The USB Situation | Hacker News Reader

The USB Situation

randsinrepose.com

161 pointsherbertl230 comments

Having a standard plug is great, I hope we stick with it for decades and gradually the situation will improve as everyone gets used to the standard.

USB-C gets rid of all the stupid previous decisions on the physical connectors (orientation required but not obvious, fragile clips, too large, too small), the physical side of things is now set and hopefully all devices, chargers and outlets will now converge on usb-c.

Yes getting the right cable can make a difference but the situation is so much better than before, partly because phone manufacturers were forced by the EU to adopt one connector early one. I’m so glad Apple’s proprietary connector is gone.

Lightning remains a better physical connection. So many USB-C connections I have are flimsy as hell.

Hmm. I don't see how. I'm poor so the quality of cables I can afford or buy is much worse than the average tech worker — I'm limited to either the cable that comes with e.g. my phone, or some 1.5m cables I bought from Amazon four years ago, and I've never had a flimsy or dodgy USB-C connection, even though those cables were put through hard work while I was homeless (and honestly I'm really, really surprised — they should be breaking by now).

Now, HDMI, on the other hand... yeesh

Can't say why, but in my personal experience USBC is far less likely to stop working due to lint in the socket, which is fixable but annoying.

I really have never had any issues with USB-C, lightning on the other hand was the complete opposite. Fascinating we have had the exact opposite experiences

I'm mostly concerned about USB-C repeating what I consider the mistake they had with micro-USB: having a thin post/tab inside the socket of the phone. It puts the most fragile part of the interface on the most expensive side (the phone). It would make so much more sense to put that breakable inner tab on the cable side, so you only need to replace the cable. Lightning doesn't have that inner tab on either side, so I find it much more durable.

On the flip side, lightning puts the part that wears out most quickly (the retention springs) inside the device, while USB-C does the opposite. The same argument can be made for both sides.

I'm not an Apple fanboy but I do use Apple phones which still bear the lighting connector and not even once has the male outlived the female —no brand, no shape, not with any head–start.

Lightning females are basically eternal for all intents and purposes even if they do feel a bit looser at the end of the terminal's lifetime by eg letting water into the connector part itself.

I don't know that it is any worse with USB-C as all usb-C devices I own are far more sheltered from everything.

USB-C is still welcome though because all other types are barely pluggable into a compatible device.

I love the Lightning connector, and think it feels better than USB-C. My Intel MPB has terrible USB-C ports where the cables just fall out all the time.

But to be fair I've also had many issues with Lightning. A few shorted out and became unusable and burnt on one side. And those were 100% original bought in the Apple store, as were the 5W chargers and iPhone this happened with.

Knockoffs were generally terrible and might stop working. A "genuine" cable bought from big retailer turned out to be a knockoff once after a software update, resulting in annoying popups from Apple. And some knockoffs were so bad they didn't stay in.

Even certified Mfi ones from Belkin somehow felt different, like the tolerances were slightly off. Those worked though.

Overall, I think it's had a good run and was underrated as a connector physically, but on the whole I like USB-C and it's more open ecosystem more.

Lightning works great. It's a wonderful connector. Of all the Lightning-equipped devices I've ever owned (1), I've only ever had one single issue with it that required replacing a cable.

50% failure is an admirable and lofty bar that all electrical connectors should strive to meet.

Lightning is so awesome and universal that Apple has never even bothered fitting it to a pedestrian device like a computer, and has reserved it for only their most very-exclusive, high-tech devices (like the portable telephones and mice that were once available at astutely prestigious retail locations such as Wal-Mart).

Seriously, this Lightning connector is like the best Kool Aid ever. It's a shame that they stopped making it; it could have been everywhere, if only it had more time in a truly free market.

12 glorious years was clearly not enough time. It deserved so much more.

For that matter, every device with a Lightning connector except for a limited set of iPad Pro models in a limited set of situations, was USB 2.0, and even those unusual situations were 5 Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 1. Power seems to have topped out around 18 W. The specs are not comparable with modern USB C, and it isn't clear that the connector itself would have been adaptable to comparable specs without significant changes.

Except for how either Apple or the pinout forced it to be (excluding very rare situations) stuck at 480MB/s. USB-C can hit 20GB/s. Lightning also tops out at lower wattages.

And by the time you revise the pinout, you effectively have a different connector. Lightning was nice-ish to plug in, but the wear-component was on the expensive device, not the cheap cable, and pairing it with the shit data transfer rate makes it a terrible connector

I disagree, lightning is more fragile as it has a single point of contact which can bend, they also become unusable if the exposed contacts get damaged or corroded.

Apart from that though it was proprietary, which is awful for lots of reasons; that’s the main reason I’m happy to see it gone.

Standard plug is great but government need to mandate labeling.

I'm stuck putting wire labels on every USB c cable I own. I can't tell the difference between a 3A and 5A cable otherwise, same for usb2.0 only cables vs 3.1 vs 3.2 4x,whatever the fuck.

I wouldn't be against better labeling, but I've found that I don't have to worry about it too much, day to day.

USB-C has allowed me to grab one decent two-port charging brick, two solid 6ft cables, and charge just about everything I own just by keeping those in my backpack. If I think I'll need to move any data fast, etc., I just throw my one good USB4 cable in my bag, too.

