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Comment by CubsFan1060 | Hacker News Reader

Before everyone freaks out, consider that it's highly likely that:

* All USBC Cables will work for charging

* Probably all USBC cables will work for connecting to accessories

* Data will only be allowed to pass to a certified accessory

I think this is more likely to be very careful about what accessories you can use versus trying to stop you from being able to use an average usb cable to charge.

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I suspect it will also limit non-certified USB-C charging cables to some hopefully-not-terrible charging speed.

I see this as a general win since mfi seems to be reasonably open and USB-C has a lot of cheap cables floating around.

USB-C is annoying and I don't like having to worry about about my cable frying my device.

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/smart-office/using-the...

> USB-C is annoying and I don't like having to worry about about my cable frying my device.

Yikes. I've never worried about that until reading this comment.

You should not fear the FUD. There's incredibly miniscule danger. People buy shitty uncertified ultra-cheap USB cables by the millions & there's been next to no problems. Your devices will be fine. Almost all devices & chargers have quite good safety measures built in, so at worst, stuff doesn't charge.

USB-C has such a loud hate-mob after it. And it's really just not bad. It really mostly is great.

My two biggest complaints:

1). If I have 4 USBC devices, and 1 USBC port, how do I connect them? With previous versions I buy a $10 hub. There are literally zero options to accomplish this with Usbc ( if I am wrong I would love to know about it, this is actually a problem I have)

2). The cables. Some cables support certain data. Some certain power. There are no markings to give me any of this information at all.

I think you can use something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-4-Port-USB-C-Hub-Compatible/d...

...albeit it'll only do data, and won't let you do P/D or video.

My impression is that the cheap-hub product got a lot harder to make because of how much more USB-C supports, such that you need to caveat any cheap product (as I had to there), and the products that do support all the USB-C features wind up being full dock-type hubs that start at around $70.

Have you done a google search for a usbc hub? The first result is 25$ but will solve your problem.

It’s not cheap, but I’m happy with the OWC Thunderbolt Hub: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-hub

It has its own power supply. I have a USBC 14 inch monitor and a webcam plugged into the hub, and the hub plugs into my MacBook. The hub can power my external monitor, webcam and the MacBook.

> Almost all devices & chargers have quite good safety measures built in

Even chargers from ALLCAPS manufacturers on amazon?

Most of them will be incredibly fine, not harm a fly, and offer like 2x+ more value than where we were before with charging which also had lots of no-name replacement brands & hard to get $100 OEM chargers. While being completely intercompatible.

It's just absurdly epic, in my book. Pick a completely random no-name brand it and there's like 98% chance it'll do the job fine, if you want a $30 100w charger for ex. In most cases, I would not be afraid to plug it in and find out. I expect some cheap chargers indeed probably won't be able to sustain full load, but I also expect they'll shutdown fine & not harm anything. It just seems unfair to try to reach into the absolute bottom-most reaches we can find to judge, and even if we do, I think most people would be impressed & shocked how little harm is done here.

But more so, there's so many perfectly fine all-caps brands that do have thousands of reviews that seem either quite legit or mostly legit. Nekteck has a 100w gan charger you absolutely can do fine with for $40. PPS and multiport capabilities abundantly available at under $50? Can we not be impressed a bit here?

Making 20V 5A & not messing causing damage is not the worlds wildest problem, even if you are cutting every corner you can.

I've definitely bought a charger off Amazon that later shit the bed and the NAS device it was powering wouldn't boot. I wound up buying a whole new enclosure off of ebay before determining that the power supply went just slightly bad enough to make it power up but not successfully spin up the drives or whatever and boot. It didn't burn down my house, but it caused me way more hassle and economic cost than its price was worth.

Nas enclosure from a shitty off-brand, powersupply from a shitty off-brand. User = that usb-c standard really sucks.

Except I really like the USB-C standard.

Actually, to my surprise, the answer is YES!!

I was trying to consolidate my chargers into a single charging station and I didn't realize started a saga. Eventually I had to give up. While I was getting down the rabbit hole, I tested dozens of different chargers and the results were quite unexpected. Though I didn't use an oscilloscope, the usb power meters used gave almost the same results, thus I would say the results were good. The best of those were a few ~$7 ones bought from Amazon, good/fair ones were either came with mobile devices or from popular brands such as A*r or B**n(I hid the names here deliberately to avoid being taken as ads). The worst were also among the two aforementioned popular brands. For A brand, its voltage dropped to 4.8V when under load ~1.8A but it caused significant interference that the USB light's switch stopped working after powered on. B brand were even worse, voltage dropped to 4.5V when under ~1.7A load.

