Thunderbolt, Displayport and Docks
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While I complain, I would also like to mention the USB forum's insane naming strategy and non-obvious labeling system. Remember when USB 3 was easily identifiable because of the blue plastic in the port?
Better labeling would be a nice improvement, but I'll still take the current state of things over what we used to have.
I immediately order a thunder bolt cable direct from apple the moment I smell any issues, which often fixes it.
Having incompatible ports means 3/ disappears but since many cables support multiple specs, it's nice to often have a win when connecting two devices over a cable rather than simply being blocked because the connector isn't compatible physically.
This is basically impossible to diagnose as ports and cables are not marked with their supported specs.
Something like, test the cable and get a resistance of 0.6Ω ? Let's just toss it away. This will definitely fail the usb protocol and stop devices from working properly when charge at full speed.
I actually found a few problematic cables with that. These are pretty hard to find out normally because they only fail when charges at full speed (cause the voltage to drop too much) and transmits data at same time.
Or test a charger that labels fast charging but don't actually get any at all? The resistance changes a lot when you touched the cable(probably the connection between board and plug breaks)? Toss it away. They are broken or fake, why bother keep them.
Agree. People are looking at the past with rose tinted glasses or haven't lived through the '90s - '00 tech. Every phone and electronic gadget had their own proprietary dock, cable and connector for data and charging. Even many phones had proprietary connectors for headphones instead of the 3.5mm jack. It was a nightmare.
You're phone is running out of battery while you're at the bar/on vacation? Then good luck finding someone with the same Motorola charger. Want to transfer your photos to your PC and your 50pin Sony Ericsson data cable is acting up? Good luck finding a cheap replacement on a short notice. Want to plug in the phone's memory card in your laptop instead? Well, if your laptop doesn't support Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Pro Duo, then you're shit out of luck.
And even those proprietary connectors had plenty of issues, and manufacturers weren't even consistent, changing their connectors every few years instead of sticking with one for the long run.
What we have today has certainly teething issues, but we're on the right path.
Curiously, many Nokia phones in the same generation seemed to use the same charger form factor, at least when I last checked.
Contrast this to me recently finding myself with an Android phone that has USB Type C and only a Nintendo Switch charger. I mean, it looks like it fits and both of them are the same form factor, right? So technically it should charge the phone, too. Except that it didn't (personal experience) and some online claimed that certain phone and charger combinations might cause them to (temporarily) stop working.
Ergo, instead of seeing that a Motorola charger won't work for my Nokia device, I was left wondering about whether it's even safe to share the charger given that the connectors do fit. Furthermore, I've seen cases where a USB cable actually doesn't carry data and can only be used for charging, with no clear/apparent indications of this, neither when buying it or when looking at it.
The world would be much simpler if one plug had one spec, with no deviations from it being permissible. If it fits, it should work.
Except it does work, for charging at least.
Everywhere I could find a type-C plug, it always managed to charge my phone regardless which charger brand or dock was at the other end. I can go to any bar, airport or hotel on any continent and I know I'll find a type-C plug somewhere VS in the past when your Cingular phone had a connector which wasn't available in Europe because those phones weren't sold there. That's a real life saver which many people seem to ignore just because their Nintendo widget decided to not follow the spec.
>Contrast this to me recently finding myself with an Android phone that has USB Type C and only a Nintendo Switch charger
Nintendo violated the spec on the Switch either through malice, wanting to lock users into their own chargers, or through engineering incompetence by not being able to follow a spec which every other electronics brand could. Nintendo is also known to be extremely anti-consumer. So blame Nintendo not type-C.
Here it definitely doesn't. I have at least 4/5 cables / usb-c ports combos in my home which aren't able to perform this apparently basic feature ; the phone's charging icon will activate but it will still loose battery
The "fasgear" brand on amazon have worked well for me and they actually have 3-meter cables that do full 100w charging, right angle connectors for laptops/etc, and they have a usb 4-compatible lineup (that I have not tried). A 2m charge cable is $7 a pop and 3m is $11 (they run coupons on both frequently that take it down another 10% or so) but whatever, that's just kinda what it costs to not have to worry about it.
cables that come with things go into a baggie in The Bin Of Solitude where they shall remain untouched until my descendents clean them out after I pass. "But what if I really really need a low-spec charge cable at some hypothetical point in the future!?!? you never know when it'll be 2012 again, buddy."
gonna suck when 140W or whatever comes out and my cables won't do it but... I guess they'll still work at 100W. Hopefully. I guess it's not guaranteed either, thanks USB-IF.
Just out of curiosity, will the device charge if you
1. Let the device drain mostly if not fully
2. Start charging
3. Turn off the device
4. Continue charging with the device continued in a turned off state
5. ... wait (this might take a day or a week)
6. Check if the battery managed to fully charge
That is, I am wondering if there is some shenanigan in that the device somehow refuses to be slow charged. I have never heard of it but if that is happening, I would like to learn more.
That said I have several cheap devices that refuse to be charged/powered by a PD charger like an Apple charger. For instance the Neo Geo Mini, only likes basic 5V 1A chargers for some reason (I guess looking at the MB charger it doesn't support 5V 1A). If the charger doesn't support what the device wants it won't work. My phone happily will charge with what the Switch charger puts out.
You missed my point entirely. The speed of the charging is not the issue here. It shouldn't matter what PD or fast charging protocol Nintendo or OnePlus would use, they should all be backwards compatible to legacy slow-charging and trickle charge from any type-C charger ever made, which is a lifesaver in an emergency and is why the type-C connector is a godsend.
Nintendo fucked up the pin-out on the connector making it completely non-standard and incompatible to any other type-C charger released. The speed of their charging protocol was not the issue.
Nintendo did more non-standard stuff with the dock port dimensions. Not so much pinouts. 3rd party docks fried Switches because of shit power management sending more voltage than the Switch needed.
EDIT: The problem seems to actually be that the Switch charger only supports 5V 1.5A whereas some phones require 2 or 3A and are not compatible.
The cable boxes’ USB-C power supplies do not charge my Sony USB-C camera. They’re on my stack of things I intended to look into one day, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Everything looking the same with zero indication of what does what is the USB-C issue. The answer here might be “your phone doesn’t have that capability”, but the fact that you have to dive into the data sheets of everything involved including all of the cabling just to figure out what the hell the outcome is supposed to be versus the observed outcome is all completely absurd.
That has always been the case - when phones had random 25 pin connectors some of them supported video out, some of them didn't, some of them let you connect and sync with your PC and some of them didn't. You couldn't tell by looking at them.
> phones had random 25 pin connectors
Well, that's not exactly how things worked. Back when phones used feature connectors, you'd be searching for cables for the specific phone type. Video was... almost never a thing, but let's take a data cable instead like you mention, for using the phone as a modem. Or a firmware update cable. So you were searching for, say, a "Nokia 9210 Data / Firmware Cable". If you found one, you were mostly certain that it worked. There were mobile shops that specialized in this stuff. Every large city had at least one store with a firmware unlock service, and they could tell you the exact cable you needed for firmware, or for modem data. The best I can look for right now is an Android-compatible USB C Dock with HDMI output. Hard to tell if it's any good.
I still don't know how int_19h knows definitively that the phone doesn't support video output.
And then, what about Ethernet? I've tried a few different solutions: this specific dock, then a USB C to USB A converter with an ancient 10/100 interface that even works on the Wii U and has been in the Linux kernel for over a decade, and also using that interface plugged into the USB C dock.
And finally, I also tried some simple keyboards - both with that USB C dock, and with C-A converters. None of them worked. Why wouldn't basic USB functionality like keyboards not work? Has the Android kernel dropped support for such exotic devices as keyboards? It does support bluetooth keyboards; and it's not like the kernel is wanting for memory with 4GB of RAM, or whatever is left of it after all the spyware Android devices run whether I want them to or not.
(I suspect it doesn't support being a USB host in general, which would explain why keyboards and mice didn't work for you.)
Most phone can charge off of the base 5V/3A profile, so it works for phone.
But many bigger devices don't. I think most laptop only charge off of 20V mode, so it won't work if the charger can only do 5V or 9V. Some tablet also only do 9V, refusing to charge on 5V.