I will admit, though, that I've had some crappy situations at work where it turned out my flaky monitor setup was due to the stupid work-provided docks coming with cables that only supported 10Gbps. Better labeling would've solved those ones.

Charging is the place it matters less.

Hah same exact setup one brick two ports and it charges everything even my laptop! I've been eyeing some of the ones with built in batteries, but I get a lot of mileage of one brick in the bag.

The steam deck forced me to finally pay attention to the usb-c ecosystem and I can only imagine how some non tech people might get with mysteriously bad or slow charging.

I find it crazy that Apple went back to magsafe in the m4 (maybe earlier but that's the machine I have at work). But at least you can still charge over usb-c.

I can't get myself to do the battery-built-in-to-charger thing. I've always treated portable power banks as semi-disposable since they do eventually get worse and fail, and it feels icky to me to tie ~immortal charging gear to something that will die.

I did have the same feeling about flashlights for camping/hiking with lithium batteries, though, until someone walked me through just how much better they are than lugging around AAs.

Yeah, every cable should have a 3 digit number of something with a unique capacity lookup.

If you're not fussed about amps, one digit is plenty. A-C cables have 3 possible speeds, and C-C cables have 5 possible speeds. And two of those are shared for 6 total, I think. You can keep all 8 separate if that helps remind you that only C-C cables can do monitors and thunderbolt.

There are some weird active cables but the vast majority of USB cables you'd buy today just need a speed rating and a note of whether they're 60 or 240 watts.

You can just throw away the low-spec cables BTW.

This is the answer. I just bin the cables that come with devices and use my own spec compliant good cables. Thankfully the inclusion of a useless 5cm usb c to a cable with every device is coming to an end.

The mandatory labeling should express:

    - Intended maximum safe Power Delivery\*
    - Intended maximum link speed

* in Watts; optional voltage / current --- Gbit/sec '1/2' as rounding for 480mbit, permissible to use Engineering notation and power of 10 (rather than 2) values, must specify bit or byte base size unit.

> I’m so glad Apple’s proprietary connector is gone.

Apple made Lightning when the rest of the world was still mucking about with Micro-USB, which I would argue is just about the worst connector ever in common use. The only type of cable where I routinely kept a half dozen on hand because they failed so damn often.

I do like USB-C, but despite being superior (physically) on paper, it's not as robust as Lightning, definitely more finicky. But it has more capability, which is important.

How do people find Lightning cables robust? Every single one I got from Apple failed around the one year mark. So much so that I finally started buying cheap knockoffs that only lasted 6 months but cost a tenth of official ones. To compare, I haven't seen a single Micro-USB or USB-C cable fail on me whether expensive or cheap. Am I simply uniquely unlucky in the matters of Lightning cables?

My Apple Lightning cables weren't great either. They typically either started coming apart at the stress relief sleeve or the contacts would somehow corrode (other cables in the same container were fine).

I settled on buying packs of 3rd party braided cables for myself and parents so we could switch them out more easily.

With MagSafe, I rarely use a cable at all anymore!

> How do people find Lightning cables robust?

Had every Apple device that used Lightning and consequently have had a veritable smorgasbord of cables from official to Poundland to weird keyring ones; never had a single one fail.

Then again, I've not had a MicroUSB or USB-C cable fail on me either (without obvious physical damage like the one I half-melted by injudicious aiming of a blowtorch.)

A few years ago, I bought a bunch of magnetic cables (with both Lightning and USB-C connectors - the cables are the same; only the connectors differ). I haven’t had any issues so far.

> How do people find Lightning cables robust? Every single one I got from Apple failed

My third party cables are lasting 3-5 years. Absolutely would have preferred lightning cables, but it is what it is.

That said, Apples lightning cables were/are indeed quite low quality.

I've found the opposite, Lightning cables routinely failed for me and I haven't had a USB-C cable fail yet, and I've been using them for 7+ years.

Not sure if it's the connector or the build quality, but want to throw in the opposite experience.

I just had to buy more type-C cables because all of mine are broken - always at the cable entering the connector, and I don't coil them tightly - but I've never used Lightning.

In case you don’t do this already, avoid:

- Pulling on the cable to unplug it, instead ensure you pull on the solid connector on the end.

- Bending at the point of the cable connector, resting the phone upright on the cable + connector when plugged in (e.g. in cup holder in a car) or stretching the cable too long that it causes a bend in the cable at the connector when plugged in.

There was a recent HN post about cable abuse and it said coiling too tight doesn’t itself damage cables (I will add I don’t like how it makes the cable get a memory and wants to kind of recoil itself all the time), but I think the action of too tight coiling incidentally puts more stress on where it joins the connector.

The cables fail from bad design.

The connectors are great.

Aren't there high quality cables available? Eg from companies like Apple or Anker?

I struggle to understand why an Apple lightning cable would be more robust than an Apple thunderbolt cable...

Well at least the metal part of any type-C plug will inherently be more fragile due to the hollow design and manufacturing by stamping out of sheet metal. Whereas for Lightning, it’s a solid machined part.

But as soon as you get to the chip housing and the rest of the cable, it’s anyone’s game I suppose.

What I've read is that the Micro-USB plug is intentionally designed to fail before the connector inside the device is damaged.

