) don't give you any visibility on what type of cable/charger/etc you have even though that information is technically available to the device (that's how it negotiates power delivery) which is extremely confusing even to tech-savvy people.
Should complex things not have a spec?
Compare USB-C power delivery and the 12-pin cable & connector with USB-A's 4 pins and a resistor on the data lines to communicate allowed current draw, or even a barrel jack with the standard 19V ~3A PSU and no negotiation at all. Which one is the easiest to build (hint: one is easy enough to DIY) and which one is more reliable?
In USB-A this was accomplished through a hodge-podge of different resistances applied across data lines, not officially part of the standard but just done by manufacturers. USB-C is a huge improvement on this.
I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. Maybe some kinda tier system could help. Every charger, cable and device could have a class. The charging rate is the lowest of the three. E.g. a "Class 5 cable will charge up to 200 watts and has a pink end". If you pair that with a Class 2 charger (say, 50 watts) and a class 3 laptop (100 watts) you'll be limited to charging your laptop at 50 watts.
The new rules mention that and aim to fix it by demanding clear labels.
People and companies can screw thing up royally regardless of spec complexity when there's no review/oversight involved. That's not a valid argument.
If you want to force and check adherence to a spec you need to involve certification authorities (TÜV, SGS, UL, etc.) but then widget prices would increase dramatically.
Edit: to address the child comments below: who gets to be the judge of the complexity of the spec? If Nintendo fucked it up but some EE students can get it right through side projects on github, does that make the spec complex or does that make Nintendo incompetent (lacks a HW review/qualification process)?
The spec could be as simple as "white wire goes to positive terminal, black wire goes to negative terminal" and there's still the chance of an implementation fuckup in the design pipeline, especially in large projects/companies with distributed siloed teams like Nintendo due to poor internal communication, if there is no proper internal review/qualification process in the design loop.
Edit 2: I looked at the USB-C charging specs and they're easy enough to understand for any graduate EE and for any company who's had some basic experience with USB as a whole, let alone 100 year old multi-billion HW conglomerates like Nintendo.
IMHO, Nintendo's USB-C charging fuckup is 100% on them. I wish people would stop needlessly defending them here.
Edit 3: Also, what if Nintendo intentionally chose not to follow the spec in order to force the users to use and buy only original parts from them? Either way, incompetence or malice, you really can't blame the spec here.
1) How is it the spec's fault that random OEMs go to extreme cost cutting measures in order to price dump themselves to the bottom by not following the spec? Of course they won't work properly.
But again, for the 100th time, that's not the specs fault that manufacturers actively choose to ignore it.
If a driver chooses to knowingly run a red light, is it automatically the fault of the spec (the highway code) ?
2) You're moving the goalposts. We are talking about USB-C charging spec here that's super easy to follow, and Nintendo didn't, not USB-C docs with display-port and other fluff. So this dock example doesn't apply to Nintendos' refusal to follow the charging spec.
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_pow...
(for an older example without cable ratings: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb-if_logo_usage_gu...)
It's just that no one cares.
Some vendors now let the USB-IF compliance test most products (Amazon Basics, Apple), but no consumer cares. Even amongst the ones which do certify their product, no one uses the logo.
What is the point of anything then? Most pieces of tech we take for granted are an unregulated bundle of specs that more or less work together with one another most of the time well enough to be valued at several trillions and be in every household.
If you want to regulate and certify every USB-C cable in your household then increase prices would stop the adoption of any such tech and you would then complain about the costs and over-regulation.
The EU is already regulating USB-C into place. How much more regulation do you want?
Let's not let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'good'. Remember 20 years ago when every phone and electronic widget in your house came with its own proprietary cable and proprietary interface and included CD with proprietary Windows-only software to work? Yeah! Lost the original cable/dock with the proprietary 20-pin connector? Good luck with that mate.
Yes, USB-C still has teething problems due to manufacturers cutting costs and fighting tooth and nail against standardization so they can keep their walled garden rent seeking models of the past (remember Sony shoving their proprietary Memory-Stick everywhere despite SD cards having won?), but despite these issues, we've never had it so good in terms of cross-compatibility as we have it today and this push for USB-C everything is a step in the right direction.
And now with the addition of the 48volt high power charging mode it is even longer with more requirements.
The minimum requirements are that you have to support the USB 2.0 protocol:
> While BC1.2 is still supported over USB Type-C because it depends on the USB2.0 lane, a significantly simplified and higher power current capability mechanism is also implemented. This simplified approach involves resistor pull-down/ pull-up relationships. These pull-down/pull-up resistors are connected to the CC wire and the upstream facing port (UFP) must monitor the voltage on the CC1 and CC2 pins in order to detect the current sourcing capability of the down- stream facing port (DFP) it is connected to. This is a substantial improvement over the complicated handshake mech- anisms involved with USB BC1.2.
> The basic USB Type-C current capabilities are Default USB (500mA for USB2.0 and 900mA for USB3.0), 1.5A@5V, and 3A@5V.
* https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001953a.pd...
(This is distinct from the "fast charging" mode(s?), which does seem to have compatibility problems. But in that case, the failure mode is that device charges slowly, which is probably not a big issue for the kind of small phones/gadgets that the EU regulation targets. The previous standard was micro-USB, which can't do fast-charging anyway.)
Which means 1 spec is not sufficient for interoperability