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Comment by pmalynin | Hacker News Reader

When are we going to hear about USB4.1 2x2 Gen 1 V2? Surely that will be compatible with existing cables.

I was SURE they had learned their lesson after the clusterfuck that was 3.1/3.2 but no, right back at the same shit again.

It's hard to see this as anything but purpose-built to make it harder to tell what a cable is capable of (a huge boon to scammers, aka: 90% of cable sellers). If the USB-IF had half a brain between them all (clearly they don't) they would require the data/charging/etc specs to be printed on the cable. Instead they spend their time coming up with confusing standards that are indecipherable to the average person which lead to a shitty world where everyone needs a cable tester to know what a cable is capable of, or they have constant bad experiences with a cable that fits the port but underperforms if it works at all.

I've heard some people say this is because it's all marketing-driven vs engineering-driven, if that's the case the fire the whole department because they suck at marketing. It's gotten to the point the only cables I can trust are from Anker and even those suffer from lack of labeling on them.

Can you recommend a reliable cable tester?

I wish, I've looked a little but part of the problem is the new specs. I doubt many testers can be "forward compatible" to be able to test new specs before they exist. I have an old USB-A tester I used but it's obviously useless for USB-C and all it's specs. Even then, the old tester I have just tells you the speed/wattage, not the max, it's more for monitoring than testing.

At some point I'll just have to bite the bullet and get whatever is on the market and hope there aren't new specs right around the corner.

I believe Totalphase tests signal integrity instead of specifically what kind of cable it is - which solves the forward compatibility problem but their stuff is very expensive for the home user

You can get little USB power meters but they only tell you voltage and current, not transfer capability. Actual cable testers cost thousands.

>Actual cable testers cost thousands.

Why? Surely there could be some SBC or something for like $100 which you could connect to your computer. The testing software can measure how long it takes to transfer a file. Then it could try charging itself from the computer requesting a higher and higher wattage. I don't see how a device like that could be so expensive.

So that measures transfer speeds, but what about the rest of the things USB carries?

Here's an example of the data that cable testers can give you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFbJD6RE4EY

The goal is to determine the type of cable. Testing the signal quality is an entirely different thing.

Yeah, I would like a test device that could let me know which transfer rates a cable supports. I've got a huge pile of USBC cables (and adapters). A good chunk of them might even be USB 2.0!

It seems like a device capable of acting as a host & device could just try to shove data down a cable and see what the max is...

On the Mac, there's a simple way to check cables:

Take a USB3 device, plug it in with the cable, and then go to System Profiler (Apple Menu -> About this Mac -> System Profiler). Look for the device, and check the speed. If it says 480MB/s it's a USB 2 cable, if it says 5GB/s, 10GB/s or 20GB/s then it's a USB3 cable.

I assume there's a way to do the same thing on Windows and Linux.

I just tested that, and it works. Using a Samsung T7 SSD. Clever. Now I wonder if a similar trick works for power capabilities?

There's $50-200USD USB PD meters on AliExpress. I like Ruideng / RD-Tech brand ones.

Coconut battery shows how much power your battery is charging with. I've only used this to compare power supplies, but I don't see why it shouldn't work with cables as well. Of course that only works when the battery is empty enough to actually fast charge.

It would be helpful if the connectors for the different cables had different shapes, so it would be immediately obvious what kind of cable it is and mostly prevent plugging incompatible cables into the wrong places. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.

Thanks to "helpful" legislation, everything must use the same port. Expect this to only make the situation worse in the coming years.

I mean sure, but you can't see signal quality at 1gb/s without a scope capable of much higher rates (you need at least a few points in each period). Short of muxing together several fpgas and hand picking components, you straight up can't see the signals. There's a reason why you can buy a 4 digit multimeter for $30, 5 for maybe $500, and >5 costs thousands.

Real cable testers are specialized high speed scopes with all sorts of protocol support and cost thousands.

But what you need is a device that simply queries the cable and asks it what it thinks it can do. I haven’t seen one for sale and am too busy to make one, but it shouldn’t be that hard.

Apple’s system info ought to tell you this but doesn’t.

Thousands? You're about 1-2 orders of magnitude low...

Thousands sounds about right to me. For example the only one I've played with is $15k (Advanced Cable Tester by Total Phase).