I have a compulsion for fixing things, so I've seen a lot of gadgets where a connector has been broken away from a circuit board due to repetitive stress on a plug. The most common have been audio plugs -- headphone jacks in cellphones, and some connectors in musical instrument gear. I'd much prefer to replace a $5 cable than an expensive phone or gadget.

But of course it's arguable that they made it too delicate.

Now that I'm on my soap box... I've also seen a lot of damaged cables where the breakage is in the wire just as it exits one of the plugs. And a common cause is the habit of coiling your cables neatly by wrapping them as tightly as possible. Since I mentioned musical gear, I'm a working musician, and I cringe when I see how people -- even engineers -- treat cables. I always advise people to watch one or two of the ubiquitous videos where some burly roadie shows the proper way of coiling and handling a cable. I'm a bassist, and I have cables that have lasted 20+ years.

> the Micro-USB plug is intentionally designed to fail before the connector inside the device is damaged.

I've had two devices where the MicroUSB socket has broken off the PCB. Not a huge amount considering I've probably had tens of devices with MicroUSB power over the years but a truly inconvenient amount given the impossibility of a home fix (for most people.)

Now I use those magnetic-plug cables and just leave the MicroUSB ends in whatever I might need to charge to avoid the physical stress.

That's a different failure mode. Before Micro USB there was Mini USB, which was the same concept but I believe the fault was that the springy parts were inside the device. When that wore out, you were screwed because the cable would just cease to make good contact, and a new cable wouldn't help.

Micro USB's improvement was reversing where the weak bits were. Now it's the cable that wears out, so when it does you just throw it out and buy a new one.

Attachment to the board is another thing entirely, it's all about having some sort of through hole pins to hold it in place (not all devices had that, some were purely surface mount), and good design. I think some devices had a tiny daughter board for the connector, to ensure that part could wiggle around a bit for stress relief.

The Mini USB plug layout also gives it more leverage to apply force to the PCB connections. It's a really annoyingly bad design.

I think Nokia's original Micro USB socket design had only two through-hole pins, which was not sturdy enough.

A standard USB-C socket has four: one in each corner like some later Micro USB sockets. There even exists USB-C sockets with all through-hole pins but there's no space for USB 3 pins so they are all USB 2.0 or charging-only.

I used to buy cables with non-standard reversible Micro USB plugs, but I think there was only one manufacturer of them and now I can't find replacements.

A large part of it is basic physics. A Micro-B connector like [0] is way easier to damage than a C connector like [1] because it is less solidly mounted to the PCB, and because it has a shorter distance from the fulcrum to the furthest mounting point.

I have accidentally ripped off Micro-B connectors, but ripping off a C one usually requires a nontrivial amount of force.

[0]: https://www.lcsc.com/datasheet/C53207153.pdf

[1]: https://www.lcsc.com/datasheet/C53431229.pdf

> Micro-USB, which I would argue is just about the worst connector ever in common use

False! Mini-USB is even worse.

USB-C is much better than micro or mini, but still lacks the robustness of A. I would far rather have something a few mm bigger but tough.

Anything bigger is too big for smaller devices like phones.

USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail. Actually all the USB connectors do eventually, because they all rely on a thin piece of sheet metal not bending when lateral force is applied. And, reversibility notwithstanding, they are still hard to fumble into place compared to (say) RJ45, or 3.5mm TRRS.

I have no love for Apple and their proprietary nonsense, but even lightning is a strictly better connector than USB-C - easier to insert, less fragile, better wearing. Still too many wires though.

I wish we'd used something like TRRRS, and stuck to 4 wires. Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.

TRRS might work for power, but it sucks for signal integrity - ergo no high-speed for you. And 4 wires is nowhere enough. You need two for each differential pair. No, half-duplex is absolutely not okay, it's the worst design decision in pre-SS USB.

Tangeant but then it means that framework's expansion card design for their laptop is a great idea: When the expansion cards plug into the mainboard they are already on a rail that prevents lateral stress, plus generally don't un/plug them often and you let the cheap replaceable expansion card takes on the wear.

> USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail.

Strange comment. My USB C cables have only ever failed around the strain relief after lengthy use, as with any cable that gets handled a lot. I've got a few where I can feel the resistance gradually lessening when plugging and unplugging, but nothing has failed. As someone who wants to keep devices for a while the greatest thing about the USB C power standard sounds a little like faint praise, but: pretty much all my laptops relying on USB C for power will allow me to plug power into a different USB C port if the one I habitually use wears out.

Lightning was more failure prone, not just wearing out the goofy plugs but with failures on the device side. Micro-USB was a nightmare.

I also haven't had any USB-C ports fail, so +1 to your anecdata.

Some laptops are picky about what port you use to charge them, unfortunately - I believe my laptop has only one that can charge it fast enough to keep up with full GPU use - the others are around 20W iirc.

> Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.

Meh.

Anyone who has used audio devices with TRS will tell you how fragile both the female and male connections are.

Seriously. Who hasn’t wiggled a headphone connector and heard the static? And you want to run 40Gbps over that?!

As with headphones, you can always just not wiggle it! Or arrange so that it doesn't rotate once it's fully inserted. There's nothing magical about the contacts in a USB connector.

> You can always just not wiggle it

Surely you understand how USB cables are used in reality? “Don’t wiggle it” is not practical advice.

> There’s nothing magical about the contacts in a USB connector.

Of course not. What’s special is the connector that holds it securely in place, and allows all 24 pins to make contact without shorting.

