USB 4 version 2 promises 80 Gbps speeds over existing cables
theverge.com
theverge.com
I choose to believe that there is still time to fix all this.
Here is what they need to do:
* Specify a set of power tiers: 15W, 30W, 100W.
* Specify a set of bandwidth tiers: 10Gbps, 20Gbps, 40Gbps, 80Gbps
* Specify a set of icons representing protocol capabilities (e.g. “DP” for DisplayPort)
* Mandate that every port and cable is labelled with those two numbers and any associated icons.
* Call it USB 5.
* Drop all the “2x2” and “version 2” and “Gen2” and “SuperSpeed+” terminology.
Apologies if I forgot some dimension of USB functionality.
That's the crux. Your first two points already exist, but no one is required to use them, so no one does.
The only way to mandate this is making USB a standard not open as-is (ideally patent-protected). But that is the reason USB succeeded and changing this isn't a good idea.
In the current generation I've seen devices with "DP" used to mean "Power Delivery" instead of "DisplayPort"
Any mandate that is possible to ignore or misinterpret will just add noise.
USB-IF is made up of manufacturers. The primary goal is lower BOM. The confusion is the point. Making everything optional is the point.
USB-IF is not going to adopt a standard that requires every manufacturer to retool or redesign their Widget in order to slap a USB 4 label on it. Why would they vote for that? The whole 2x2/Gen2/etc thing was so some of the members could do some minor revisions then keep shipping their existing chips and products without them being considered "old", with a bit of "design by committee" mixed in.
USB-IF doesn't give two shits what you or I or anyone else thinks about it, nor what our actual experiences with it are. They care about how much it costs. And by cost I mean an $0.01 difference per unit is considered a significant savings.
Could someone ELI5 this line of thinking? Exactly how is a $0.01 saving so consequential? Is a better-performing $9.99 cable too expensive for some people but a $9.98 cable within their budget somehow? Is each manufacturer manufacturing 100 million cables and saving $1M here? What is the logic?
Quick math:
Let's say 1 million cables at $0.50. That costs you $500k. If you get the cost down to $0.49, you just enabled another 20k cables to be manufactured, and another $200k in profit.
1 million for 490k and sold for 10 million is a 9.5 million profit.
10k is a rounding error.
On the device side, the ability to get those few percent extra profitability is the difference between a failed product and a successful one to higher ups. If you give a TPM the option to choose between $0.05 off the BOM and theoretical improvement to reliability, they'll choose the former almost every time.
I remember one product launch that turned into a disaster because it had been cost optimized so hard that the circuit would go slightly out of spec under physical strain and it turned into a yelling match over the few cents of additional plastic in the housing to mitigate the issue.
For a typical cable, it's probably around $0.30 to $0.50 to make, and they tend to sell between $5 and $15, depending on the spec.
For simplicity's sake, we'll assume $0.50 cables that sell for $10. Now, if you save $0.01 in manufacturing, so the cost is now $0.49, and if you sell say 100k cables (feels like a believable amount) then you've saved a cool $1000 in making them. So your profits are $1000 larger now, and you can pat yourself on the back. Good job!
The kicker then is how those profits can be used to make MORE cables. And $1000 of extra profits means $1000 of extra cables. Just over 2000 more, in fact, which you can also sell for $10 each.
Those extra 2000 cables have now earned you a cool $20k of profit ALONE, from only $1000 saved dollars, which itself was from only a single saved cent! Amazing job!
If you keep repeating this, you can probably start to see how this begins to run away:
Even starting with only $1 to make $0.49 cables, you end up earning over $1M on your 19th batch, even if you were spending only 10% of your sales to make new batches of cables and pocketing the other 90%! You actually pocket $1.5M on that batch, and then only spend $167k on the next batch, which promises to earn you even more!
Meanwhile, your competitor making $0.50 cables, starting with a similar $1 and 10% to new batches scheme, would only get to pocket $1.1M on their 19th batch! That $400k is a pretty tidy bonus you've earned.
On your 20th batch, you're selling 80k cables, but your competitor can only afford to sell $60k. We've not even reached the 100k a batch mark, let alone a million cables, and you're already way ahead.
And that's compound interest, folks! From $1, saving only a single cent, we can earn $400k more than we would have otherwise. Outstanding.
EDIT: I took so long to write this that I see andrewstuart2 has summed up the first half of the story far more concisely than I. Nicely done! I feel that compound interest is important for seeing the bigger picture of profit over time, so I'll keep this comment as is.