What do you want to test? Another reply has mentioned the 15K USD TotalPhase device, which I'd love to use one day.

For "home" testing, I've used a USB C -> NVMe enclosure (UGreen is my favourite) with a half decent NVMe drive in it. Does the drive reach 1 gigabyte / second sustained read/write? Congrats, the cable supports 10 gigabit.

AFAICT they are learning some lessons. Its not supposed to be called USB4 V2. It's USB 80Gbps. But whether vendors get with the program...

My personal favorite was a usb-c gpu dock that I had actually shorted out and smoked when used with any other cable.

My old workplace had laptops with USBC docks that would only accept the cable flipped in one orientation. 50% chance you'd get it wrong every time.

>indecipherable to the average person

Average person? This shit is indecipherable even for hardcore computer nerds.

Now I'm imagining a team of archaeologists in 2000 years who are struggling to decipher USB cable packaging in an abandoned electronics warehouse.

They have successfully reverse engineered our computer architectures, found abundant documentation on TCP/IP et al, one team had a major breakthrough and international recognition when they recovered large parts of the network infrastructure of an old obscure company called Google, which uncovered a platform for hosting audio-visual content, giving researchers abundant material to reconstruct how past societies worked. But that one thing they just can't crack is those weird cables with different plugs and colors and names, misleading and contradicting instructions, documentation and specifications. They'll never find out what secrets these plastic-encased HDDs hold.

The most probably cause for the civilizational downfall, argue the archeologists, is that after a software update everyone's devices stopped being able to communicate with each other. They found references to a prophecy of this in old books, and refer to it as the "Babble" event.

I don't understand why they can't use trademark law or something to keep companies from violating the spec all over the place. Even the Nintendo Switch's implementation has a list of violations a full page long.

I don't think the Switch is sold as USB-C in the US. (You can charge with one, but I think they tell you to use the Nintendo Power Adaptor and make no mention of USB-C.)

https://www.nintendo.com/switch/tech-specs/ says "USB Type-C".

Oh hey - that's new.

The USB versioning makes total sense. People just misunderstand versioning, in a similar way to how some people thing version 1.2 is higher than version 1.11 because versioning sucks.

For the general consumer, there are three labels. SuperSpeed USB 5Gbit/s, SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s, and SuperSpeed USB 20Gbit/s. More Gbit/s is more better. Easy and understandable. SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s used to be called SuperSpeed+ but that was a mistake that was soon corrected. All the gen-X-Y-by-Z stuff is for people who read data sheets for fun. You don't need to care and you shouldn't.

The Gen 3.2 2x2 label is juar not for general consumers. It's a technical spec written in a similar way to how law works: the spec has revisions.

Take food for a comparison. There have been big lawsuits around whether something is a biscuit or a cake for weird tax reasons. For this analogy I'm going to assume cakes are just better biscuits, swap them around in your head if you disagree.

Now, if I sell a biscuit, I'll say "1 biscuit". This is similar to 1x1 in USB terms. Then I come up with my improved biscuit, or a cake, and I'll also sell cakes; I'll put "1 cake", or 2x1 in USB terms. The generation is just how good the food is or how fast the lane is.

Through the magic of engineering I also find a way to pack multiple foodstuffs into a single box! I now sell boxes of "2 biscuits" (1x2) and "2 cakes" (2x2). In practice, nobody needs boxes of 2 biscuits, but it's a technical possibility.

However, suppose the law changes this year. Some biscuits are now cakes, some cakes are now biscuits.

If my target audience is the general public, I'll put "2 cakes" and "2 biscuits" on the right boxes with updated packaging or ingredients. This is similar to the USB logo with a little 10 or "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s". Because nobody buys my boxes of two biscuits, I don't even bother designing a logo for them.

If my target audience demand technical specs on my food, I'm in trouble now, though. How do they know if my definitions are based on the new law or the old law? Will their dietary compliance officer let them buy from me? The solution is simple: add the spec you're following to the ingredient list on the back!

Now I'm selling "two biscuits (food law of 2021)", or in USB terms "USB 1x2 Gen 3.2", and "two cakes (food law of 2022)", "USB 2x2 Gen 3.2" in USB terms.