Static is bc of the scrawny wires though.

Anyway, usb-c receptacles could be countersunk to help that fumbling problem. Right angle connectors could help, too.

You still have the problem of temporarily connecting every pin as you plug it in. USB-C has 24 pins and all are used. That would be a TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS connector.

> USB-C is very far from a perfect connector.

There is no perfect connector. But a common, standardized connector across applications and manufacturers, which is available now, and has most of the useful features is the next best thing.

Audio 6.5 mm is as close as humanity got to a perfect connector. Unfortunately downsizing it to 3.5 mm removes the robustness of the female as it tends to eventually break

Here's a lifehack that will extend the life of the socket by ~1000x: you can buy a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm "adapter" that you keep plugged in to the female end. Now you have a wear part that is trivially replaceable.

Of course that doesn't work all that well for laptops where it would stick out and easily break when you put it in a bag, but for that one pair of headphones you like that is no longer being manufactured it's great!

This is actually really smart!

There's no "perfect" connector because there are many needs and some conflict with each other.

trrrs is a wild thing to want as the universal connector... They are bad for any actively powered connection since the tip/rings hit EVERYTHING on the way out and shorting. Split keyboard users know that pain.

I was also worried about the plastic tongue, but I have never managed to break one. In contrast, I have managed to irreperably damage the exposed metal contacts on multiple Lightning cables. If you'd asked me which should be more durable, I would have predicted Lightning, but my experience has been the exact opposite and beyond any doubt.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough, and it is.

I have not in fact seen any USB-C sockets/cables fail, but I have seen a couple of failures with lightning (the fragile tongue on the male end can snap or get corroded/scratched).

No need to overthink it. USB cables should just label themselves with their bandwidth - it's not rocket science. Lots of other kinds of cables have a similar requirement. And I guess their maximum watts too. Admittedly I'm not sure why so few USB cables do this.

I'd very much rather not have a new connector shape every time the technology improves and devices and cables gain new capabilities. The benefit of where USB-C is at, is the new stuff is backwards compatible with previous generations. The complaints in the early years - about one connector, unpredictable capabilities - were wrong. It took time for this benefit to accrue.

Also all the version numbers and brand names have been confusing, but the bandwidth is just a single number that goes up each generation and covers most of the issues now. There are just a few edge cases this doesn't cover these days.

Most USB C cables do have a label, but it's an electronic one. Desktop and mobile OSes could do a better job of surfacing this information for the user.

Or they could simply be labelled.

In this way, I would be able to see (using the advanced, integrated bionic vision system that I've carried with me and used every day I've been alive) what it is that I have before me instead of plugging them in one at a time to some electronic oracle to try to discern the details of the invisible magic inside.

Do they really? Even on linux, I can look at what bandwidth a device is connected with using lsusb, but there is no way to tell if a low speed is a limitation of the device or the cable. It just displays the speed that was negotiated considering all factors. I've never found a way to get information about a cable digitally.

There are a handful of dedicated devices that will read the eMarker, eg https://www.amazon.com/s?k=USB+emarker

A recent HN thread announcing a Mac app that can read them along with discussion on alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972511

Very cool, thanks!

>No need to overthink it. USB cables should just label themselves with their bandwidth - it's not rocket science.

And yet, this requirement already misses the other thing it should state: it's power rating. Because even two cables with the same bandwidth can have widely different power rating, and thus powering capacity or charging speed for different devices.

I have no respect for a man who can't label a cable with more than one figure.

Don't take this comment too seriously, just a curiosity.

Powering capacity sometimes matters, but are there any devices out there where the charging speed would be meaningfully different? As in, they use significantly more than 60 watts to charge? (I looked up some of those super fast charging phones and they don't seem to be following the USB standards in the first place.)

> but are there any devices out there where the charging speed would be meaningfully different? As in, they use significantly more than 60 watts to charge?

Any device which can charge at 100W or more? Like lots of laptops, as well as my ebile batteries?

> Like lots of laptops, as well as my ebile batteries?

Soldering irons can benefit from being able to peak above 60W when heating.

They certainly can.

A dainty little USB-powered Pinecil v2 can peak at ~126W with appropriate firmware and an EPR 28v PD 3.1 power supply. It's an impressive feat. :) (And, yes, it requires a USB cable that is e-marked for 240W before this is allowed to happen.)

That said: 28v EPR is a bit usual. A more typical configuration runs on 20v USB PD at no more than ~64W, like a cheap, genuine [safe], used 65w Lenovo laptop charger cheerfully provides.

The question was about charging.

"Lots of" laptops? Upon searching a bit harder I think the 16 inch macbook pro can probably do it. Most laptops that can hit 50% in half an hour don't have a big enough battery to charge at much over 60 watts.

Ebike is interesting.

> Upon searching a bit harder I think the 16 inch macbook pro can probably do it.

The 16" MBP can charge at 140W over USB-C since the M3 (before that it's limited to 100W over USB-C, Magsafe was required to hit 140), the 14" can charge at 100W (specifically 96W) over USB-C: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102378

Framework's 16" can charge at 85W (1C on an 85W battery), and it can also pull 160W from the charger under load (possibly under load + charging).

Getting clear infos from Dell is impossible but it looks like a number of laptops are provided with 130W chargers, and their "ExpressCharge" is apparently a bit under 1C, so their 96Wh battery expresscharge laptops likely charge around 85W (and require 130W chargers to do so).

etc...