But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices.
maybe in an ideal world, but this is absolutely not guaranteed at all. Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between. Even apple does this sometimes, in fact.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-...
https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery
now of course the usb-c crowd is probably going "well apple needs to get its shit together!" but that's not an uncommon thing at all. Chargers are still designed for the specific device and don't necessarily support intermediate standards, just like motherboard ports end up being designed for specific use-cases and don't necessarily support the thing you're trying to do with them. Maybe that should have been a requirement, but it isn't, because USB-IF is shit and doesn't care about the consumer.
fully implementing the usb-c standard, to all its extremes and nuances, is expensive as fuck, and this is a cost-driven market so you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to choose to swiss-cheese the standard and their charger will be $2 cheaper so that'll be the one you buy. Or else you're paying more for Anker and Apple stuff (whoops, maybe not apple for chargers, but their cables are still the best!).
and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do. Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example.
Just like Apple. Just like Switch. etc etc. At some point it stops being a problem with specific vendors and starts being just a badly designed standard. USB-C is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they want to be in devices for which $1 for a port or a controller chip is a big expense, but also scale to 40V/100W charging and 80gbps full-duplex data (with a 40gbps video channel and a 40gbps pcie link) and have everything "just work", and that's not really physically possible to implement in devices where every nickel counts.
Maybe there should have been some defined "mobile" and "laptop/desktop" profiles, that overlapped in some defined ways, so this wouldn't have been a problem. Your mobile standard can be cost-optimized, your laptop standard can be full-featured, both of them have some lowest-common-denomiantor requirements. Laptop 2.0 always supports everything Laptop 1.0 did, and Phone 3.0 always supports everything Phone 2.0 and 1.0 did.
But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. They do it on purpose, and people still defend them and love the product regardless, it's as mindless as people constantly (including here, ctrl-f any apple thread and search ‘mindless’ or ‘fanboy’) accuse apple fandoms of being. It's a bad standard and it's really just that simple, they could and should have done better and should not retain a government monopoly going forward, or else this will only continue to get more convoluted and complicated. Like we literally just got USB 4 2.0 and all, the leopard isn't changing its spots at this point.
But like, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome of the “one cable for everything” pipe dream people are pushing. Either cables/devices are expensive (thunderbolt), or each device supports some subset of the standard and end up with a confusing mess. But the “one cable for everything” fandom is insatiable.
Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.
Yeah we don't live in an ideal world. But this has been a low enough encounter for me (actually never so far) to not overshadow the masive advantages type-C standardization has brought into my life. The fact that my phone and gadgets can all charge from the same plug that's now obliquus everywhere in the world is a godsend that people love to overlook every time they want to shit on the type-C standard because Nintendo screwed up.
>But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder.
Do you have a better solution? Were the older days of millions of constantly changing cables and ports from every phone and gadget manufacturer better? I feel not. And what we have today, while far from perfects is miles better that the past.
Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either.
>Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.
Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Yeah, extra profiles won't work if you don't have the right cable, which could be confusing for the consumer, but let's not halt technological progress in the right direction by constantly making perfect the enemy of good.
I love, and I think everyone else will agree, that now we have a single cable coming into the laptop instead of a huge octopus spaghetti monster from every port that needs to be plugged and unplugged individually for every peripheral every time you want to leave your desk. I'm sure there will be people who prefer the octopus spaghetti monster, but I don't want to go back to those days, so the disadvantages of the move to type-C are massively overshadowed by the advantages.
Yes, I literally said it in my post: instead of a "profile" being "20V@2A" it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities. You can always add more capabilities, if you have 3.0 data but only 2.0 charging, that's fine, but, you have to advertise that as 2.0.
Desktop/laptop ports are required to carry video and pcie, mobile standards don't have to... or maybe higher versions of the standard should start requiring it.
If that means motherboard makers have to start advertising that their ports only support the "mobile" connectivity levels because they didn't want to put video/pcie on the port... tough, that's information the consumers need to know.
> Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either.
3.5mm headset (headphone+mic) connectors were the closest thing I've ever seen to a bulletproof connector apart from VERY niche things like low-impedence headphones that required an amp. Not sure that's a good example either. I guess there's line level, but, go to best buy and pick a random device (any device) with a headphone port and a random pair of headphones and they work 100% of the time, guaranteed, I'll bet you money on this right now at my local best buy.
Ethernet? Displayport? Both of those pretty much negotiate seamlessly down to whatever capability they both support.
You can't make ethernet "optional" stuff, because ethernet does exactly one thing and it either works or it doesn't. My home network just works - go to best buy and pick a random switch and a random ethernet device and it works 100% of the time, and I'll bet you money on that too. Even things like crossover ports are dead now, the only real thing that matters even to nerds is stuff like MTU size that also transparently work unless you actively fuck with the settings.
It's really only USB-C that has turned into a trainwreck and it's specifically because USB-IF doesn't define meaningful profiles and just makes everything an optional feature, and since "it can do everything" that means most things don't do anything more than the bare minimum.
> Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is.
Well, if you use profiles in that manner, don't be surprised when people are confused by your connector that has 57 different profiles and nothing supports anything.
Again: why can't a profile be "laptop 2.0" and my laptop supports that? Why do I have to know that my laptop needs the 40V/2.5A profile to charge and that I need X charger and Y cable?
That's purely down to USB-IF mismanagement and corruption. They should not have a government monopoly, they're working for the vendors, not for you.
Expense was pretty much a foregone conclusion at the start of the thunderbolt "one cable for everything" experiment, and now people want to do that with usb in general. Sure, that'll be great, but it's going to be expensive, including in places that don't need those capabilities. If you allow deviations from the standard, then you are back to things being incompatible with various devices/cables/chargers. They allowed that with power profiles (in particular) and video capabilities and now it's a mess.
Framing profiles in terms of device use-cases is my attempt at turning that soup back into something comprehensible for average consumers, while keeping the benefit. People approach this as "I want to plug my phone into the charger and have it just work", "I want to plug my dock into my laptop and do everything through one cable", etc, and those are actually use-cases and not feature profiles, they don't really care that the laptop needs 40V 2.5A or 25V 3A, they just want it to work. But of course a $10 vape pen (or phone) doesn't need 40V 2.5A charging. So you have a "phone profile" and a "laptop profile" and iterate those things as groups/featuresets and not as a bunch of profiles thrown into one enormous standard.
You can retain most of the "universal standard" juice without squeezing too hard on the "$60 cable" expense side of things. You could have one cable for laptop docks and one cable for phone charging and have a lot of overlap between, but still not have to use a $60 cable to charge your phone just because that's what a laptop needs, and yet not have a confusing free-for-all of "this charger doesn't do that".
I'm just a rando though so it's not like I have any say.
Sure, maybe the audio will work, maybe it will have static cause they're cheap since the manufacturer cut corners to save $.01. But does the mic on them work with my device? Or the buttons on them, will they work controlling the volume? IIRC, wired 3.5mm headphones had separate versions for iPhone and Android as the buttons on them worked different on each platform. So making 3.5mm an example of successful standardization across all platforms is laughable IMHO.
>it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities.
What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?
It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.
Yeah, the type-C flexibility is both a blessing and a curse.
I think the confusion, expense, and e-waste from having 57 different profiles is worse than a hypothetical about some new class of device that demands drastically different capability sets from the existing ones. The answer is... USB-IF should define Laptop 2.0 such that that doesn't happen, and if there is some drastically new class of device that merits a new profile, we make VR Headset 1.0 or whatever. If there's some new USB 5.0 standard that everyone is going to want... then we release a new Laptop 3.0 standard with that included.
and if you are making a netbook or something that doesn't need super-powered 100W charging then... market it as Laptop 1.0? what exactly is the problem?
It's a hypothetical edge case that is completely and trivially solvable if it ever comes up, and doesn't merit throwing away the whole USB-C standardization idea.
> Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?
because that's the whole point of USB-C, to eliminate redundant cables and move towards standardized devices/chargers, and the entire point is lost if you allow vendors to play silly buggers with current/voltage profiles.
Like, basically what you're saying here is you don't like the idea of USB-C at all and want a more granular set of capabilities. That would be great! Just have one standard that covers audio, and another one or two that cover video? We could hypothetically give them all different cables, so no device has to use any cable that's any more expensive than it must be, and give them all different connectors so there's no consumer confusion about what plugs into what, right? Sounds good to me.
The harm from "device profiles" is... manufacturers would have to market that device as "Laptop 2.0" or "Laptop 2.0 With 40gbps Data" or whatever the extension ends up being. Laptop 2.5, if you will. Having to be more specific in advertising is much much better than allowing massive consumer confusion and e-waste due to incompatible chargers/cables/etc.