So literally I gave up and continue to use what I have right now, at least for now.

I bought a garbage USBC cable and while it didn’t fry my device, it damn near got me in several car accidents. It was faulty and continually disconnected and reconnected for no apparent reason while I was driving. This meant losing navigation at total random, even when I needed information to make turns.

I have no idea why a brand new cable would behave like this but after several scary interactions on the road I stopped trusting the standard and bought a better cable.

There were some devices that got bricked by USB-C cables a few years back.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/poorly-designed-usb-c-cable-kills...

> Leung, who has been testing USB-C cables and posting about them on Amazon(Opens in a new window), posted a one-star review(Opens in a new window) of Surjtech's 3M USB A-to-C cable. Why did it earn such low marks? It "seriously damaged the laptop computer I am using for these reviews, a Chromebook Pixel 2015, and two USB PD Sniffer devices (Twinkie)," he said.

https://www.destructoid.com/after-the-mass-bricked-switch-si...

> To further quell that fear Nintendo has provided a landing page that explains what’s safe — and it basically boils down to USB-A to USB-C with 56K OHM resistors. Bottom line? Don’t get cheap bargain bin cables and you “should” be okay according to Nintendo. Or you can just opt for USB-C to USB-C to be safe.

Nintendo is a good example of vendors gone wild when it comes to usb-c and how to do it wrong, but so are raspberry pi's and many other vendors initially. Apple adding yet some another abomination to the mix after the dust almost settled, simply just to maintain some market relevance when it comes to selling overpriced dongles and power supplies. It is unwelcome in the current mess of usb-c as staying just the own bastard thing externally with lightning. Did the EU really change any of the waste or spend? No, just filled whole new landfills with lightning accessories.

Everyone is still going to have to re-buy 4x $60-100 power adapters, a $50 headphone jack for usb-c, and most anything else the want to connect to it. If you share a household with (gasp!) android, then you still gotta keep a bin for the apple vs android/everyone else crap and/or label them.

> Everyone is still going to have to re-buy 4x $60-100 power adapters

Belkin 65W 2-port PPS is like $50, and that is not going to fry your devices.

> a $50 headphone jack for usb-c

Even the Apple one is $10, and audiophiles have said the DAC in it is quite good.

> If you share a household with (gasp!) android, then you still gotta keep a bin for the apple vs android/everyone else crap and/or label them.

Not as of this fall.

> Everyone is still going to have to re-buy 4x $60-100 power adapters

This is untrue assuming you mean people switching from a Lightning iPhone to a USB C iPhone. Existing iPhones already charge over USB C PD (to Lightning) using the same USB C power adapters as a typical modern Android device or laptop, for example.

It hasn't been a major issue since the first few years of general use. Some people got burned and remember but not the other 99 cables that were fine.

You should still by from a trusted or well reviewed source/manufacturer. My issue is the cheaper long cables I have all work but charging is not fast, just normal speed.

> Buy good quality cables from name brands such as Anker.

Unfortunately that does not always help. My Anker cable started to burn next to me, while I was trying to fall asleep. It wasn't even USB-C, but still mini usb. Fortunately I didn't fall asleep fast enough and noticed a strange smell. Very scary, though.

*micro usb

How did support handle this situation when you reached out?

I tend to take a picture of the barcode / proof of purchase with my phone and tag it with the item name before I chuck the box. The one issue I had with an anker cable I submitted a ticket with a picture of the defect, picture of the proof of purchase / barcode and the invoice from Amazon. New cable arrived in a couple days. I was impressed. Their stuff seems to hold up.

Any more details on where you sourced the charger / cable? Power supply? US/EU?

OK, so that's trying to stop us from being able to use an average USB cable to do anything but charge.

Yup. Which satisfies the EU law and behaves the same to lightning cables.

I don't see anything in the EU law that says every single device has to interoperate with every accessory.

While this may be true, it is just a short-term solution because the EU will just change the law again if it annoys too much. It would be far more easy for all of us to not only follow the letter of the law but also its spirit. But this wouldn't be a very Apple thing to do.