I don't see anything about charging at 140W on that apple page. I do see it saying 50 percent in half an hour which is a lot less. For the 16 inch that's near 100W, for the 14 inch with an almost 70Wh battery that's about 70 watts.

I guess 85W is enough to make a difference from 60W, but it's pretty close.

> and require 130W chargers to do so

Only if that's a weird artificial requirement, no way charging is only 60% efficient.

The most infuriating part is that the USB-IF actually designed those labels already!

The graphics already exist[0], and they are quite clear about what the cable is able to do. Manufacturers just... can't be bothered?

[0]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_log...

Oof now I've actually looked at this link and... they did manage to make it confusing: There's an official label for 5, 20, 40, and 80Gbps... but the official label for 480Mbps is, "just don't show any value." And that's the most common USB-C cable you'll find new, even today.

> USB cables should just label themselves with their bandwidth

Article: "MacBook Neo’s two USB-C ports look identical. One is 20× faster."

The anti-UX designers have escaped from the web design containment dimension and started to ruin the physical world. I didn't mind at all the different colors on ports for USB 2.0, 3.0 and the unofficial teal 10 Gbps USB 3.x (whatever revision) etc.

https://randsinrepose.com/guides/usb/usb-guide.html

this is 100% Claude-generated,and without citations I'd be very careful at trusting it. wonder why whoever prompted this in existence would not include actual references and sources of information.

disclaimer: me -> everyday CC user, so trust me, this thing loves to spit nonsense.

https://randsinrepose.com/guides/usb/sources.html — every single fact is sourced.

Written by Claude, too. (well, "Grumbles", as the footnote says)

I don't particularly care if it's right or not but this is ...weird. Especially from Rands.

I can't parse what the idea is here, like, what's being communicated and why. The "minimal writing" version says too little, the "throw everything and the kitchen sink version" says too much. And enough of both is slop (meaning, unneeded) that it's hard to orient yourself and find a guidepost, if there is one.

And I love using AI, and my reading comprehension scores have never been below 99.9%. Idk why I'm even sharing that. It's just, it's not me, it's not some battle I'm fighting, it really is a real problem, not just "oh it's Claude", it's bad writing in an alien way from an author I've always loved.

EDIT: After my 11th minute and 4th read on this, it has become clear to me that the idea is, you don't want to use the cable that comes with your iPhone for general USB data transmission because it is slow. The noise in the short version is USB IF, 5gbps, MacBook Neo.

Yeah the language is bizarre and clearly artificial. It was made by an openclaw agent almost certainly. It took me a long time to understand their point amongst points.

> my reading comprehension scores have never been below 99.9%. Idk why I'm even sharing that.

The Twitter link that's on the footer of your website is wrong Mr. 0.1 percentile.

No?

Are you okay?

(why am I asking? its in header, link works, aggro interaction)

I'll go slow:

There is a HEADER and there is a FOOTER on your site's design. The link in the FOOTER is wrong.

Maybe you never knew that there is a footer on your website?

You also don't need a parenthetical for so few sentences.

I hope things get better for you, this is no way to live.

Yes I gave up reading half way and came here for the discussion because the style of writing was so bad and it doesn’t really seem to have a point to make.

Not sure what value someone generating slop like this thinks they are adding but I think it’ll become a strong social stigma to generate articles and people will later be very embarrassed by all this slop.

USB-C is in fact completely fine in normal use, and cheap cables are about the only problem with it.

In an alternate world, Ethernet took on the role of the universal serial bus, and we have laptops that charge via PoE, but only possible on one of their ports (the others are usable for peripherals --- with protocols running over Ethernet too, of course.) But the same confusion regarding power and speed capabilities exists.

We'd have to invent a new connector first. It's too thick for modern laptops, not to speak of cell phones.

Also, RJ45 is terribly fragile if you keep plugging and unplugging it, eventually that latch will break. And copper can barely support 10G and is terribly power hungry when it does that. And the cables get thick and inflexible.

The 8 pin modular connector as found in most ethernet does have several sins but it has one huge redeeming feature, A feature I wish was found in every cable. It is easy to field terminate. Have fun putting a new end on nearly any other cable.

Field termination is necessary when the connectors are too large to pull through a conduit. But if they were USB-C sized, you could just pull fully assembled cables.

It’s also about managing length and slack.

It also comes in very handy when you need a 8m cable, but only can buy them in lengths of 5m and 10m, or when you’re wiring an entire building, and figuring out which lengths to order up front is a major pain in the ass, certainly compared to ordering a few hundred meters of cable, a few hundred connectors and tools to put the two together. And that’s ignoring the price difference.

except those assembled cables will always be the wrong length.

As a person who has installed hundreds of miles of cabling of every description inside of buildings of every description:

Every single time someone has provided pre-terminated cabling for one of my jobs to "save time" or to "make it easier", this provision has done neither.

Instead, it has consistently multiplied both the time required and the installation difficulty. It has done these things while also producing an inferior end result.

It is my anecdotal observation that it's NFG.

I have no idea what kind of cable it was, but the bloke who installed the control panel for my ducted air conditioning got the cable snake stuck in the wall cavity. He had to cut it and use a different snake. So there's a dead snake in my wall, and your comment brought this to mind.