So I use brand (Anker, amazon basics, Apple, etc) and store (amazon.com, best buy, target, etc) to narrow down the countless cable options.
A penny here, a penny there, and soon you're talking something like $0.15/cable.
If you sell a million cables, that's $150k.
But there's also the fact that people usually buy stuff based on price. If you go on Amazon, as a consumer, you're likely to buy the $3.99 cable over the $4.99 cable.
And with the profit margins necessary that $0.15 cost savings can easily translate to a $1-$1.50 price difference for the end consumer.
Seems like there is a market for cables that are easy to identify.
Yep. If you start looking at it from the point of view of who benefits and who makes the standards, it makes a lot more sense.
The physical connector is terrible and ends up being the first thing to break on a lot of electronics. The labelling is confusing and no one knows what to buy, so you always end up buying more than you need. Motherboard manufacturers were happy to re-label their marketing materials on old boards to say USB 3.1 so they could sell them to unsuspecting consumers that were tricked into thinking 3.1 > 3.0. It goes on and on.
Look at the big picture and it starts to feel like the goal is to create a bad design because it means the manufacturers can sell us more junk.
Wireless charging or dedicated cables are just less painful than power over USB. The idea of running video signal over USB is just cringe inducing.
Besides, wireless charging is much slower and video over wireless introduces lag.
As to recharge speeds, it’s easily comparable with USB. Sometimes USB charging is noticeably faster, but use the wrong charger and USB will be far slower.
https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-...
Wireless charging can do 15+W depending on the phone.
As to the scare quote about 3.5 Billion phones, the charger they mentioned consumes 0.25W when the phone isn’t attached or 6Wh per day that’s the same energy it wastes charging a battery 12Wh per day. You can find many wired wall chargers that waste more than 0.5W when the phone isn’t charging so using one would actually take more energy than using that wireless charger for a single phone.
Wireless is close enough to the fastest possible USB speeds not to worry about it and much faster than the slowest USB speeds.
I travel a lot for business and I will soon be doing the digital nomad thing flying across the United States. I use a portable monitor that is both powered via USB C and does video over USB C.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GG31KX
I also have a few of these truly “universal” USB C cables.
As to wireless, an iPhone 13 pro max can do 15W wireless vs up to 27W with the right USB charger or 2W USB if you happen to plug into the wrong charger without thinking about it. In practice I only charge overnight or while driving so it’s hard to see a practical difference.
Although the cable can passively fall back all the way to USB 2.0, apart from that the only thing that these cables have in common with USB is the name. It's a very high speed serial bus with insane tolerances and complex protocols (even the cables have CPUs in them). So no need to cringe, except at the absurd naming conventions of the USB consortium.
Of course this also means there aren't many chipsets, unfortunately.
Then, we guarantee their safe release given one condition: Anyone whose grandma mails us a fully compliant USB cable gets to go free.
I guarantee the standards body will come to their senses shortly.
But since this is HN:
I'd die in captivity if this was me. Others would get out right away.
From the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Grandparents"[1]:
- People have grandmothers
[...]
- Grandmothers aren't technically competent
[1]: I made this up here and now.
The USB consortium already botched that badly with mini-A, so learned from that in the design of micro-A and then C. C was also influenced heavily by Apple's experience with lightning (Apple is a core member of the USB Consortium).
The physical part of type C is quite good: the nice grounding shell (preferable IMHO to lightning) high frequency design, and most importantly (per your comment) failure is mostly directed to the cable, not the jack (one of mini-A's problems) since a bad cable can be replaced while a damaged jack these days means replacing the device.
AFAIK the Essential phone was brutal for jack failures. My friend (repair shop owner) gave me an LG V60 this year and basically said it’ll be great until the USB-C port wears out.
My newest iPad with USB-C seems like the jack is already flaky while old iPads with lightning ports are all good even with the abuse they have to endure from kids they were handed down to.
I have so little faith in USB-C ports that I’ve started trying to buy magnetic adapters for all my stuff.
People break the stupid wafer trying to clean them.
They suck IMO.
Sadly it's patented so no one else could implement in their laptop.
That's an unfortunate truth and it happens to other standards as well, e.g. HDMI:
> "Products can no longer get certified for 2.0 only for 2.1, and also 2.1 features are optional to implement, so popular features like 4k120, ALLM, VRR are not required," Brad Bramy, VP of marketing and operations for the HDMI LA, confirmed to Ars. "Manufacturers could only implement eARC, for example, and claim to be a 2.1-enabled device."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/the-hdmi-forum-follo...