Even if there end up being a lot of "Laptop 2.5" devices, there is a huge value-add from having that "Laptop 2.0" standard - we eliminate an entire class of "my charger works with 40V 1A but not 25V 3A" problems, because the laptop needs to support at least laptop 2.0 to be advertised as laptop 2.0, it's a guarantee that it works at least that far. Same for chargers/cables/etc - it's a fixed target for them to work against, whereas right now with 57 different profiles it's a free-for-all.
The problem of course being - USB-IF will never do any of this of their own volition. They work for the OEMs, not for you.
> What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?
> It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.
You seem to be trying to have it both ways here: isn't this precisely the concern leveled against having multiple different connectors? The counterargument is that having one cable/charger for everything eliminates a huge amount of waste and redundancy, even if it's significantly more expensive to implement fully. Each cable may be more expensive - but you don't need 5 different cables, because you plug into your dock with one cable and you get video/pcie/data.
Having Desktop/Laptop and Phone profiles is the same USB-C concept taken further: instead of allowing manufacturers to still do inane shit with voltage/current profiles and video/pcie capabilities that render various cables/devices incompatible despite physically plugging, we say "if you want to advertise a 'laptop' standard connector, it must support at least this set of capabilities". And we pick some reasonable sets of capabilities, whatever those end up being. If you want to go further, fine, if you need a new class of profile defined, fine, but most devices will fit into those bins and we will define new bins if necessary.
If you want to reduce cost for devices that don't need the full set of capabilities on every single port, then stop trying to shoehorn USB-C into everything and let me have a physical displayport and a 3.5mm headset. Done. If you're going to force this USB-C shit on me, it needs to be consumer-friendly enough that you don't need a PHD to determine whether your laptop charger will work right with your tablet.
Nobody wants to go back to every phone having a different connector, but, that's not really going to happen at this point.
How does that generate huge amounts of e-waste?
You're drawing a huge amount of strawmen by cherry-picking niche scenarios of "wrong cable to wrong product" incompatibilities and promoting that as being the norm for everyone using usb-C everywhere, as an argument of why usb-C sucks. Sure, there are cases where this may happen and it sucks, but realistically, that's not been the case for me so far since 2016 when I made the switch and you're ignoring the massive amount of compatibility that already exists and also works just fine for everyone else, including in our office where we have a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops and docks plus 3 brands of android phones.
You're also ignoring the huge amount of e-waste prevented by having a single charring conector for all phones for the last few years allowing you to reuse older chargers on new phones across different brands and even different devices, albite at lower speeds sometimes, depending on fast-charging standard used. But still, in an emergency, I'd rather be able to charge my dying phone slower using the bartender's charger than not being able to do that at all because he's phone has one of the other 12 charging connectors we used to have. This standardization has been a huge win for consumers and the environment despite the issues from having 57 profiles which are mostly in the PC/laptop space.
Yeah it's far from perfect today, and it could be better, and hopefully things will improve with time, but standardization will always be a long and hard battle when you have so many parties with different interests and ideas, and still, compared to what we had in the past, I'd rather take this route instead of scraping all this progress by letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I've bought three different docks for my laptop. Only the third actually works at all, and only with the laptop I since replaced.
I'm not going to bother with my new one.
There's already people on this thread using the solution of ditching the cable that came with your device and replacing everything with known high quality cables.
Too bad you get it anyway? I don’t see why this is an issue. I already cannot buy a laptop that has exactly what I need. I’m sure that many people are in the same boat. You already make compromises and spend money on things you don’t want to get things that are a priority. And we spend far more money doing so already than the cost of a USBC controller.
At least this way I know exactly what I’m getting.
Better in some ways? Yes. Not better in other ways? Also yes.
Where someone stands on the spectrum depends on how you feel about uncertainty. That is, previously you were certain about what did work (i.e., the cord + charger that came with your phone) vs what did not.
Now, there's more compatibility yet at the same time we've taken on uncertainty.
I generally feel we're better off. But there are also enough times where I think, "Sure, maybe jetpacks was too much to expect two decades into the 21st Century, but connector + cable being a no-brainer isn't. FFS why do I have to think so much about something that should be so simple?"
Yeah, it's not binary.
Apple chargers follow the USB PD 2/3 spec which doesn’t include a 12v profile, which appeared in the original PD 1 spec. There’s good technical reasons for swapping the 12v profile for the the 15v profile, as 15v is far more useful for actually charging devices, but the rug pull spec change is certainly a pain in the arse.
Good third party PD chargers will support all historical USB PD profiles, and Programable Power Supply (PPS), which allows a device to request any arbitrary voltage. But many first party charges seem to strictly implement only PD 2/3 with PPS occasionally.
The USB forum have really messed up the labelling of these specs, but manufacturers like Apple are making perfectly compliant PD chargers, and implement everything USB PD 2/3 requires.
> and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do.
Every USB charger does support 5v 1A. That’s what you get from a USB port before you start the USB PD handshake. The resistors on the USB-C CC pin indicate passively what the port will provide without a full PD negotiation.
> Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example.
Of course laptops don’t support 5v 1A charging. It’s a complete waste of time. By the time the laptops power control electronics have finished converting into a useful voltage for internal power rails, you’ll have used up most of the 5W of power provided, and turned it into heat. There’s practically nothing useful a laptop can do with a 5v 1A supply. It’s not a meaningful amount of power, and it’s not a voltage that can be efficiently utilised for anything a laptop needs.
USB-C and its associated standards are still in their infancy. For all its problems today, USB-C provides an excellence technical base, over the next decade we’ll see rapid convergence on a standard set of charging features and data features that will be implemented at scale with dirt cheap dedicated silicon. That final feature set will be far beyond anything we’ve had before, but we’re ultimately waiting for the standards to stabilise enough that the IC needed to implement the really useful features can become cheap and common.
I thought every USB port supported basic USB charging, but aren't there chargers with permanently attached cables that only support higher voltages? I believe the Nintendo Switch charger is like this?
I'm able to charge my ThinkPad T14 (1st Gen AMD) using my 25W PD 3.0 Samsung phone charger (EP-TA800). Does it really deliver 20V if needed?
Then it seems to me like they should have chosen a different connector, maybe even be encouraged by some entity to do so, as to not cause undue confusion or frustration.
Or they should have stuck to the spec.
Basically, I have to carefully choose chargers for devices and can't just use any of the USB-C chargers available. Throughout this thread, there's people pointing out similar cases.
Interesting, we have various Dell and Lenovo type-C and thunderbolt docks at work and they can each cross charge the Lenovo and the Dell laptops we have.
Maybe your charger is faulty.
If it actually overheats and doesn't just get very warm, that's a fire hazard and you are using dangerously faulty equipment.
The charger which came with your phone probably doesn't output enough power to charge your phone at its maximum speed, while your laptop's charger has more than enough power for that. But what decides at which speeds to charge is actually your phone's built-in charger (what we are calling a "charger" is actually a power supply, the true charging circuit is always within the phone itself). So if your phone is overheating, either it's just hotter than you expected but still within its design parameters, or your phone charging circuit was badly designed.
> When I plug my laptop in to my phone's rapid-charger, it sometimes trickle-charges and sometimes does nothing.
Even funnier than that: when I plug my phone into my laptop using a USB-C to USB-C cable (because the phone's battery is low and the power is out), the phone tries to charge the laptop; I have to go to the USB control in the phone's notification area and tell it to do the opposite.
That's your phone's fault. It's responsible for protecting itself from excess current.
You've missed the problematic point of where we are now. In the mid 2010's, apple had lightning, and android was almost certainly micro USB. If I had a USB port, and a cable that fit, it would charge my phone effectively. Somewhere in the transition to USB-C ,we lost that.
> What we have today has certainly teething issues, but we're on the right path.
I disagree - we've missed the forest for the trees. I have 4 mains to USB adapters in my home, and 2 USB-A plug sockets. I also have 4 USB C-C cables, and 2 A-C cables (which stay in the wall sockets). I use these to power 2 phones, 2 pairs of earbuds, an M1 Macbook and and iPad. If you pick an arbitrary cable and an arbitrary power adapter and plug it into a device that fits, it will do anything ranging from not work at all (with my anker wall charger and any cable into both sets of earbuds), up to charging it so quickly the device oveheats (140w USB c charger into either phone). I've got 6 devices, 4 cables, and 4 plugs that all have the same connection points that just don't work properly together. Meanwhile if you go back to the mid 2010's as per earlier, we had a lightning cable and a micro USB cable - you knew it worked if it fit.