Lenovo has re-invented this particular wheel to fit in laptops, some ThinkPads come with a proprietary Ethernet port which is around the size of USB-C, just with Ethernet signals. And you can get a passive breakout adapter to convert it to RJ45 (idk if it's included with the laptop).

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/cabl...

People routinely lose their cool over a $7 slim headphone to usbc adapter.

I wouldn’t mind dongles if their cable wasn’t so flimsy, especially when the other cables are strong.

Which they should, because that situation is a mess too. Either 1) you get an active dongle with a cheap and nasty DAC built in, or 2) you get a passive one and get to discover if your phone manufacturer decided to route the signal from the (probably quite nice) internal DAC out via the USB-C port or not; whether they did so competently given the proximity to signal and power lines; and - separately - whether it even has a mic in ring.

It really is fractally rubbish.

Just next to the proprietary port is a USB-C one. You can buy a good USB-C ethernet adaptor for less than half the price of the Lenovo dongle.

My ideal would be a non-proprietary, smaller native Ethernet connection capable of 10GbE.

The adapter still has to adapt. That requires power, adds cost, and adds negligible-but-non-zero latency. I don't love the proprietary port being proprietary, but the fact remains it is native Ethernet with no caveats.

They are getting rather small[0] and not-crazy-power-hungry these days!

And if we're being honest: is there really that much difference latency-wise between Ethernet -> NIC -> USB -> CPU and Ethernet -> NIC -> PCIe -> CPU?

[0]: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapte...

The ix.industrial ethernet connector is a thing. I hate it, but it's a thing.

> copper can barely support 10G and is terribly power hungry when it does that.

AFAIK, thunderbolt cables are also copper - so what trickery do they use for supporting USB4-80? i believe both connectors use differential pair wires for signalling.

It's simply length. Ethernet is expected to work on 50-100m runs, while USB4 specifies maximum cable lengths of 2m even for just 5gbps (at least for passive cables). 80gbps is 0.8m

The longer Thunderbolt (which is actually just USB4) cables internally use fiber optics for data transmission, with converters to copper in each connector. Even the medium-distance (3 meter) ones have signal quality boosters in each connector matched to the kind of signal degradation that kind of cable will experience.

Completely passive TB4/TB5 cables max out at about 80 centimeters.

Besides what retatop and crote said - USB4 uses either binary or PAM-3, 10GBASE-T uses PAM-16. Higher modulation means lower frequency bandwidth (so longer and/or crappier cable), but also more current-hungry line driver and more current required to keep noise manageable.

> It's too thick for modern laptops

Nah, there's enough space for an RJ45 connector on the 0.48" thick E7270, so there's certainly enough space for one on the 0.61" Macbook Pro 14. The trick is putting the connector on the display hinge.

Laptops no longer come with ethernet ports because (a) wifi is good enough for most people, most of the time; (b) apple went USB-C-only in ~2018 and other 'premium laptops' copied it; and (c) by the time that trend reversed and laptops started re-adding hdmi and usb a ports, demand for ethernet connectors was lower than ever.

For what it's worth, it'd be pretty easy to design an RJ45 compatible connector that didn't have that flimsy plastic latch.

> copper can barely support 10G and is terribly power hungry when it does that

Mostly a side-effect of 10GBASE-T dating back to 2006 - and all the chips used by early 2020s prosumer devices therefore using pre-2010 technology.

Definitely a technological dead end, though - I highly doubt we'll ever see 25GBASE-T hit the market!

I wish they would have developed a data-over-powerline protocol specifically to link your monitor's USB to your PCs. Especially for computers 20+ years ago, almost everyone plugged their monitor into the same AC power jack as the PC. They could have had a USB 1.x connection between the monitor -> AC power -> power supply -> motherboard so you could plug your slower USB devices into your monitor and skip the USB cable. Apple had this, I guess, with imac, and I know about powerline ethernet devices, but I think they skipped the most obvious use case.

That's because anything-over-powerline is absolutely and objectively terrible.

You already have a high throughput data cable between your PC and monitor. Carry USB over displayport or whatever. At least then you can use more than one PC on an entire city block.

People would still complain that you can pickup the wrong cable and it won't work for 10GbE and that the ports look the same but some work on 10Mbit and others on 2.5GbE!

Some can even give and receive power and look the same as others that can't!

Ethernet is different in part because it's for much longer cable runs (both average and maximum) than usb is. It's a lot easier to maintain signal integrity for 10 gbps or 40 gbps when you're dealing with a few meters maximum (0.8m max I guess for usb4?).

There are DAC cables for 10G and 40G (actually 4x10G) Ethernet which are only a few meters. The newer USB standards' physical layer and other characteristics actually resembles Ethernet in many ways.

I modded a laptop to charge over PoE in 2007. Before realizing that the places that had PoE, and the places I wanted to charge my laptop, had nearly zero overlap. It was virtually useless in practice, but I still love the idea.

I have not yet made a laptop to output PoE. Though it would be tremendously useful for provisioning IP cameras, there are dedicated thick-tablet-shaped devices for that, which do source PoE from their batteries.

Even though both USB and Ethernet transport bits, the surrounding ecosystem is so different that it couldn't really be a replacement.