The stated goals of the eu law are about ewaste. Can you explain how you think the spirit of the law is that every device needs to support all accessories? Do earbuds have to support external hard drives?

FWIW personally fine with Apple MITM the verification process.

USB cables available online from any arbitrary retailer could be so wildly out of spec they burn out gadgets, or include some phone home thing.

Of course technologists will scoff as of course they’re the only people on the planet.

The whole Apple playbook these days: charge everyone a troll toll in the name of safety

these days?

And consumers are fine with that proposal because they end up with stuff that actually works.

But they are fine with it only because those safety mechanisms are not enforced by goverments already, and of course Apple is more than happy to be the one in charge of enforcing it.

Finish the thought. If governments did the enforcement, Apple wouldn’t have to do so.

For things with actual safety issues like batteries and power bricks, the government should be regulating them more. For things like "does this usb-c cable meet the required specs to provide consistent video and high speed data transfers?", this seems like exactly the kind of thing private companies can validate.

If consumers are fine then the vast majority of cables I’d see people owning would be Apple cables. That’s rarely the case. Most people are buying 3rd party cables even to use with Apple devices and I doubt any but a small minority even know what MFI is, never mind basing their purchasing decision on it.

Edit: To add to the anecdata, here’s a Reddit thread on the iPhone subreddit where the majority of folks are responding by saying they’re buying non Apple chargers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/b4k8j2/do_you_guys_...

From a cursory look at that thread, everybody is using Anker or Belkin, all MFI-certified, or a variety of Qi chargers which are also fully supported.

I guess I'm not sure what your point is.

rhaway84773 conflated Apple cables with MFI cables. The Apple tax is high, the MFI tax not so much.

The customers that buy Apple don't flinch at 40 bucks for a cable, no.

There's a reason that Apple is not that big in lower income countries like here in Spain.

Please point me to the iPhone cables you're buying.

Here's Apple's own; 40 smackaroos for USB 2.0 (eg 2002-era) transfer speed: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HN5S2ZM/A/native-union-ni...

The future, everyone!

God forbid you buy one of those "cheaper" $20 rubber cables and live in a house with pets. No joke, I have went through more than a half dozen of those cables from regular wear-and-tear.

I wouldn't call that "Apple's own" cable. That's a third-party cable that they sell in their store, and is notably more expensive than their own officially-branded cables.

(That said, I do agree that their branded cables are generally overpriced for their level of durability.)

While their accessories are quite overpriced, it's not just "in the name of". It's in reality, too: there are quite a few teardowns comparing the insides of e.g. Apple chargers vs. generic chargers. Whatever issues you may have with Apple accessories, cheaper ones are often much worse.

You have it backwards. Charging will be permitted with any cable - only data communication will be blocked unless you pay the Apple tax.

This helps exactly no one - except Apple of course.

None of my Lightning cables are “Apple certified”. They all transfer data find.

These are my “universal charging cables”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092ZT8CJ9

- USB A/USB C on one end

- USB C/Lightning on the other

They transfer data at USB 2 speeds

But my truly universal cables are these

https://a.co/d/4NVYrmN

- USB A/USB C on one end

- lightning/USB C/MicroUSB on the other end

- 10 Gbps data

- 100W charging

- video over USB C for my portable display that gets power and video over 1 cable

These are thicker and less convenient than the first ones.

>USB cables available online from any arbitrary retailer could be so wildly out of spec they burn out gadgets, or include some phone home thing.

Apple's tristar (or whatever they call it now on new models) should reject anything out of spec, I don't think a cable should be ultimately trusted that it will work due to very real world wear scenarios.

Phone home is probably tin foil hat thinking.

> Phone home is probably tin foil hat thinking.

Probably, but also be careful which cable you're using! https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable

This one is physically exactly the same as an Apple Lighting cable, but contains a WiFi Server and a bunch of other doodads

Wow, that's a really good price for such a neat hack.

USB stacks seem to have a lot of vulnerabilities. I would unironically prefer a non-data cable that just did negotiated power delivery, so I wouldn’t need to carry a trusted charger.

Gotta hold onto those $60 HDMI adapter sales I guess...

The ecosystem of USB C accessories is one of the best parts. Lightning accessories are incredibly expensive and incredibly limited by comparison.

doesnt their 'lightning to hdmi' adapter, really a hack with an arm chip with ram in there to transcode the output from the phone into a hdmi signal?