That's before you get into the nonsense around Android auto. I have a car with AA in it's head unit, and a USB port for connectivity. I must ahve tried 5 different branded cables before I found a reddit post that linked a specific anker cable that works for my very specific combination of car and device - I _never_ would have figured that out on my own.
I don't think I missed anything on the phone charging part, I think you're looking at other issues.
>If I had a USB port, and a cable that fit, it would charge my phone effectively. Somewhere in the transition to USB-C ,we lost that.
I don't know what you think we lost, but every type-C plug I could find in any household or office, always managed to charge my Android phone, just like micro-B before that.
if I show you a photo of two USB chargers, can you tell me which one will provide 5w to my phone and which will provide 15w?
Why do the two ports on my 45w USB adapter provide different wattages with no visible difference to them?
Why does my macbook have the same ports as my phone and iPad but not charge from them when using the almost identical charger to the one I'm supposed to use with it?
Why does my PS5 controller only charge to 2 out of 3 bars when using any/all of the adapters above?
> I think you're looking at other issues.
There are enough issues with where we've gotten to that didn't exist 5 years ago for me to be confident in saying we're going in the wrong direction. We've standardised _cables_, but the important part is the protocols, not the cable. I _want_ different cables for different protocols .
Why? Did you also care about that with micro-B on Android? Or when using different wattage lightning chargers from Apple?
It's up to you to read the wattage on them an decide which one you want to use. Mobile tech has gotten more powerful and so have the chargers.
It's your responsibility to keep track of the chargers in your household, but the great part is, even if you don't and mix them up, they'll both charge your phone either way, just ar different speeds, and most likely any other low power type-C gadget in your household like your earbuds. You can't expect us to go back to having different plugs for different wattages just because you can't keep track of the different chargers you own. Devices and chargers are smart and they'll negociate the quickest and safest charging wattage regardless.
Since you're being obviously obtuse just to be snarky, I'll stop answering your questions as i think i provided enough arguments so far.
And of course you can choose to charge your macbook with an iPad charger, but (surprise I guess?) you won't get a lot of power because the thing is rated for lower rates.
But if we compare to the past.... everything USB-like was charging at 5W. I don't think you will find any USB-C cable + charger that doesn't do that. So things are _by definition_ not worse for that.
For your laptop.... you used to have a proprietary connector or a barrel connector. Now you have a USB-C connector. Now granted, the confusion around the cables and chargers is true! So... put a sticker on it. You now have a proprietary connector again, and things are the same as before.
You can pretend to be in the good old days, and have the nice surprise of added benefits when you need to be. This is a _mathematical proof_ that things are better if you use some colored tape.
PS: since you're only mentioning charging.... we did standardise the charging protocols. The cables are the same and the charging protocols are the same. Just if you buy a weaker charger it will output less.
That isn't how USB-PD works / a problem with USB itself, The device being charged controls the rate of charge: Sinks (in this case, your phone) request a voltage and current from the source, going off of a list of what the source reports that it supports. If the phone can only support say 10W charging it's going to request 10W of power regardless of how oversized the charger is.
set a maximum of a 1 hour charge speed and pop up a notification that allows the user to manually elect to supercharge the battery faster, imo. it shouldn't be an automatic "the charger supports it, imma nuke the battery", that just sounds like vendors speeding up the pace of planned obsolescence.
people always complain about this with wireless, that the heat from a 5W wireless charger is somehow damaging the battery and causing e-waste as a result, and yet you've got vendors who are bragging about how they're zapping a phone battery with a 140W charger to get a third of a charge in 5 minutes or whatever, that's terrible as a general practice.
Nonsense. Your phone is not trying to pull 50W, any correctly implemented type C cable will do.
The complexity of Type C is for things you were not able to do at all: high-power applications (>40W) and / or high data rates over a single cable.
I've a single cable which charges my laptops, connects all the devices plugged into the display, and carries video to two different displays.
That does require a cable with somewhat high specs, and it's unfortunate that labelling isn't the clearest and unsuitable cables are difficult to diagnose, but before this was only an option via bespoke proprietary docks. Now it's just a standard cable.
It's the consumers fault that manufacturers don't follow the spec. It's my fault that Sony PS5 controllers only charge 2/3 of the way when not using the console as a power source, or the nintendo switch doesn't conform to the spec despite using the same adapters, or that my samsung buds aren't charging when I use an anker cable.
As for the Switch, it's somewhat sensitive to out of spec chargers and cables but if it's a proper cable or charger it shouldn't damage it. Most of the concerns were from 3rd party docks when it first came out which weren't really to spec. It would be nice if it wasn't so sensitive, but if you use good hardware you won't have issues.
I've got a regular Switch which has all the original hardware. I often use my laptop's 90W adapter to charge it when traveling. I have not experienced any issues in multiple years of doing so.
I guess I should add to that and say don't buy crappy devices that will immolate themselves or be out of spec so much they damage other components.
Meanwhile, the varying form factor for computer parts has never really been a problem. Back in the day, nobody ever tried to connect their VGA monitor to their PS/2 mouse port. But now, thanks to USB-C, many people try that, only to have it fail. They might have to get a new computer or monitor to salvage even one of them, but in the past, it was pretty easy to get something to work. (Still not perfect, of course. You still had to have a graphics card that could drive the monitor at the timings you desired, and sometimes the optimal timings for the monitor weren't achievable with your particular video output. This problem, of course, still affects HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt.) Meanwhile, the ports that were the same caused a lot of confusion. How come you couldn't connect your PS/2 keyboard to the mouse port?
All in all, I think Type C is kryptonite for today's economy. Consumers only look at one spec when purchasing peripherals -- the price. To make the lowest price USB type C cable, you simply remove any copper from it that isn't related to charging a phone. That means you end up with people that want to use displayport alt mode, or data transfer, and can't, and have no ability whatsoever to fix the problem themselves.
None of this precludes a standard that lets you charge your phone, but it's complicated when you want to use one port to charge your phone, your laptop, your desktop, your monitor, share data, stream video, etc. and USB didn't get this one right. Of course, the industry did even worse without a standard, but it's still terrible.
If we keep going like this, with proprietary charging networks, incompatible plugs, and holiday weekends in California where the official guidance is to not charge your EV, it’s very difficult for me to be optimistic about the future of EVs. We probably need a trillion dollars worth of infra to fix the grid, chargers, and roads to really make this good, but I do not see that happening in my lifetime (mid 30s).
None of this, of course, applies to laptop companies with their bullshit barrel chargers.
It does suck that there are necessarily so many cable types (basically boiling down to no/low/hi data x no/lo/hi power) with no obvious good labeling system except for reading specs on a box.
But it's also not an issue for most people since most devices come with their own cable. My laptop came with an appropriate expensive USB-C power delivery cord, my USB lamp came with a cheapo one, my expensive monitor came with an appropriate expensive high-data Thunderbolt cable. And the manufacturers usually sell or recommend the appropriate longer length cable if you need that.
The issues only arise when you're trying to do more complicated things like use a USB hub, or run extremely long distances. The fact that USB hubs work at all still often seems like a minor miracle to me...
What is the value of all the ports being the same if you can’t mix and match cables?
what is my printer going to do with a displayport and pcie channel? obviously it doesn't need to implement those, but, it worked just fine with a USB Type-A 10gbps connector, what is the value-add of pushing that to USB-C at all?
I can plug 2 devices in of the same type, without worrying about there being only 1 port of that type. I don't have to hunt for which port is where. I don't have to worry that this one model of laptop is missing that one type of port because there's only space for 7 on the side with the ports.
I could keep going...
My monitor cord stays attached to my monitor. My external hard drive cable stays attached to that. My phone charger cord stays attached to my phone charger. Etc.
Sure I have some extra old USB cables lying around from old devices where I tossed the device and kept the cord just in case... but generally speaking random cords isn't really a problem.
We currently have computers with 10 different types of ports. The different ports just happen to be visually indistinguishable.
sure, but, when they plug it into their computer it's not going to work because almost no motherboards support video or pcie over their type-c connectors. the dock will do it, that doesn't mean the rest of the system will.
also, while the cable that comes in the box will work... what if you need a longer one? if they buy a random usb-c cable off the shelf, will it work with video? survey says probably not... especially if they're a typical consumer and buy the cheapest one.
battered USB-C users: “You don't know him like I do, he really loves me and he says he's gonna release USB 4 and leave all this confusion behind us forever!”