Cakes can be cakes in both 2021 and 2022 law, but I don't think anyone will be confused if you write down according to what law they're considered cakes. Similarly, people shouldn't get confused by what spec the USB description works. Look at the consumer name for comparison of actual products, look up the provided spec the conversation table that came with your copy of the latest USB spec if you want to get a pedantic view.

This versioning problem is everywhere. Are two PCIe Gen 4 lanes faster or slower than four PCIe Gen 3 lanes? How does a PCIe Gen 5 lane compare? What about memory, is DDR5-3200 faster or slower than DDR4-3200? Is an Intel Core i7 12700 faster than an Intel Core i9 11900K? What about a Ryzen 7300 versus a Ryzen 3950X?

The label "USB4v2" should probably be changed to "USB4 Gen 2" for consistency, but this random Chinese hardware manufacturer might just have used the wrong name here. This isn't part of the official USB spec, it's just a name some person found on some machine.

If we're going to be talking about general consumers, most can't (and righteously shouldn't) handle anything more than one whole incrementing number. WTF is a "gbits", a layman would ask; is it Google Bits?

Car manufacturers have this drilled down: Each new model car gets a new version number based on year of release, nothing more nothing less. 2020 Honda Civic, 1995 Toyota Camry, 2022 Tesla Model S. Newer year? Newer model. Simple. Done.

Likewise, USB should be numbering each and every new different standard revision with a whole number if the goal is to attain general consumer understanding. By my tally, we're up to USB12 with USB4v2120gbps (USB11 for USB4v280gbps).

How fucking simple everything would be if instead of asking if a cable/device is compatible with USB3.2, which can be USB3 or USB3.1 and Gen1x1, Gen2x1, Gen2x1, Gen1x2, or Gen2x2 because nobody knows WTF Gens are, we ask if it's compatible with USB6 (aka USB3.2Gen2x2). It's simple and unambiguous.

USB naming schemes as it stands is pig latin to computer nerds, let alone the layman. If the goal is universal understanding by the public at large, aka the general consumer, it is failing hard.

All consumers need to know is that more 'gbits' is better, so it's fine. I think that's true enough as a generalisation to be acceptable.

It’s definitely nowhere near that easy for general consumers.

This Lenovo page lists USB ports “USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (full function, USB+DP+PD)” and “ USB-3.2 Gen 1 Type-A”, with no mention of speed https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkbook/thinkbook-s...

This HP laptop lists USB 3.1 Type C and 3.1 Type A, with no mention of speed. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-envy-x360-2-in-1-15-6-touch-...

Apple’s MacBook Air page lists “USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)”.

Now, imagine someone buying a USB hub or dock. You might ignore the details from above and just search Best Buy or Amazon for any usbc compatible device. You’ll most likely mess up. Alternatively, you could search for a device specifically compatible with “USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (full function, USB+DP+PD)” as mentioned above for your Lenovo and get immediately super overwhelmed and confused.

> However, suppose the law changes this year. Some biscuits are now cakes, some cakes are now biscuits.

> Cakes can be cakes in both 2021 and 2022 law, but I don't think anyone will be confused if you write down according to what law they're considered cakes.

But all cakes are biscuits and always have been, better in every way.

And many cake-biscuit packages just say the year the cake upgrade was invented.

So if you put the cake year on something, people expect those biscuits to also be cakes, and not just biscuits.

Even if the packages are supposed to say "cake", what actually happens in practice should be taken into account.

An average person doesn't need mods than USB 2.0 speeds. Anything past microSD speeds is fine. Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right?

120Gbps is way beyond anything an average person needs.

The only issue is that hopefully it will replace HDMI and some cables might not handle that. But even then, it's solved by buying a few Ankers and marking them with tape.

Yeah, it's all super confusing, and could be better, but in practice it works really well.

>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right?

M.2 can do anywhere from 0.5GB/s to 14GB/s depending on the protocol used.

No, it really doesn't work well. Have you ever used a USB protocol analyzer or written a USB device driver?

Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling.

Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings.

USB is an absolute nightmare right now.

I don't think average consumers use $80 webcams.

If you're not a 45k+ a year type, you might very well be doing remote work on phones, assuming you're WFH at all. Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high.

Even if you are, webcams could very well run in 480Mbps if they had to, if in camera encoding was still the norm, which it would be if high speed cables weren't (theoretically) widespread.