Bother devices should then have the colors required IN the socket/connector.
This problem can never be solved. Where there are improvements over the same connector, you need some way to identify. Either with a simple solution such as colors or markings, or with on-screen / audio feedback.
The logos for power ratings are visually indistinguishable from the logos for data rate.
So you tell your family member that they need a 40-gigabit cable, they get a 60-Watt cable, and call you back to say it's still not working.
At this point, the USB-IF is beyond incompetence and well over into malice. They hate you all.
For the record, USB PD 3.1 has 28V, 36V, and 48V fixed voltages enabling up to 140W, 180W and 240W:
It's totally possible to deliver 3kw in the form factor of USBC safely. Obviously there needs to be extra circuitry in both ends of the connection, but that extra circuitry should still be cheaper than today's thick dumb AC cables.
Wouldnt that take like 400V? Not sure how safe that would be.
With high voltages, it's all down to how many joules you allow to be dissipated in a human. Ie. Current*voltage*time. Specifically, anything over about 0.01 Joules is dangerous. To use high voltages in a consumer product you need to limit either the current or the time, and you need to do it in a way that is very robust to being chewed on by a baby in a bath. And it needs to be robust to that even when built by a corner-cutting factory.
One approach to that is to have either end of the link 'test' the other end - ie. Simulate a human touching the wire. If power isn't turned off fast enough to be in spec, then the remote end or cable isn't working correctly and shouldnt be used.
To supply 3000W with a 110V supply would require around 28A, which will trip any 10A or 15A breaker commonly found on most house lines going to electrical outlets, but it's well within the realm of something that could be supplied by a circuit equipped with a 30A or higher breaker and qualified wiring.
Of course at 30A or higher, we're talking about things that connect via those bulky connectors you would find on dryers and other high load electronics. Bulky for your safety, mind you.
The utter, utter majority of the world runs on something around ~230V [1], except America and Japan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country#/...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
My stove and clothes dryer are certainly not 120V.
Washing machines too I've heard.
I can't believe this is a modern standard. It looks like marketing deception, not a standard.
Is there anything the requires them to not all support the max feature set, apart from cost - some use case that would break, or be dangerous, or be mutually incompatible with another feature?
TB4 cables over 1.5ft require inline active signal boosting/filtering chips.
It isn't just a question of cost -- if you want a long cable to charge a phone, you'd probably prefer it to be thinner and more flexible, and you don't need the extra power.
If you buy a certified USB4 cable, it has the markings and should work as you expect it to work.
If you buy a cheap Chinese cable, it won't have any markings or it has wrong markings. It won't be possible to mandate that every cheap Chinese cable has correct markings. It would require Amazon or Walmart to do some kind of quality checking for all their sellers, which won't happen. They allow SSD scams, so they also allow USB scams. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628381
That is, until the Chinese get on this fancy new internet thing.
* USB3.1Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is).
* USB3.1Gen2? USB4.
* USB3.2Gen1? USB3 (because it literally is).
* USB3.2Gen2? USB4.
* USB3.2Gen1x2? USB5.
* USB3.2Gen2x2? USB6.
* USB4Gen2x1? USB7.
* USB4Gen2x2? USB8.
* USB4Gen3x1? USB9.
* USB4Gen3x2? USB10.
* USB4v2? USB11.
Power Delivery? Likewise one whole version number (eg: PD100W) based off watts carried, and append that version number to the USB version number.
So for example: USB9 PD100W, USB7 PD30W, etc.
Dead. Fucking. Simple.
The U in USB stands for Universal. The first step to being universal is to be so dead fucking simple even your technologically illiterate grandma can tell things apart.
I hate the Chrome Versioning System, but it is by far dead fucking simple, and USB could use some dead fucking simpleness with its version numbers.
lol there are still HDMI cables without an HDMI logo on them. There are still plain old full speed USB cables without the USB logo on them. China alone will destroy this single requirement and laugh as they sell hundreds of millions of cables per year.
I really do wish it were possible to mandate this. Things would be easier.
* Somehow get all manufacturers to only create quality cables complying with the standard whose capabilities match what they say they do.
That won’t happen. Some manufacturer will start making a cable that’s longer than what the spec says is possible, or will try to get away with a bit less shielding or a bit less conductor in the cables than what the spec requires, or will decrease quality control, so that their cables are fine, on average, but 1:1000 buyers will get a melon that’s sub-spec.