Devices plugged into an Ethernet network are true peers, but USB is master-slave by necessity. Ethernet devices have unique addresses, but USB devices can be anonymous, only identified based on the port they're plugged into. Ethernet is best-effort with buffering and packet dropping, but USB provides guaranteed delivery with tightly bounded latency. Ethernet signals must travel up to 100 meters but USB requires the host and device to be within a few meters. You could reuse the physical wires, maybe (we already do! USB runs on twisted-pair) but nothing else, from the connector to the topology, is usable.

I'd rather prefer Ethernet over USB 2.0. Full duplex, galvanically isolated and cheap fiber converters, (relatively) lightweight host implementation possible, no "transaction translator" madness (at the cost of slightly more expensive hubs). Too bad it is such a power hog.

One of my pet peeves with USB C is that many laptop manufacturers went "great less space occupied we can push the porta closer together to make space for something else", but many USB C devices (particularly USB Sticks ...) have inherited the dimensions of USB A. So there is not enough space for a plug and cable, e.g. I can't use my yubi key while my monitor is connected to the laptop.

A short USB-C extension cable won't do the trick?

Ref: https://www.amazon.com/Extension-Extender-0-65ft-Thunderbolt...

It would, but that's the Apple solution, a dongle.

Better to design it right the first time, which I think is the OP's point.

Those are out of spec though so should be used with caution.

Agree, but a 2FA dongle is extremely low risk.

The USB-C specification[0] recommends a minimum 12.85mm heart-to-heart distance between ports. Fine for cables, probably not fine for dongles.

USB-A mandates[0] a maximum overmold size of the plug of 16mm, so the minimum heart-to-heart distance is going to be a hair above that, although I don't think anyone is placing them that tightly together in practice.

[0]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...

[0]: http://www.poweredusb.org/pdf/usb20.pdf#page=127

It would help if computers / phones had an easy way to just identify a cable when you plug it in. Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about?

it violates every products person wish to be “simple”.

There’s a reason that Windows barely shows any errors until the system fully halts.

They now have the option to silently add this kind of detail to logs and have clippy find answers to why is my computer odd/slow only when asked. For a long time I felt like companies leaving product decisions to the Occamist (or the closely related lazy programmer) was a superpower to compete against larger organizations that usually don't, but we may get a run for our money from emulated simplicity.

Windows will throw up warnings when the disk space is nearly empty, when it detects driver instability, when RAM is full and page files can't keep up, when a specific application is draining your battery, when your files aren't backing up right, and all other kinds.

The problem with most of those is that either users don't care until it's too late ("I need to get this done now, I'll delete files later"), third party applications are the cause and Windows can't/shouldn't interfere (did a program memory leak or is the user pushing the boundaries of what the system can handle?), or because there's not much the user can do about it ("your GPU driver crashed", well gee, my drivers are up to date, let me spend half a month's wages on a new GPU then, shall we?).

The only "too late" errors I've seen on Windows are when something very important has crashed and the system needs to shut down for data integrity (crss.exe crashing on school computers comes to mind, though I doubt that was the fault of Microsoft), or when something unpredictable went wrong, like a file ending up corrupt because of a failing hard drive or flipped bit in memory.

Microsoft actually created a dedicated screen to monitor errors and failures of all kinds (https://www.elevenforum.com/t/view-reliability-history-in-wi...) that's been around since Vista. It used to open up automatically if you clicked a popup after certain errors, but it appears Microsoft eventually stopped doing that. Going by how many "today I learned" posts I find when I look up the feature, I'm guessing nobody who actually understands what the screen does ever used the feature.

> when RAM is full and page files can't keep up

reality: kills dwm.exe (not the game that's the culprit and was running in borderless mode)

Windows does not kill system processes like that the way Linux does. It doesn't even have a real OOM killer, it just keeps allocating more and more page file until there's no more page file to allocate, no more pages to compress, no more working sets and other caches to clear, and then finally gives up when you try to allocate RAM. If DWM.exe crashes and you have even a small amount of storage space or RAM, something else is going on.

Given how DWM and video games both hit the GPU pretty hard, the death of DWM.exe can be anything from memory exhaustion to (GPU driver) bugs.

I guess you need control over both cable endings. You can buy dedicated cable testers like https://treedix.com/products/treedix-usb-cable-tester-usb-c-...

I have enjoyed my Treedix - now almost every cable I have has coloured labels for what it supports and what ends it has (handy when you're in a rush.)

On the downside, it has highlighted what a cowboy industry manufacturing USB-C cables is.

> https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

This was on show hn only yesterday.

Probably can't tell you anything about the other end of the cable though.

> Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about?

If i believed in conspiracies i'd say the usb consortium or mafia or whatever it's called is pressuring software developers to not display that info. Otherwise they'd have "normal people" with torches and pitchforks at their door.

The cable can report what it "thinks" it is, and in fact, modern USB-C cables do this: they have "e-Marker chips" inside the plugs which communicate with whatever they're plugged into and enumerate their belief as to their capabilities. The thing is, manufacturers can set the e-Marker chips to spew lies, or a cable that used to support 80Gbps got slightly damaged after 6 months of use and now only reliably transmits 10Gbps.

Power capacity is relatively easy to measure ad-hoc via voltage drop from one end to the other...USB-PD controllers already do this and can even fine-tune the voltage to make sure that if the device receiving (sinking) power needs 20V they'll send 20.4V or 20.9V to compensate for voltage drop so that the charging device gets 20V on its end.