USB-IF: “haha but what if I released usb 4 2.0? … … …”
Like c’mon nobody can deny that they’re absolutely doing this shit on purpose, creating confusing standards makes it easier for the forum members to market older crap and pretend it supports the latest thing without incurring the cost of actually supporting it.
it's extremely extremely concerning that this is the standards body that the EU has given a government monopoly to develop connectors for our devices. This forum does not have consumer interests at heart, at all, they are looking out for their members, not for you. And like an abusive partner, they aren't gonna suddenly wake up one day and change everything... they exist as an organization so that Asus can make 1% more profit on a laptop by using an older usb controller, not to produce good standards that consumers can understand.
Unlike HDMI, there's just no alternative right now. We desperately need "VESA for data connections" and to get the wheel away from the shitters at USB-IF.
<rant>
Being able to market a USB 3.0 cable as USB4 despite only reaching 5 Gb/s is nothing short of incompetence, and almost certainly deceptive. There’s zero reason to rename old speed capabilities when we still refer to USB 480 Mb/s as… 2.0. If every feature of USB4 is optional besides 5 Gb/s, what’s the purpose of being able to call something “USB4 compatible” besides marketing?
It’s the same reason HDMI 2.0 is now 2.1! Because almost every feature that’s new in 2.1 is optional. A few months ago, the media went crazy about Apple listing their new MacBook as supporting HDMI 2.0 when 2.1 had been out for a while, but it turned out they were just being more honest.
I never experience incompatibility with my setup, but I’m sure it does happen, especially with budget cables/devices. I’m not sure what cables you’ve tried but I’ve had good luck with Anker and Apple’s newer cables.
Additionally, I've never had any problems with USB-C cables physically failing without extensive abuse. I cannot say the same for on-brand Apple charging cables.
So at worst, it's break even with the proprietary cable situation we had but with massive upside?
It just works for almost everything, the only two more finicky devices I have are a Divoom speaker, and the Nintendo Switch which only like their own charger.
And for docks you just buy the one that your laptop OEM sells and it all just works. If you have a macbook, just buy the apple adapter and you know it will work. Yes it's a bit expensive, but all the cheaper ones on ebay and amazon are defective.
This was very much NOT true for the x86 Macbooks. There is a gigantic thread on the Apple forums about it. I have 6 different docks of both TB3 and TB4 generations and none of them work on my x86 Macbook pro while they all work with my Windows and Linux machines. This was so bad that it pushed me to Linux full-time.
Has this gotten better on the M1/M2's?
Although, I'm not really looking to move back at this point. Going Linux full-time has been quite refreshing for me. I no longer have to buy apps to dork with everything that Apple refused to put useful defaults on.
Has always worked for me on Intel and Apple chips and have seen it always work for every other mac user.
Both CalDigit and Belkin each used to have two different TB3 docks on the Apple store (I see that is no longer true). I believe that Anker used to be sold for a while but is no more. There used to be a TB4 dock, but I don't remember which brand as it was expensive enough that we returned it when it didn't work.
I have the adapter you pointed out and it also fails.
In addition, I KNOW FOR A FACT that this broke with an OS upgrade because I have a precisely identical laptop that runs an earlier version of macOS and the dock works fine. And if I swap the drives, the failure follows the OS.
> Has always worked for me on Intel and Apple chips and have seen it always work for every other mac user.
42 people disagree with you: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253635722
And more: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/sixq3o/weird_...
And 7 pages here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mbp-13-2020-wont-recogn...
Sure the labelling and capability spread is a nightmare to deal with if you want to make sure you can do high wattage charging or high bandwidth data transfer, but it's still much much much better than back in the day when everything had it's own proprietary cable.
If you have a big pile of shoddy cables throw them all out and buy a bunch of the same brand that you know works in bulk. Problem solved. It's not that bad.
The EU is working to improve things - by 2024.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220603IP...
- Macbook Pro (work)
- Macbook Air (personal)
- Friend's PC laptop
- Friend's Android phone
- iPad
- Nintendo Switch
- Steam Deck
- Panic Playdate
- Sony Headphones
- Amazon Kindle
- Anker battery pack
- Fuji Camera
I think that's pretty great. Obviously these things aren't all in my travel bag at the same time, but my travel charging setup will work with any combination of them, from all of these different manufacturers, at up to 100W!
Sadly I do need to carry a USB-C to Lightning cable for my iPhone and AirPods, but it seems like even those final dominos may fall in the next year or two.
I agree that there are definitely shortcomings in how complex things get when dealing with Thunderbolt, Docks, and the naming of different versions, but for charging things are pretty great right now as long as you get chargers and cables that are rated for USB-C PD.
I just wish I could buy a compact GaN charger that could charge a 16” M1 MBP at full speed that also had other ports USB-A and C ports to charge other stuff. Traveling with more than one charger in 2022 should be unnecessary, but the HYPERJUICE Stackable GaN 100w I have doesn’t charge the MBP anywhere close to 100W, the Satechi charges faster but has no USB-A ports, this Korean brand one with two A and two C I believe maxes at 65W per port, and the EGO EXINNO 240W is pretty picky about cables.
The least-bad solution I’ve found is the factory MBP charger, then use the MBP ports themselves as the charger, with A adapters where required :/
We were promised a future with less chargers waste, but I have more incompatible chargers than ever in my box of chargers and cables now.
In contrast my Laptop's HDMI port only does 30Hz (older Thinkpad X1) and to get 60Hz via HDMI I need a usb c to HDMI adapter (which, again, works completeley hassle free).
There probably are some cases where usb c vs thunderbolt 3 vs usb 4 would matter, e.g. if you want fast storage and ethernet together with the screen connection. However, that would not have been any easier before usb c.
USB-C was meant to fit for all my needs but actually I have more cables than ever as there are so many of them with completely different capabilities. If they were not correctly labeled in the first place, it would be a pain in the neck to sort them out. Unfortunately I learned that the hard way.
USB-C Docks are even more chaotic than cables. I returned 3 docks in a row as none of them worked on any of my machines, doesn't really matter cheap or expensive, generic or brand ones. You just don't know which one is going to work. One from around 4 years ago still goes strong, the other one bought later was deadly long time ago. Aforementioned 3 docks returned, one almost got my laptop rebooted the second it plugged in. I never ever had so much problems.
Data- and protocol-related stuff is more complex indeed, but those I can usually research and check the specs of before ordering, so it's really a non-issue.
As this article describes, you can also just look for everything Thunderbolt 4 compatible, as it's a standard on top of the USB 4 standard that's just an aggregated specification of "this stuff works" for most of the important extensions.
Also add USB4 v2 to the mix.
It gets really complex.
Just FYI, not sure if you’re intending to imply this but a lot of people get it wrong regardless and it’s worth saying: usb-c/thunderbolt was NEVER compatible with HDMI.
DP++ (the hdmi mode for DisplayPort connectors) is and has always been an optional extension, it’s just so widely supported on full-size DP ports that people don’t even realize it. And it’s NOT included in most embedded implementations of DP - like the usb-c alt mode. DP++ involves using a different voltage, and it would be super complex to do the voltage change in situations like that across a USB link... you'd probably have to have a voltage converter for the DP pairs to run at HDMI voltages.
Anyway, all usb-c to hdmi cables are active cables. The adapters for hdmi 1.4 are dirt cheap and they’re so small they fit inside the plug, but, they’re active converters and they can have all kinds of weird behavior. Same for docks, the hdmi coming off your thunderbolt dock is an active converter chip and I’ve personally experienced hdmi-specific glitches on a Dell thunderbolt dock that I think were attributable to this.
Sometimes I wish HDMI would just go away, or for HDMI-only devices (mainly TVs) to add a DisplayPort just so I wouldn’t have to deal with HDMI.
Which is still a massive massive improvement over finding out that you can't plug in a device because you lack the exact same cable or needs.
Nowadays this only happens at the edge of capabilities, not for basic functionality.
Good riddance. I don't want to lug 10 cables with me instead of a single high end USB-C.
At work, I have an HP laptop with Thunderbolt 4, DP alt-mode, etc.