* They do specify power tiers, 15W is the minimum for chargers, 30W I believe is the minimum for power delivery cables, with cables being additionally certified (and marked) for 60W, 120w and 240W.
* A certified cable with USB-C ports on both ends should be a USB cable, full-stop. Negotiation of alt modes is up to the devices on both ends.
The problem is that there are a lot of vendors that use garbage terms like USB 3.2 2x2, which were never meant for the market at all. I suspect this is usually a consequence of those products not actually being certified, and thus avoiding using the official marks.
IMHO, that there was anything publicly talking about "USB 3.2 2x2" is a side effect of the USB-IF not having the teeth to enforce use of the "USB" mark. Vendors would start using the right terms and running basic conformance if, say, they found they were no longer able to get their products imported. But the Implementers Forum is made up of the same vendors who are shipping broken devices, cheap charging cables, and motherboards with spec-invalid ports.
When many people talk about USB 3.2, people assume there is some sort of semantic versioning of the port or cables itself. Thats not how specs work - everything which was USB 3.0 compliant is USB 3.2 compliant. If you want to mandate new things or break old ones, you create a new version like USB4.
Many people have the same problem with HDMI 2.1a - there is no device certified with HDMI 2.0 that is incompatible with HDMI 2.1a. Thus, advertising 2.1a support means _nothing_ compared to advertising HDMI 2 support in general. It was a marketing failure that the HDMI licensing organization allowed vendors to use version numbers to imply _anything_, vs advertising that the devices you are connecting support features like 8K/60 or VRR.
Though it wasn’t exactly more bits or what v6 solves: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol
I humbly propose:
USB 4.0Gen 0a (USB 1.0 speeds)
USB 4.0Gen 0b (USB 2.0 speeds)
USB 4.0Gen 1 (also USB 2.0 speeds)
USB 4.0Gen 1z (USB 1.0 speeds again)
USB 4.0 (20 Gbps)
USB 4.0e (40 Gbps)
USB 4.0Gen 2a (also 40Gbps)
USB 4.0Gen 2e (80 Gbps)
USB 4.0Gen 2f (charging only)Want USB 2.0 but not USB 3.0 or 4.0? Just put a USB 2.0 port on the damn device.
Want USB 4.0 but faster? Name it USB 5.0. USB 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 all used the same plug and nobody is confused about that. Same applies to USB-C and USB 4: either you implement it (fully) or if you don't want to: implement legacy USB instead.
Please don’t force everyone to buy (relative) very expensive cables if all they wanna do is charge their phone.
That cheap cable probably also has an even cheaper variant that simply sets itself on fire if you put more than 10W through it. And that variant might only support USB 2.0 and as such transfer speeds are so bad people now have to think in terms of 'which one was my slow cable'.
The high speed cable might never be as cheap as €7, but in a couple years it could be €9-11.
I'm sure at some point high speed cables will be a lot cheaper than they are now, but as long as the make up a small percentage of the market they will command a big premium.
I propose that they version each standard with the last 8 characters of a hash of the standard itself.
Using your humble list, here's the improved one:
USB 845fee48
USB cf580d60
USB ea95d69e
USB 1e0cdbcc
USB ee846eec
USB 1c0733ea
USB 7b36fc51
USB b5db768f
USB 47bd0646With human-readable names, the product pages start to have too much creative freedom like "USB 3.0 3.1 Gen 1 2" which becomes hell for browsing, as now the people buying get to be blamed if they make a wrong purchase
"USB 1e0cdbcc works with 47bd0646 for power"
"USB b5db768f (compatible with 7b36fc51, and improves 1c0733ea; KHTML, like Gecko)"
I'm fairly sure some people would split the hashes up like phone numbers.
“USB Pro (2022)”
“USB Air (2022)”
To take just a first pass over your suggestions - creative use of case, and letters/numbers that could easily be confused.
USB 4.01 (USB 1.0 speeds)
USB 4.0L (USB 1.0 speeds again)
USB 4.0i (40 Gbps)
USB 4.0l (80 Gbps)
USB 4.0f (charging only)
Can you imagine asking the Office manager to buy some USB 4.0l cables for your high-speed 80Gbit devices -- but what turns up is a USB 1.0 cable.
IEEE 802.11af-2013.
2. The charging speed is fundamentally constrained by how thick the cable is. So thick cables are very likely fast-charge cables (they wouldn't spend the extra money on lower-gauge copper if they weren't going to need it for something), and thin cables definitely aren't.
Also there are cables that bulk up on insulation to pretend to be more premium.
Passive ones are available in multiple lengths up to 2 meters, but only go half speed above .5 meters.
