I hate USB-C. What a mess.
What good is a universal port if it's not actually universal? I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to be.
What good is a universal port if it's not actually universal? I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to be.
Having a plug on say a laptop that can be a charger, a HID, a drive, a monitor, or all of the above with a docking station is vastly superior to the old day IMHO.
Unfortunately the cable to do that isn't cheap and is massively overkill for say a phone charger. Thus cable compatibility becomes a thing but looking at HDMI cable compatibility is always a thing.
I think the problem is what used to be complaints about niche connectors are complaints about USB-C and it feels different and more impactful even if it isn't necessarily.
After all I know back in the Mini-USB days you had manufacturers skipping the data pins to save some copper leading to frustration when you couldn't transfer files.
Besides Thunderbolt cables, there is not a standard nor universal way to identity them. I had to test each cable by plug in an SSD then speed test the SSD.
Flash back 15 years, a cable with MicroUSB either transfer data, or not. The difference between high speed / super speed only lives in the device.
A USB-C docking station will plug into many of my laptops, but only two will display anything on the screen.
Being able to pick and choose features like that is not user friendly. It will do everything except when they didn't feel like implementing it is not a good standard.
At least you get minimal functionality (why are you hoarding data less cables?) Better than having to go buy one because you have a billion micro USB but no FireWire to hook up that drive.
That's actually not a bad solution. The speed of a cable doesn't matter unless you have a device that needs to be fast.
The baseline profiles for power delivery (i.e. anything up to 20V@5A) have been all but done for two, three years now - you can readily buy combinations of PD and MUX chipsets that handle everything you can throw at them, and Anker has high-quality chargers to supply the juice.
The thing where USB-C still has issues is alternate modes. USBx usually works on all ports of a laptop or PC and virtually all cables, but anything involving TB, display, debug or audio is a hit-and-miss given how incredibly difficult it is to route all these high-frequency signals and properly mux them.
The simple fact that we can finally share charging cables across phones is a god send, not having a single cable for all phones was the stupidest thing people had ever done.
It’s such a mess that the EU took one look at it and said “let’s make that a universal standard and force it upon everyone!” Modern USB truly is the government bureaucracy of standards.
I believe there were discussions about potentially standardizing on Lighting if Apple relinquished it's tight control over the technology but they were not interested in that path.
The EU decided that Apple cannot dictate what cables are used to charge their phones to the degree of at one point charging manufacturers $4 per cable (to be fair it seems like Apple was providing the hardware so it wasn't a pure licensing charge).
If you're curious, my main objection to the EU is that I don't think USB-C is a good standard and I don't like the prospect of the whole industry stuck with USB-C longer than appropriate because there's no incentive to experiment and possibly come up with something dramatically better.