I use an external screen and kb/mouse, so I have an HP USB-C G5 dock. It has a USB-C connector, only supports up to USB 3, but that's fine. It supports DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.0.
Its cable is fixed, so I'd expect it to be "up to standard". Also, HP Dock, HP laptop, Windows 11 as recommended by HP, you'd expect all this to just work, right?
Wrong! If I want 4k@60Hz on the monitor, I have to do a stupid dance of plugging the monitor on HDMI in addition to DP (doesn't work if DP isn't plugged in), unplug de DP, replug the DP, unplug the HDMI. It then works as expected. Colors are weird on HDMI (doesn't do 4:4:4 coding for some reason) so I insist on a DP connection.
Once this setup gets going, it will usually survive a sleep / wake cycle (if the PC wakes up, but that's a different story). However, there's a pretty good chance the image will be partially messed up: most often crazy colors and moving lines, sometimes the image will be OK, only somewhat misaligned (think old LCDs with VGA connectors before "auto-adjusting" them) and the monitor will complain of frequency mismatch or something. If I switch inputs on the monitor, it will come back OK. It will not survive a reboot (have to do the dance again). The BIOS has a special "use high definition" entry, that warns against reducing the USB bandwidth. Didn't make a difference.
At home, I have an HP desktop with Thunderbolt 3, DP out, etc. I have a USB-C monitor which works fine up until the Windows login screen when it goes blank (no signal). Windows install worked fine. It works if I force the resolution to less than 4k@60Hz. I only got to see the Windows desktop once with this. Didn't survive a reboot and never worked again.
None of this happens with Linux/X11, everything works as expected on the same hardware.
I fancy myself fairly technical, but I have to admit I have no idea what's going on. Not even where to start looking for issues. I've tried updating the BIOS/firmware across all devices, no luck.
What happens is Windows tries to help - and so switched out of the mode you wanted because something in the cable or negotiation indicated it wouldn’t work.
Linux often doesn’t do that and just blindly runs ahead - and so if the monitor becomes working a moment later - it works.
Utilities for Mac and windows can sometimes force what mode it uses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714107
Wouldn’t be surprising at all to me if it was just down to the active converter not handling it right, even on a fancy expensive dock. There are only so many active converter chips on the market after all and they’re oriented towards cost not correctness.
And I mean, mine sorta works after sleep… like 3/4 or 7/8 times. And if it were an active cable that you were plugging and unplugging every time, that works 100%. You only notice the flaw because it’s a dock, and that’s not really what the converter was designed for.
This is DP pass-through, there's no DisplayLink or similar involved.
The other commenter mentioning that Linux "doesn't care and plows through" could be on to something, too.
But I should note that I haven't "forced" anything. The display is detected as 4K@60Hz with no intervention on my part.
Whereas on Windows, before I do the dance, it only says 4k@30, I can't manually change it to 60 Hz; not with the standard Windows settings app, anyway.
This also happens on a separate dock. But on that one, it never works under Windows, DP or HDMI, dance or no dance. Works perfectly on Linux, though. However, that's some random Chinese dock off Amazon, so I chalked it up to shady implementation on its side.
However, this just goes to show that things aren't so "simple" as OP stated, things can fail in weird ways which aren't straightforward to diagnose. And the hardware isn't obviously broken, either, since I'm typing this on Linux attached to the Chinese dock in 4K@60Hz without having done anything special to get it going. So, something, somewhere, may be somehow out of spec, but how can I diagnose that? On the face of it, all my components are what I'm supposed to use.
I guess there are just too many moving parts, whereas a DP cable connected to the graphics card is pretty straightforward.
is it, or is there a re-driver? also, there are 4 high-speed lines in USB-C; 2 are used for USB3 so the other 2 are for DP-HDMI convertor and DP connector. seems like only 1 of HDMI or DP should work at 1 time.
anyways, this is not an issue with USB but an issue with the dock behavior.
How would I go about verifying that? I've never installed any driver for the dock, and the DP-connected screen works during early boot. Linux recognizes it as DP-X-Y. I've never had the curiosity of plugging in the HDMI port under Linux.
On Windows, it recognizes 3 screens when both DP and HDMI are connected (the third being the internal laptop display).
I know there's a similar HP dock, the G2, that does say it has DisplayLink, whereas this one doesn't.
> the other 2 are for DP-HDMI convertor and DP connector. seems like only 1 of HDMI or DP should work at 1 time.
If it's a USB 3.2 2x2, shouldn't that be able to handle one 4k@60Hz stream per lane, thus supporting two 4k@60 displays at the same time?
That's interesting, I've always seen Linux recognizing DP ports as only DP-X in xrandr. So my first guess would be that what you have within the dock is a something like a DP MST hub, to split the single DP port into two, and then one of these two ports goes into the active converter to HDMI (perhaps in the same chip), while the other is exposed as the DP socket.
Another fun fact: the laptop I'm typing this on shows 4 DP connections (DisplayPort-0 through 3), one HDMI-A-0, one eDP. There's no dock connected to it right now. When I was using the Chinese dock with a DP monitor, one of the four was showing up as connected.
The PC only has two USB-C connectors and one HDMI. So, I guess it expects to be able to drive two displays per USB-C port.
How do you know that it is DisplayPort pass-through?
From what I've seen, if it's going through a USB-C hub, there is almost zero chance that it is DisplayPort pass-through, although such a thing is possible to implement, in theory.
Before this, I had a DisplayLink dock that would not work on Linux without specific drivers.
The HP specs [0] say the number of displays depends on the computer's graphics card.
Don't know if there's anything in between DisplayLink and pass-through, though, so I can't be certain it's not that.
[0] https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-usb-c-dock-g5/277672...
Specifically:
For USB-C functionality, host PC must support the DisplayPort Alt mode protocol through its USB-C port.
USB-C docks (as in USB and DP-Alt mode over USB-C) and dongles are a world of hurt. We had a bunch of them (including from reputable vendors like Lenovo and Anker) and we always had issues, needing to replug the cable because charging wouldn't work, crappy network adapters, suspend-wake issues, BlueTooth/WiFi interference, etc. The only adapter that worked well were the Apple Digital Multiport AV adapter, but it is overpriced and only has a measly 2 ports (plus power passthrough).
My wife and I both switched to Thunderbolt 3 docks both at home and at the office and the problems are gone. Everything always comes up, including after sleep-wake cycles. If often have my private MBP stationary and hooked up for days.
I really love Thunderbolt docks, just plug one cable and you have everything hooked up.
Another issue is that thunderbolt only recently has become more common on PCs. My late 2021 AMD laptop doesn't have TB, for example. Only the higher-end HP laptops at work had it, but they had other issues which made them unusable for me (soldered RAM, under-powered CPUs and shiny screens), so I chose lower-end models.
I used a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock with a Linux-certified Lenovo laptop. 4k@60Hz didn't work (the lanes got misconfigured, worked fine on Windows), charging wouldn't work 25% of the times, the network interface would often not come up. Sleep/resume was hit and miss.
I didn't have a lemon, since we had two of these docks.
I used to be quite well known as the “computer guy” because I would set people to native resolution.
USB has always had software bugs but the explosion of optional features and unexpected hardware combinations has made it feel like Bluetooth; connecting is the easy part, but have fun negotiating all the different profiles and making sure both ends of the connection support the same things.
For example: My Macbook Pro has a 87 watt USB-C power supply. My Steam Deck charges using USB-C.
When I connect the two, the Deck tells me it's not charging at full power. While being connected to a 2x more powerful power supply than it's official one.
Without consulting Google, can any regular person figure out what is the issue?
(SPOILER: Steam Deck only charges using 15V, the Apple PSU supplies 9V and 20V, no 15V)
I remember the hell of every phone having a different charging cable and having to ask around hoping someone had the same brand as you. Sure, it might be a bit of a pain that you can find a cable/charger that won't support the full charging speed of your device, but at least you can still charge it slower.
If they'd changed the connector, you'd throw away your old cables and buy new ones, so just do that every time for the new spec if you really want.
We had different connectors that would or would not work depending on your specific application. Some connectors would only have a smaller set of pins for restricted use cases (charging only, sound only etc.) than the full standard, you still had the quality and ratings issue (think ethernet cables), some companies would still recycle connectors used in other contexts for their specific purpose (a sheer round connector is one of those: there must be hundreds or proprietary cables with a round connector).
And of course you’d have adaptors to make a connector work in an equivalent setup.