I so far haven't chopped up any usb-c cables, but I don't see why to expect any different.
In a way, this is actually fine too — the conductor itself can be higher-resistance, as long as there's enough shielding to prevent the heat the conductor puts out from setting anything on fire. (Basically, following the same rules for sheath thickness as in-wall cabling uses.)
The only real practical difference, for most people, will be that anything electrically connected to the "thick sheath, thin conductor" cable, will get very hot. (And also, if you use such a cable to connect a device to a portable battery bank, you'll find you get your battery bankk will run dry sooner than expected, since your cable is acting as an additional load.)
The bigger issue is that the insulation material will degrade over time if it's consistently exposed to temperatures that are too high, and at that point it becomes a safety hazard because the conductors are no longer properly protected. So typically cables with a higher temperature rating will have insulation and/or an outer jacket made with different materials.
For mains leads, this usually means you're "grounding" heat into:
1. the device itself, usually at the power supply. The heat dead-ends between the coils of a transformer, this being why high-wattage PSUs have fans.
2. your wall — specifically, your wall junction-box power sockets, at the point that the device's power lead's male connector touches the faceplate of the wall socket. This is why you'll often see slight electrical singing on such sockets when you're operating e.g. a portable air conditioner or microwave on a 120V 16A socket: despite most of the heat following the thermal conductive path of the cable into your house wiring, some of the heat ends up transferring into the air where the thicker insulator ends, through the bare contacts, and into the plastic of the wall-socket faceplate.
3. The rest of the house, through the thermal conductive path of the house wiring — the house wiring, being lower-gauge and so needing relatively thinner insulation, leaks heat more readily than the sort of "super-insulated" cables made for high-amperage appliances, and so the heat is gradually sloughed off all over your walls.
4. Your neighbourhood electrical distribution box. Despite heat leaking through your house, modern residential wiring's electrical insulation is still thick enough, that if you're using enough household load to just be barely below tripping your mains breaker, you're probably heating up your neighbourhood distribution box. Ever noticed one humming really loudly when you walk by? Just like your computer's PSU, these have active cooling that goes harder when houses are dumping heat at them.
Note also that this is among the reasons that industrial power routing (for e.g. factories, mills, etc) doesn't use insulated NM in-wall wiring (Romex), but instead routes individual [lightly-insulated, essentially just for electrical separation] conductors through metal conduit, with as little in-wall routing of that metal conduit as possible. The metal conduit is a heat sink for the conductors — such installations are trying to take on the responsibility of dumping electrical waste heat locally, so that they don't overheat their nearby electrical distribution station, or produce line sag on the poles connecting them to it!
It works great, although I'd like a microcontroller added that can display the standard rather than looking up the connections myself.
Over existing Thunderbolt 4 cables, it appears. So not USB 2.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1, or USB 3.1 Gen 2 cables.
But I have an important question I haven't seen anyone address - does the 80 Gbps performance means the eGPUs will be that much less constraint? Will this enable true gaming and AI work with a laptop connected to an eGPU?
I want my computer to warn me if I plug in a faulty cable. Or a cable that is preventing some functionality of the device - eg. Lowering speeds or charging slower than it could.
Probably a matter of time before they do on that matter, too.
Wired networking standardization tends to be lead by groups that want to use the technology and also sell it, rather than by groups that mostly want to sell it. There still were four competing 100M ethernet standards, and now a fifth 100Base-T1 has appeared (but targetting specific niches).
If all that changed between USB1.0 and USB 4 version 2 (or wtf it ends up being called) was twisting the pairs more (more or less), the cabling issues would be less too.
Telephones and other telecommunication devices have been mandated to use RJ connectors for decades!
How would USB C ever become “a standard” if no one could come out with one first because they had to wait on the law to change?
BTW, USB C is not “mandated” yet. If they did “mandate” it, are they going to “mandate” that the cords standardize on a power delivery? video out? A certain data speed? Protocols the vendors must support?
Will “the standard” be like the indecipherable 99 section 11 chapter GDPR that made the web worse and festered with cookie pop ups?
The free market also came up with these.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092ZT8CJ9?
They are in my go bag.
And guess what? None of the companies that exist solely to track users had to change anything because of the GDPR. But one private company - Apple - forced app developers to allow users to opt in to tracking and companies like Facebook announced that it affected their revenue by billions.
Maybe the government isn’t effective at regulating tech?
So the GDPR changed things by making it so you can't just inform the user about tracking, you must also give the user the option to say no which is why the next gen of banners have opt out options.