I agree that the situation might not be ideal for people doing stuff beyond average consumer level, but even that could be mostly worked around with a controller firmware update(Count the bit error rate, inform the user if they are using a trash cable).

No amount of standardization and marking of the cables will eliminate scammers without killing cheap uncertified stuff totally, so I would think software and documentation fixes would be best.

Most stuff already comes with a suitable USB cable. Just pop up a reminder to fish out the good one if the one you're using is bad.

"Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high."

How do you think the internal camera on most laptops is connected to the rest of the computer? (Hint: It's permanently wired to the USB bus. It's a non-removable USB webcam)

Given this fact, it seems you should actually agree with my original statement.

That is correct for most older laptops.

However, many newer laptops have begun to use cameras with a MIPI interface, like the smartphones. This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread.

> This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread.

That story for the interested was "The growing image-processor unpleasantness" and can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32516826

>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right?

2012 called and they want their PCIe 2.0 devices back.

My PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD does 7GB/s for bursts up to ~700GB at a time (SLC cache) which is very convenient when I'm moving video around. You can also get x8 and x16 data center SSDs.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs should come out next month and double that.

The average person now has a laptop without an HDMI port, without a dedicated GPU, without Ethernet. It only has one or two USB-C ports.

A USB cable replaces the HDMI connection. That by itself requires more than USB 2.0 speeds. HDMI is 3.2 GB/s vs USB2 480 MB/s.

Now add connecting an external GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, they require faster speeds.

eGPUs in particular, use a lot of bandwidth.

I think standards in general are confusing to the average person. The average person doesn't care about standards, they care about completing a task: can I use this cable to connect my Mac to a 4k Monitor? Can it pass all the power that my device needs from my charger? Will this cable be a bottleneck if I connect it to my external SSD storage?

None of my computers support USB4 today, but I'm buying USB4 cables so I don't have to waste so much time looking for a cable that will do a particular job.

I want to say that I will only buy cables that are labeled clearly with capabilities and bandwidth but I'm not sure that is a promise I can keep.

Worth noting: the USB cables I have which reliably work at 20Gbps currently are considerably bulkier than other cables. Thicker wire AWG and more shielding. They're not always the most practical and they're considerably more costly.

Also, I had to test quite a few cables which were sold as supporting 20Gbps before finding ones that actually worked, so pre-buying ones which supposedly work at a certain rate when you cannot test that may not be the most prudent approach.

They did learn their lesson. The marketing name for USB4 cables are simply

USB4® 20Gbps

and

USB4® 40Gbps

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb4_language_produc...

These version numbers are internal.

Products will be called USB4® 80Gbps.

Little good it did with USB-C. They have a similar language guidelines for USB-C – https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_language_...

Nothing this simple, no.

The old marketing names assume a user can understand the difference between Full Speed, High Speed and Super Speed without prior knowledge, and that is somehow easier than... numbers.

You know what's handy about a Thunderbolt 3 cable? It has a thunderbolt and the number 3 silkscreened onto the plugs.

The target market for thunderbolt and USB cables are very different though. Most USB cables are bought by people who just want to charge their iphone and don't want to spend a cent too much. Thunderbolt cables are bought by people who want to send data between very specific and expensive devices.

But what revision? R1 or R1.31?

If you use an R1 cable on a 1.31 device, you may end up with a brick, or even worse a fire.

Before plugging them in, I always dissect open the ends of my cables and examine the chips under a microscope just to be certain. Sometimes a delid is also needed, in such instances I head over to Ken Shirriff's house. :P

I think you are joking about "USB4.1 2x2 Gen 1 V2", but I can't tell. USB naming is messed up.

I think it's only a matter of they renaming every model every time the standard is updated. So models come with $standard_version $standard_revision $main_model_version $minor_model_version, and there are different sets of all of those numbers that refer to the same thing.

Or maybe they have another naming schema orthogonal to that that I don't know about.

To make it less confusing they’ll be moving to the old WiFi style names. The new versions will be called, in order:

USB-A, USB-B, USB-R, USB-CZ, USB-L2, USB-S, then USB-D. To avoid confusion they’ll use the same physical port, which is now Type-C, but renamed Type-1138.

USB-D is somewhat theoretical as we’re likely to go through more renaming by then. But I digress.

It’s important to note each version of the standard supports both active (“o”) and passive (“u”) variants depending on distance.