Sure more shapes would make any of these issues limited to a specific shape, but there was still plenty of room to get it wrong.
All in all I think USB C is still a step forward.
Er, but isn't that exactly the problem with USB now? Not all USB ports and all USB cables are interchangeable, some devices use certain pins for restricted use cases (charging only, sound only), cables and devices have painfully varying quality (https://www.pcmag.com/news/poorly-designed-usb-c-cable-kills... , https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/google-engineer-leav...), and companies reuse the one connector without actually being fully compatible (Nintendo, I'm looking at you).
The difference is it's one less issue to deal with: we don't have to fret about the connector shape anymore.
There's also a fighting chance to have "all around" cables that match 90% of what you expect to be using it for.
So you would destroy a blade every couple weeks when an unused or unplugged power connector barrel would touch the modem blade and destroy the modem through its circuitry’s apparently-unprotected ground.
We‘ve been having connector issues for as long as we’ve had connectors.
The only docks that have worked for me, have been the CalDigit TSX docks, which I have used for a long time. The TS4 is out of stock on the CalDigit site, and I'm never using Amazon again, for anything over about $100. I'll get it, eventually.
I have the latest 14-inch MBP (M1Max).
The biggest issues that I encounter are:
1) External keyboard wake up/recognized.
If I use a dock, the keyboard is often not recognized. I found that I need to plug directly into the Mac. Otherwise, it sometimes won't wake the computer, or the computer sometimes "forgets" the keyboard.
2) Monitor Handling.
I use a 49" LG Ultrawide (5120 X 1440). I used to have it split into two monitors (3840 X 1440, 1680 X 1440), but now use it as a single, ultrwawide, after Apple started natively supporting that resolution.
I found that many docks (even "Thunderbolt" ones) and adapters, refused to allow me to select the ultrawide size. Also, the monitor would often fail to be recognized, after the computer wakes, and I would have to reach under, and unplug/replug, to get it recognized. I have the monitor plugged directly into one of the TB ports, with a TB-to-DP cable, and it works great.
From what I understand, the new CalDigit should fix these issues.
I really think they included the HDMI, just for projectors. It’s worthless, as a daily monitor port (to me).
I didn't want to shell out all that dosh, just to be disappointed.
I’ve learned to avoid DisplayLink. It’s a hack.
I have a USBC-to-DP adapter, that I plug into a TB port.
This is the cable that I use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074V5MMCH
I get this all the time with my 2560x1440 144hz monitor even though it is plugged directly into my m1 mbp. It's maddening and I still can't figure out how to resolve it.
I think Apple cheaped out on the HDMI port.
Even apart from the monitor just hanging in the sleep state... a lot of them have glitchy behavior until you hard reboot the monitor. Some monitors actually will (internally) execute a full reboot of the monitor controller board when you wake them as a result, because they can't reliably come back out of the Deep Sleep state, and that's another source of the "monitor disconnects and windows moves my icons/windows" glitches. The monitor is actually electrically unplugging itself and replugging when it wakes.
Vendors don't really care because everyone (who's in the know) turns the feature off because it's broken and causes problems.
This particular EU regulatory exercise was a failure. Or at least, EU needs to rip off the bandaid and require that it be enabled with no option to disable it, which would obviously lead to problems and poor reviews, which would eventually lead to a fix... after a couple years of glitchy monitors.
I do wish reviewers paid a bit more mind to the myriad of GUI/usability issues w.r.t. monitors (waking from sleep, DP disconnects, slow menus that are plagued with inconsistencies depending on the monitor's state, etc). Sometimes, if I'm lucky, a reviewer will make a side note about it in their comments section.
I attach a variety of USB devices (keyboard, mouse, backup drives) and haven't had any trouble with it.
It's over-priced at $250, but I picked it up from Costco last December for $100.
I mention it because it's been trouble-free for me and it never seems to be listed in the reviews I've seen.
I think almost every hub out there (besides CalDigit) has the same “guts,” as the port layout is almost identical.
Edit: spelling
At the moment I'm considering the Dell UltraSharp 32 4K USB-C Hub Monitor - U3223QE. I know it is only a USB-C hub, but I'd like to be able to plug my older laptops into it on occasion, so I need something with a least an HDMI input and preferably also a DisplayPort input.
I don't know anything about monitor-hubs so if people have comments or recommendations, please let me know.
I am using a 350-nit Philips Brilliance 329P9H (manufactured by AOC), and, frankly, the size makes a huge difference contra the need for multiple panels. It works well with Windows and macOS devices.
One does not need Thunderbolt on a device like this; anything latency-sensitive or bandwidth-intensive should be connected directly as is. USB-C is fine.
Sure, I think some of the latest USB standards should be able to support that while at the same time providing 4K@60Hz. But I'd also like the monitor to support higher resolutions, too.
The monitors with USB-C charging that I've seen (eg X34GS) have really bad coil whine if you use them for charging... which is sort of like the main point here. and beyond that, it's only 89W, what happens if you want a 140W charger? what happens if you want 10gbe and the monitor doesn't have that? what happens if the thunderbolt part of the monitor is poorly implemented or has problems? thunderbolt is known for being finicky and do you want to trust monitor companies to get it right, when they can't even make a monitor that doesn't coil whine while charging?
and on the flip side... what if you want to upgrade your monitor, or it fails/breaks? or what if you want to upgrade to something better? the monitors with a good dock implementation won't necessarily be exactly what you want, and it certainly will be expensive compared to picking a dock+monitor separately.
it's very attractive in a sterile product-designer sense to have the dock built into the monitor, but dock+monitor is nearly as clean and gives you a LOT more flexibility and reliability in a practical sense. If anything I'd go the other direction and have the monitor powered off a usb-c from the dock lol.
as far as general cleanliness, one of these years I'm gonna cut a hole in my wall and drop some cables to the basement with TB3 or DP 1.4 active fiber cables (not electrical cable so fire code ignores it) and use a TB4 dock as a header for my desktop in the basement, so it will be super clean. You can even run power cables in the walls (technically you probably need this to be speaker wire to get CL2 fire rating) and eliminate all cables except for a couple running to the dock/monitor through the walls. Get a monitor arm for your desk and you can lift everything up and clean it all, etc. Would be super nice, I'm tired of cables everywhere and my desktop dumping heat in my office.
(don't do wallmount arms though... tried that and didn't have very good results because the monitor arm really works best going straight forward and doesn't give you a lot of motion laterally. With a desk-mount arm you can put it where it needs to be, with a wall arm you have to put it on a stud and you can't really move it laterally very much, so if the stud isn't exactly where you want it, you almost have to move the desk to fit the mount, didn't work well.)
The former seems more and more common among monitors, so it should be easier to find the kind of monitor you want.
But it's also true that it's probable for your connectivity needs to change before you want to change the monitor.
If you just need the one monitor, Dell has some great options. I can just have the one cable to my laptop, everything else is wired to the monitor and works great.
So the Dell monitor is connected to 3 computers now, it switches sound depending on the video source (!) : USBC, DisplayPort and HDMI all pass sound to my headphones. And Ethernet stays with USBC box - exactly what I wanted. I still need a keyboard/mouse switch but overall “Display as a dock” setup turned out very good for me.
I Googled "Mac EDID ruby"[0] to try to find the script that I'd found and used.
Also, many monitor docks power off the USB ports when they go to sleep, and then you can't use a device on those ports (including a keyboard or mouse) to wake up the computer.
Most new monitors will however allow you to switch to USB3.0 speeds at the cost of being capped at 4K@30Hz.
If you want to use a webcam and a usb Jabra speakerphone for video calls you may exceed the power limits.
Took me way too long to diagnose the issue
You can connect the monitors with a display port cable, then use a single USB-C cable to connect both to the laptop in one go. The dock also works great for everything I've needed it for. (dock only works on one monitor when daisy-chaining them, but that's no big deal and appears to be a fundamental limitation of using display port to daisy-chain.)
It acts as both a USB hub and a KVM switch. I plug my MBP in with USB-C, and also attach a Linux desktop via DisplayPort and a separate USB3 cable. When I switch the display between the Mac and desktop, my keyboard and mouse also switch because they're connected to the monitor.
As others have said, using USB C for display leaves only USB2 speeds for other devices attached to the monitor. This is fine for keyboard + mouse but I wouldn't attach an SSD to the monitor's USB ports.