Interesting. Do you have more details on this or links to related readings?
Maybe some kind of very high end VR headset?
I would absolutely love to have full speed external NVME drives.
Does this indicate that you can potentially hook up a PCIE 4.0 x4 or PCI 3.0 x8 enclosure over USB4v2?
I'll never miss communism but the fact is that here in Eastern Europe we had an actual agency that vetted various cheese and milk and sausage products with class A, B, C etc.
You knew what you were getting for your money. I miss that.
At one point the world has to return to it -- constantly swindling the consumers is not a sustainable business strategy.
I’m a free market, no government intervention guy for non-necessities like phones. Less a fan of such an approach on basics. Still needs to be lighter touch. Food should be heavier handed since it leads to healthcare outcomes and productivity losses.
Imagine having a slot for an usb-stick in your notebook, which contains your hard drive. Laptop broken? take your usb-stick and a new Laptop and off you go working again.
Actually I just realized thats what I want.
Want a backup? put stick in Nas and wait 30 minutes.
Want a new PC? take your win10 install and go.
Private surfing on employer hardware? Put the stick into the machine and remove the other one.
PS: I do realize that booting from USB is a thing since a long time, this "vision" is more like an actual end to end concept and, you know, 80GB ps ;)
The USB folks have a good thing in USB-C at the current 3.X revision. Let it simmer for a while. Introduce Thunderbolt 5 if someone really needs that kind of bandwidth, but let USB4 mature before inflicting it on the world.
(ok, it's not quite /that/ bad, but you get the sentiment)
Maybe make their physical shapes different enough so that you can't connect things which fail catastrophically together?
But if you wan these top Mbps or W, or want 60 Hz 4k video, you may find out that not everything works with everything else, and proper cables play a crucial role, while being visually not distinctive at all.
The only thing it improved over was the hellscape if charging ports.
There are some cables that show the power throughput [1], I would like to see cables that show data throughput as well.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Charging-Display-Wattage-Braided-Tran...
Myself, I ran into an incompatibility for the first time ever last week in over 24 years of using USB devices. A new Thinkpad with Windows 10 would lock up it's USB bus if I plugged a USB speaker in using the hub on my Dell monitor. Hooking it up directly worked fine. These are all "legacy" USB 3.0 devices with Type A and Type B connectors, and have worked for years with other computers (PC + Mac). What a shitshow USB has become.
And i'm not alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPtcKycQeI
An example of a slower and less dumb way to run our ecosphere into the ground: I convert all podcasts I listen and want to keep to opus @ 20 kbit/s which on average results in 1/5 of the original file size.
But that's the cheap shot at your slightly ranting arguments. USB isn't going to run us into the ground. Transport uses up so incredibly much more energy, almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment. Cooling and heating too, obviously. Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment.
True. I never claimed otherwise.
> ...almost none of which comes from sustainable sources at the moment.
I know. The world is roughly at 80 % fossil energy right now, as far as I remember.
Trust me on this, energy is one of the topics I spend time reading and thinking about several times a day.
> Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment.
Here's the thing. It's about this mentality of: this small thing here doesn't really matter. But people in this "ever more culture" reliably put one "small thing" after the other in their basket of consumption capacity .. until it's full.
These people ask "I can have more, why shouldn't I?" rather than "I can have more, do I really want/need more?"
Do you enjoy watching your movie at 8k 4 times more than at 4k because it comes with 4x the pixels? If you do, I pity you.
I recently watched some Linus Tech Tips video where he installs their 1 PB of storage and boasts about their new camera that can record videos with a data rate of 300 MB/s ... 1 TB per 3 seconds ... yeah! ... sorry (not sorry), despite all my fascination with tech, this attitude is just so heinously wasteful and damaging.
As if these hundreds of HDDs hadn't taken any ressources and weren't consuming quite a bit of electricity.
Again ..
> Don't worry about a better USB cable if you're really concerned with the environment.
I don't worry about the cable. I worry about the f*** up culture/attitude.
Yea, no .. people should have fun and do the things they want. But being needlessly wasteful while doing them is just asocial because in the end it hurts the whole ecosphere.
I want to store the podcasts I listen to so I do. But I do it in a way that doesn't need TBs of disk space.
Besides, the conversion is only necessary because the content is delivered in utterly over the top bitrate.
And also, once I've converted a file to lower bitrate, from then on every time I do something with it (play, copy, ...) it will consume less energy than doing the same thing with the large original file.