It certainly was. It might not be anymore but it worked fairly well so I'm not sure why they would change it.

It still is since Lightning doesn't have the bandwidth for a raw HDMI signal, only a compressed video stream

It's basically an airplay receiver with an HDMI output.

Does anyone not comparison shop?

https://a.co/d/2KdWjH9

Not at all. Let's take a look at a USB C option:

https://www.amazon.com/Multiport-Adapter-Compatible-MacBook-...

For many many years there wasn't a reliable seeming 3rd party lightning to HDMI adapter. I bought mine in about 2019ish? And besides Apple the only one I could find was a sketchy clone of Apple's.

Exactly this! I think the MFi chip just has to be on the device, then any cable works.

MFi is costly and annoying (Android's AOAP is much easier because there is no paperwork and no key distribution), but it does bring some security (like "I am plugging this authenticated MFi ethernet adapter that was audited and that shouldn't pretend to be a keyboard and do stuff on my behalf")

> * Data will only be allowed to pass to a certified accessory

How can you read that as a feature?

They want to protect users against themselves? What about a software interface for USB Host options (like OTG, how to present media, etc) is great. Does iOS already have one of those? A proprietary layer that stops you from using USB-C features unless they say it's okay is an abuse of their position. This is a money-grab.

This phenomena is calls Stockholm Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Though I would like it to be more open (like the Android AOAP), I disagree with the "abuse of position".

They build a smartphone, they don't have to enable ethernet-over-usb if they don't want to (most Android phones don't). Just like they don't have to add cameras to their smartphones if they don't want to.

I guess they can totally say "you can only use MFi-certified ethernet adapter with iOS devices", and this actually brings security ("when you plug an ethernet adapter in your iPhone, you can be sure it won't behave like a keyboard and try to hack you").

Of course I wish everything was more open. But that does not make it an abuse of their position. Most software out there is vendor-locked and proprietary.

There is zero reason to restrict transfer speeds to a USB 2.0 level in today's age.

This is Apple once again not respecting their customer.

Are there even Android phones out there with USB 3.0 or higher over USB-C?

My current gen phone also only support USB 2.0 and it's ridiculously slow to get data off of it. I usually put in an SD card, copy all data over and put the SD card into my PC.

Yes, a bunch of Android phones are USB 3.0 or greater.

Android flagships from the last 6 years or so have USB 3.0.

My understanding is that they would need to redesign the SOC since USB3 wasn't part of the standard A series chips. The few iPad Pro's that have USB3 have an external controller.

Why would only two of the four iphone 15 models support the higher speed then? Are they putting in 2 different chips for the same model? I think all of them are using the A17

Data will only be allowed to pass to a certified accessory

Theoretically it should be possible for a cable to spoof the ID of what it's connected to though, right?

That was why I had it as a probably. I don't feel qualified enough to comment on what is or what is not possible there.

Lightning accessories used crypto-based verification. I would be surprised if the next iteration for USB-C is not significantly stronger. So more than a simple spoof / replay attack will likely be required.

> Theoretically it should be possible for a cable to spoof the ID of what it's connected to though, right?

Yes, but the authentication doesn't appear to be simple ID spoofing. This is from the announcement of the standard they're using:

"The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today announced the USB Type-C Authentication specification, defining cryptographic-based authentication for USB Type-C chargers and devices. Using this protocol, host systems can confirm the authenticity of a USB device or USB charger, including such product aspects as the descriptors/capabilities and certification status. All of this happens right at the moment a wired connection is made – before inappropriate power or data can be transferred."

https://usb.org/sites/default/files/article_files/USB_Type-C...

Wouldn’t want to transfer any inappropriate data, haha.

No, I don't think so. At least for MFi (which this rumor suggests they will extend to USB-C), there is an authentication co-processor. That's not just an ID, it's cryptography.

So theoretically it could be possible to break the authentication, but in practice, we can assume it's at least very hard.

> Data will only be allowed to pass to a certified accessory

Does this mean that there is no possibility of someone would create a cable with some malware in it?

That's a good question! I wonder if the data sent over MFi is signed/encrypted (which would prevent a MITM attack). I could totally imagine it!

But at least it somehow protects against a fake accessory with some malware in it, because the accessory has to be authenticated (that I'm sure of).

That sounds not like they’re limiting it, just that they are not providing drivers for every device under the Sun and are not providing a mechanism to install third party drivers.

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