Other nice qualities include connectivity options (USB-C, HDMI, DisplayPort), a very beefy 90 watts power delivery, slim bezels, and highly adjustable height/tilt/rotation. Downsides are no speakers and 60 Hz refresh rate. But I haven't found anything better than this display.
- power wattage
- data speeds
- capabilities (eg Display Port)
I’ve found a few below but they aren’t complete.
[0] https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/assets/assets/000/085/324/med...
[1] https://www.akitio.com/images/support/faq/thunderbolt3-vs-us...
[2] https://i.redd.it/1n2tk9cd9kj21.png
[3] https://www.thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/default/files/th...
Not quite. Before, if the cable provided by your device manufacturer failed or was lost, you had practically no chance to replace it other than buying another overpriced cable from the original manufacturer. Keeping a backup around for every single device was often infeasible. Now you have a very good chance of finding an adequate replacement, even of a reasonably priced exact replacement if you work at it.
"But you can fry your Nintendo Switch now!" Well, yeah, but built-in signaling and negotiation has kept such cases rare enough to make the news, and it wasn't impossible before. Maybe not with the smaller devices using unique connectors, but back then it was common to reduce the number of adapters by carrying a "universal" one and a bag of tips. Set the voltage wrong and BZZZT fried laptop.
So it's complex in different ways but I agree with those who say that thinking it's worse requires some serious rose-colored glasses (or not having been an adult during that time). I'll take being able to charge nearly a dozen different devices, from earbuds to laptops, with the same one charger and cables, even if that cable doesn't provide absolutely full functionality for every combination. Carrying around a bunch of separate connectors and (usually built in) cables really sucked. In practical terms, it left people stranded without any power option, or with an actually dead device, even more often.
I've had one cable fail, and one dock fail. I now own three thunderbolt cables, and two working docks, and a dead one.
Personal laptop has 3 USB-C ports, only one of which is Thunderbolt. If I forget and use the more conveniently placed USB-C port, the resolution is limited. If I neglect to connect it to power first, it won't reliably connect to the dock.
Work laptop will connect, but will always decide I want 1080P, I have to manually adjust the resolution each time. I have noticed if the monitor is set to 120 HZ, the laptop refuses to acknowledge it exists. 240 or 60 HZ works.
SO's laptop was quite the quest. It works now, but originally it refused to activate the display. Other ports on the dock worked, the display itself worked with a single DisplayPort -> Thunderbolt cable. The display was listed in the graphics card driver software when connected via the dock, it just refused to allow me to enable it. Things would work without a display driver, or a really old version of the driver. Various driver removal utilities didn't help. I flattened the laptop and installed the latest drivers. Things work for now.
I've come away from this mess with a setup that mostly works, but surely doesn't feel stable. And if it stops working, I have basically no clue as to why. Could be a failed part, could be a driver issue, nothing really gives me any feedback as to why it's not working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Electronics_Standards_As...
This didn’t work with the Apple Thunderbolt Display. I tried this a few times and got this only to work with a TB Hub in the middle.
And to add to: > Thunderbolt 4 seems to be essentially just USB4 with all optional items implemented (but USB4 is more like TB3 than USB3...).
TB4 is as described but adds restriction to min/max speeds. This is more for the to be connected devices than the computer. It is a form of seal that it will work with the highest possible speed. Otherwise it could just be USB-4 or TB3.
You can't make a standard that always does everything while being afforable enough to be used in low-cost, low-margin devices
There is a reason: cost. A lower-capability cable is cheaper to make, and people don't want to pay more when the lower capability (often just power) is all they need. If every cable had to be made to the absolute highest spec, people would complain about that too. There are also economies of scale etc. from using the same connector.
Yes, the situation is bad. Worse than it needs to be. Better branding and labeling and OS diagnostics would all help. But "absolutely no reason" is still either naive or exaggeration.
1. buy everything thunderbolt 4 certified
2. connect monitors using tb -> dp cables
3. avoid Linux and Windows (vms are ok)
Everything works as it should and using only one cable I’m connecting my MacBook to 2 monitors, a webcam, a screen capture card, a microphone, a stream deck, and it even charges the battery.
Break one of the rules and be ready for a world of pain.
Did you really find a solution where you plug in one cable and you natively get two independent screens out of your MacBook? To my great frustration I have found my M1 Pro can only extend to one monitor, not two. Every solution out there either ends up with "mirrored" displays (useless) or requires to virtualise the link via DisplayLink which I really don't like. Apparently it's a fundamental issue with limitations of Apple's implementation.
I have this dock: https://amazon.com/dp/B08FF6WYZH, and both monitors are connected to the dock though HDMI.
The error you have is that it doesn't support MST (daisy chaining monitors) but if I use separate thunderbolt -> display port cables for each monitor it works.
The Intel Mac I had previously wasn’t able to do this but thankfully my company allows Linux laptops.
So the recommendation to just avoid Linux is unfair IMO.
In lieu of this mythical system, this post on HN.
I use pinboard.in all the time. A lot of people seem to like raindrop which is newer and more maintained.
Organize using whatever Markdown tool you like, from folders and OS search to Obsidian.md.
I would like to do this with a TB4 hub in the middle. I don't want to connect a GPU (yet) but I do want the speed of networking with no latency that TB4 networking does. I think it is faster than NVMe SSDs.
Does anyone have a TB4 hub and two linux boxes and TB4 cables to see what happens if you connect two computers via a TB4 hub - do you get the networking automatically?
What happens if you plug two TB4 ports from the same device into the hub?
But since you use Thunderbolt networking, what is the actual speed of it? I've seen statements that suggest it emulates a 10 GbE NIC and so only does 10 gigabit/s, but that sounds kinda weird. Is it a full duplex almost-40 gigabit/s link?
NVMe is sitting directly on PCI-E bus, which is connected directly to the CPU. The only thing what is faster than that is RAM.
What problem are you trying to solve, which isn’t already solved with your existing Ethernet cable?
Update: I stand corrected. [1] Turns out most Thunderbolt controllers can act as downstream devices, too!
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbolt/comments/s6vq3k/comment...
To go technical we need to check the USB4 System Overview. https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/D1T1-3%20-%20USB4%20... to find four types of Protocol are mapped to USB4: USB3 Adapters, DP Adapters, PCIe Adapters, Host Interface Adapters. We are all familiar with USB3, DP, PCIe but what is a "Host Interface Adapter"?
Now we need to open another document https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/D2T1-3%20-%20USB4%20... to find "Provides parallel communication channels: Control Packet Routing, Host-to-host tunneling" under the Host Interface section. It's Host-to-host tunneling we want.
Finally, go to page 55 of this PDF and see Path Terminology -- most importantly you can see there can be any number of Path Segments.
So to recap: The so called Thunderbolt networking is now called USB4NET, it is provided by the Host Interface Adapter, and it can travel over any number of routers. (In the first doc, you can find routers are the fundamental block of USB4, host, router, device are all routers and in this sense they are the same.)
> USB4 20 Gbps (gen 3) uses 128b/132b = 19.39 Gbps
> Thunderbolt 3 10.3125Gbps uses 64b/66b = 10Gbps
> Thunderbolt 3 20.625Gbps uses 64b/66b = 20Gbps
Hah, seems Apple doesn't want to get sued again for bit distinctions so they're making sure the sticker unit matches the true rate with the standard they control more of. It's a bit like the decimal/binary distinction: https://blog.codinghorror.com/gigabyte-decimal-vs-binary/
But then I'm from the time of parallel-port printers and dial-up internet, so maybe my bar is lower...
Apple has made USB4 controllers for their M1/M2 devices. Though it isn't fully clear to me if the author is aware and meant "chipmakers other than Intel and Apple".
Only after replugging a few times will it work.
Not to mention the security issues of ThunderClap
Currently it's just a crapshoot as to where my apps will be. Will they be on the right monitor? Will the monitors have magically juxtaposed? Will everything be only on the laptop screen? Who knows!? This is a productivity destroyer for me, multiple times per day.
Yes, I wait until both screens have powered on. And then some extra time... and it doesn't matter at all.
Isn't that handled by software? That Apple hasn't been able to provide for ages despite originally bosting to have the best monitor support, and now releasing "the best" external display with Studio Display?
> Currently it's just a crapshoot as to where my apps will be. Will they be on the right monitor? Will the monitors have magically juxtaposed? Will everything be only on the laptop screen? Who knows!?
Yup. It's been a pain for me since forever.