Power levels are a simple scale of 10^nth milliwatts, expressed as a Roman numeral for readability. So I = 10mw, II = 100mw, etc.

Soon you can buy a highly advanced passive USB cable capable of delivering 10kW to your car for charging.

USB-SuX.

Thanks, I hate it.

Waiting for USB-BSU

Sounds like a knock-off of NTSF:SD:SUV::

(a great show by the way)

when I see that many letters, I just think Law and Order.

But in the end they'll "restart" it and call it just "USB".

On consumer devices, this would be "USB4 120Gbps". Look for this when you're in the store.

If you're designing circuit boards or writing drivers, you'll need the full spec.

Assuming the new spec pushes 60Gbps over a single lane, that would be "USB 4 Gen 4x2" going by the USB spec. Two lanes (x2) at the new lane type (4), part of the new USB 4 spec. A device only capable of driving a single new fancy lane would be "USB 4 Gen 4x1".

This kills me because USB naming is actually super straightforward.

USB3.0, USB3.1, and USB3.2 are spec revisions.

USB3.1 (and 3.2) support Gen 1 and Gen 2 physical layer/transmission modes (gen 1 is 8b/10b encoding and gen2 is 128b/132b encoding).

USB3.2 adds support for using the extra differential pair in the cables to transmit data. So now you get x1 and x2 which correspond to the number of lanes available for data transmission (akin to PCIE x1, x4, x8, and x16).

So USB3.2 gen 2 x2 is just the USB3.2 standard using 128b/132b encoding over 2 lanes.

The problem is that everyone decided to use the tech spec identifiers rather than the consumer identifiers for labeling products. If you are in engineering working on making the product which uses USB ports, then you would look for ICs that support USB3.2 gen2x2 operation but if you are selling a consumer product, you are supposed to label it as a USB3 SS+ 20Gbps port.

... & Knuckles (tm)

But in all seriousness, this is one of the worst things marketer types make us suffer. Breaking consistency of naming and numbering. EACH and EVERY model series of ANYTHING successful just has to break the pattern at some time.

Remember when Nokia phones had 4-digit model numbers, optionally with "i"? Then Nseries and Eseries arrived which all had Symbian, but confusingly enough they continued to make 4-digit models with Symbian in parallel. They also started "classic" and "slide" series which often reused other unrelated model numbers. Around 2010 they changed it all to a hot mess like X3-02, C3-01, then came 3-digit optionally with Asha in front. Thankfully they were not as creative with Lumia which had 3-digit or 4-digit models.

USB4.1 2x2 Gen 1 V2 & Knuckles requires you to plug the cable into a special active adapter that then plugs into the device.

They did learn their lesson. The marketing name for USB4 cables are simply

USB4® 20Gbps

and

USB4® 40Gbps

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb4_language_produc...

These version numbers are internal.

Products will be called USB4® 80Gbps.

The USB3 names were also internal (Proper marketing terms were Superspeed 5/10/20 Gbps). However motheboard manufacturers loved technobable as marketting.

The touted 80gbps one is presumably USB4 Gen4x2x2 (or Gen4x4?), this is presumably USB4 Gen4x3x1 or something.

No, I don't even know. Can we please just call them fucking USB11 and USB12 or something?

No, V1 of the USB versioning scheme has been deprecated for several versioning scheme versions now.

The simple solution is to specify which versioning scheme you referring to when talking about USB, so USB4 Gen4x2x2(V1)

Even easier. Just have the EU mandate that everybody will be required this year to support USB4 Gen4x2x2(v1) on all devices. This will solve everything!

The number after the x is the number of lanes, FYI.

80gbps is a bit of a weird one. To work with 120gbps, that would imply that 80gbps is two lanes and 120gbps is three lanes in a single cable. I suppose this is possible with the type C connector as it has plenty of pairs.

This would make USB4 80gbps (the sticker you see on the box) USB4 Gen 4x2, as there are two lanes of the fourth lane type. The 120Gbps one contains three lanes of the fourth lane version, or USB4 Gen 4x3.

There's no need for USB11 and USB12. Look at the 10/20/40/80/120Gbps sticker on the box. That tells you all you need to know.

>80gbps is a bit of a weird one. To work with 120gbps, that would imply that 80gbps is two lanes and 120gbps is three lanes in a single cable. I suppose this is possible with the type C connector as it has plenty of pairs.

