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>It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up.

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.

I think it's a reasonable point. A more complex spec is going to be harder to implement correctly.

And more expensive to boot.

It is a valid argument because the more complicated the spec, the easier to mess up the implementation.

Just pick a couple of those USB-C docks on the market and check how many are actually working for you. I used over 10 different USB-C docks from different vendors. It doesn't matter which vendor, they all have various issues. They might be perfectly fine for some machines but lots lots of troubles for some other machines which are also perfectly fine with some of the other docks. I have never seen something worse than that.

>Just pick a couple of those USB-C docks on the market and check how many are actually working for you.

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.

Well, if a spec has no validation procedure, compatibility enforcement or certification, what’s even the point? If the switch isn’t actually working as intended they shouldn’t be allowed to call it usb-c. There should be some minimum mandatory requirements. I haven’t studied these spec, but if there exists a min spec to qualify to call yourself USB and the switch case isn’t covered, OR, there’s no minimum spec, it IS the spec’s fault.

The USB consortium seemingly refuses to do anything that would hamper adoption, even if it's bad for consumers. They could make a list of icons that products can put on if they support. So a cable that supports 15W charging would indicate it with a little icon on the product or packaging. Then mandate a testing procedure, where failure to follow it or lying about the results is trademark infringement.

That's ... exactly what happened?

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.

Hmm, maybe the EU could step in and help regulate this stuff!

>Well, if a spec has no validation procedure, compatibility enforcement or certification, what’s even the point?

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.

Looks this isn’t that complicated, what people want is the ability to know that I all conforming USB-C cables are identical and can be interchanged freely. I don’t give two shits about the devices at the ends not being able to negotiate or different power bricks charging faster or slower.

Issue I had with docks is that I was using the wrong cable. You need a thunderbolt cable that can support higher wattage.

Wasn't USB-C power delivery spec 600pages long on release?

And now with the addition of the 48volt high power charging mode it is even longer with more requirements.

Power and ground wires alone don't cut it sadly when you're dealing with much higher wattages. There needs to be a level of negotiation between the host and the charger to decide on a specific power (current & voltage) that both can support.

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.

> I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful.

The new rules mention that and aim to fix it by demanding clear labels.

I’d like to see where the labels are put. It’s not like there’s a lot of room on a cable for legible printing. And any kind of plastic flag wont last.

You mean the ones on the packaging?

USB-C is infamous for being complex like that, but I think the charging part is basically fine? People talk about the Nintendo Switch often, but I have never heard any _other_ example of something where the charging didn't work, so I think maybe it's a rare exception.

(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.)

I plugged my switch into my laptop and the switch started to charge my laptop. I thought it was funny.

> I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it.

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...

I wanted to get a trimmer with USB-C. Unfortunately, all that I found would not allow c-to-c charging. Only charging from A. The 'A' basically allows a 'hot wire' type charge to go through for power. C-only charging requires negotiation. There's no way to tell up front that the charging is limited like this and manufacturers don't want to highlight it.

You can build your own cable by buying a "USB-C trigger" (as they're called on eBay), it's a board with a USB-C port and a power delivery controller chip that's preconfigured for the specified voltage.

This is the information I needed. Thank you!

Do you have any reason to believe that they "screwed up" due to a spec being complex, over much more likely explanations like.. they simply didn't want to follow the spec?

Thats a very strange statement to make.

Should complex things not have a spec?

My point is that I don't like USB-C because it tries to do everything and manufacturer must implement that "everything" properly which adds cost & frustration.

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?