> 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?
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.