As I understood it from TFA, 80gbps is realized with 2 lanes down, 2 lanes up; while 120gbps is realized with 3 lanes down, 1 lane up (yes, the opposite direction is capped to 40gbps).

So that's USB4Gen4x2x2 and USB4Gen4x3x1 if we use the current genxlane nomenclature? Who knows.

>There's no need for USB11 and USB12. Look at the 10/20/40/80/120Gbps sticker on the box. That tells you all you need to know.

I can't recall the last time I actually saw a gbps marking on USB cable/device marketing, so no I can't "look at the sticker" because it doesn't exist.

Just give me an unambiguous, whole, unique USB standard revision number for me to compare with my other devices and cables. The current system of superceding and overlapping standard revisions and meaningless genxlane numbers is fucking worthless and a waste of my time and nerves.

Personally, I'm waiting for USB4 HD Chain of Memories 358/2 Birth by Sleep Remix Final Chapter Prologue 2.0

Wow, this comment is a sight for Soras

If you make things compatible, how will you sell more things?

I dunno but why can't we just use fiber already

Doesn't pass power?

A huge chunk of the newer USB protocols has also been support for higher wattage faster charging.

So put power? You can run fiber right alongside 50 amp high voltage cables if you want without any signal corruption issues whatsoever.

For practical purposes they'd need just {fiber, 19VDC, GND}, and none of the schengens that USB-C has. No shielding issues, no signal corruption issues, nothing. And you could run it for kilometers.

You need at least 5V DC for backwards compatibility with devices that expect that.

No, you don't. Get an adapter with a voltage converter, just like you would if you need to plug a 120V-only device in a 240V outlet.

120VAC outlets have not changed in 60 years and that's owing to the fact that they output just straight-up power, no negotiation BS.

> 120VAC outlets have not changed in 60 years

Where I live, 120VAC outlets last changed less than 20 years ago, with the adoption of the new NBR 14136 standard for plugs and sockets.

Voltage converters are big and not that reliable at the consumer level. Putting the power supply in something replacable is a good thing. Going from 19 to 5 would be an extra conversion step.

Plus, 19v is too low. USB does 48v for the 240W mode. You could use more current, but then you are wasting copper and making connectors bigger and heavier.

I used to not be a fan of negotiation but it seems that it's highly reliable these days, stuff isn't getting fried because of incorrect voltage selection.

Playing devil's advocate: a fiber+power cable makes some sense. The main thing which limits the cable length is the data wires, not the power wires (just notice how one of the main counter-arguments for "one USB cable to rule them all" is "the higher bandwidth passive USB cables have to be shorter and thicker").

Fiber is far too fragile to deal with the abuse even babied USB cables put up with, unless you mandate some kind of semi-articulating steel conduit anyway.

So do it? Steel is cheap and recyclable.

It's also heavy and won't be recycled till we can landfill mine.

Now your short cables need heavy steel and fiber just to make long cables possible. Or else you have to have fiber+high speed copper in one connector.

> won't be recycled

Fine the shit out of people who don't recycle. Anything's possible if we put our minds to it.

First you have to make it practical to recycle at all. We don't even have recycling for bottles and cans here.

Considering recycling is stupidly uneconomic for all but a tiny selection of materials and just makes the whole carbon issue even worse, why would we do that?

Hell, for plastic throwing it in a landfill is only second best to never making it in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy312cUHumk&t=288s

Fiber can be very durable.

Once you get past the sticker shock of the transceivers.

We can just make them thicker so abusive bending is not easy to do.

I'd probably guess it's too expensive? IIRC the original Thunderbolt spec was a fiber standard and they moved it to copper because people wanted to power stuff and adding copper cabling for power + power negotiation was infeasible cost wise so they ended up with a copper only cabling solution instead.

I wish I could get 100gbs+ fiber as cheap and ubiquitous usb 2.0. I’m curious why not as well.

You can, there is no reason that the data transmission cannot be done with fibre. You just need a fibre to USB coupler at the end and a source of power. If you have a use case for it you could build it with two Raspberry Pi and a pair of couplers.

Now is it worth it? That's another issue.

Optical fibre ain't useful for the kinds of applications that USB does.

(We have fibre to the home here in Singapore. It's great. But also fragile.)

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