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Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

I hope they innovate a way to make the naming scheme even more confusing.

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)

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I don't know why you want to coddle normal people with those friendly names.

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 47bd0646

This is actually better than the human-readable scheme because then you can go on AliExpress/Google and actually land on the exact product by matching the hash.

With 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

Heh, good point! But I'm a pessimist. New product names you'll see:

"USB 1e0cdbcc works with 47bd0646 for power"

"USB b5db768f (compatible with 7b36fc51, and improves 1c0733ea; KHTML, like Gecko)"

USB b5db768f Pro MAX Gen 2 Founders Edition

> then you can go on AliExpress/Google and actually land on the exact product by matching the hash.

I'm fairly sure some people would split the hashes up like phone numbers.

No no this is all too confusing. They should take the Apple laptop approach and just come out with new standards every year named like this:

“USB Pro (2022)”

“USB Air (2022)”

With 32-bit hashes you risk a collision. You should use at least a 128-bit GUID for each standard.

No no no, if there's a collision, just append "Full Speed" on the old one, and "High Speed" on the new one. Much simpler.

Then encode GUID as emojis.

I'd go straight for sha512 naming, to make sure there won't be any naming collisions.

If you're really trying to innovate on confusing people, I would suggest some things to deliberately make it harder for people.

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)

Store pages become useless. Search doesn't help.

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.

Don't forget USB 4.Ol

They could also just make all those compatibilities non-optional. Problem solved.

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.

A 1.8 meter USB-C 60w charging cable can go for as cheap as €7. That same cable with high speed bandwidth will set you back €20-35.

Please don’t force everyone to buy (relative) very expensive cables if all they wanna do is charge their phone.

Maybe we should have thought of that ahead of time. USB-C with USB 3, 4 and Thunderbolt just pushed us back into RS232 DB-9 territory where the plug doesn't mean anything anymore, and while a lot of things might physically fit, you won't be able to predict what's going to happen, or if anything will even happen at all.

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'.

If all cables had to be complaint with all features we would see economies of scale that are never going to happen in the current market.

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.

In some respects this is simpler than the current scheme. You don't have the SuperSpeed+ Gen 2x1 and Gen 1x2 variations, which are both the same X Gbps nominal speed, except one uses an older less efficient encoding than the other and is measurably slightly slower in practice

Not far off from something like:

    IEEE 802.11af-2013.

Which I like to read with the "af" translated the popular parlance of it's time.

Now that you put it that way, it should just be USB "4.0-40", where 40 is the transfer speed.

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