But actual maximum data throughput is hard to know. The only way to really "know" how much data can flow through a cable is with an expensive oscilloscope or cable tester. Because 80Gbps cables run at ~13GHz so, at minimum you need a 26GHz scope (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem) or more practically a 52GHz scope. And it turns out it's really expensive to measure electrical signals 52 billion times per second. The necessary devices start at $15,000 (cable signal integrity tester) [0] on the very low end and only work for max 10Gbps USB 3.2 cables, or past $270,000 for 80Gbps USB4 cables (proper 60GHz oscilloscope) [1].

On the high end, each signal integrity test device can actually cost $1-2 million [2] where the base unit starts at $670,000 plus then spending additional money for hardware-accelerated analysis, specialized active probes, and the specific PAM-3 / USB4 compliance software packages.

0: https://www.totalphase.com/products/advanced-cable-tester-v2...

1: https://www.edn.com/12-bit-oscilloscope-operates-up-to-65-gh...

2: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/uxr1104a-infiniium-ux...

I get that to properly test a cable, you need that level of accuracy, but for home use, couldn’t you get away with a source and a receiver that are far cheaper?

If a USB4 device can output a USB4 stream and the receiver can check that stream for errors, isn’t that sufficient?

At some point you end up testing the peripheral and/or host rather than the cable. For example, cables often state that they can handle up to 240W ... but no 240W USB-PD chip has ever gone into production -- you won't even find one at the hottest USB-PD trade shows[0] in China.

It could be reasonable for computers to be allowed to trigger a data throughput test and the peripheral would state "I support up to 40Gbps of receiving/sending", and then send a simple pattern that can be generated on the fly. But a lot of devices can't receive/send that 80Gbps of data for long enough to perform a decent test - the storage, RAM, buffers, etc get depleted or act as bottlenecks.

If you know enough to accurately interpret the measurements you get from that, you know enough to write your own computer program to try to send 80Gbps from one computer to another and use DMA to process it in real-time without hitting storage (which a lot of peripherals likely don't have the CPU to accomplish).

If you don't know enough to write those test applications, you probably don't know enough to interpret the results of a built-in test function and the measurements would confuse and frustrate a lot of well-meaning, nerdy, but under-educated consumers who make assumptions about why they're not actually getting the rated speed.

Idk, my opinion doesn't go one way or the other here. Perhaps I myself don't quite know enough to be a good judge of that concept.

0: https://asiachargingexpo.com

I think you’re overthinking the bottleneck side of things: RAM to RAM would be sufficient to capture if the cable is capable of 40Gbps.

All an end user cares about is if the cable is the bottleneck, if you think you have known-good devices. If I have a MacBook and a good NVMe enclosure, I want to know if my cable is fast enough, rather than have it quietly fall back to 3.2 or worse.

>no 240W USB-PD chip has ever gone into production

This is because the cross-sectional-area of the conductor would create an inflexible cable – and even then the connector (even though rated) could never handle a sustained 240W in the real world.

Fires. Fires everywhere... this is why no 240W chip exists.

src: electrician

240W for USB-PD is only 5 Amps (USB spec only calls out for 240W at 48V) which can be safely carried by a standard 16AWG conductor.

USB-IF certifies plenty of USB cables as being tested safe for 240W. The reason 240W chargers don't exist is due to cost and a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s not really any demand for it.

My biggest concern is at the actually connector.

Idealized, sure it'll work. But any realworld ports will be arc/fire hazards (e.g. after corrosion, wear, damage).

That's why the 240W design has extra snubbing requirements to minimize arcing.

>extra snubbing

Just so I understand: would "extra snubbing" mean the USB-C cable wiggles less when plugged in (i.e. tighter tolerances)?

If so, this would probably mean it'll break/deform easier, too, no?

My above perspective is literally after decades of replacing burned-out devices (both freelance residential and IBEW datacenters), which "technically" are installed correctly — but know their realworld-alities.

There is an electrical circuit that suppresses the voltage spike when you suddenly unplug the cable, to suppress arcing. This improves the immediate physical safety at high power levels, and improves the amount of wear that happens. No physical changes.

My lay understanding is that USB-C PowerDelivery isn't even initiated until comms have established the supported wattage? ...or perhaps some very low 5W USB-A-like amount. On sudden disconnect, I presume you're talking about a debouncer (RC) circuit?

----

The concern I have is less about initial arcing (i.e. intentional [dis]connections), and more about long-term sustained powerdraw (I have seen soooooo many melted neutral terminals on 120V receptacles) on a loose connection. Connections become loose for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to bad installation), particularly on thermal throttlers (e.g. small wires, corrosion, cycling).

Does low voltage world have the same 80% derating as insidewireman-land (NEC/AHJ)? i.e. does a 240W PD USB-C allow continues 240W delivery (by protocol/standard/regulator), or is it neutered to 180W for "long-term loads" == 3+hr runtime (e.g. a computer display), with only ≥181W-peaking allowed..?

I just cannot see how such a small connector/cable can deliver sustained 240W, in the realworld that I've lived in.

> My lay understanding is that USB-C PowerDelivery isn't even initiated until comms have established the supported wattage? ...or perhaps some very low 5W USB-A-like amount. On sudden disconnect, I presume you're talking about a debouncer (RC) circuit?

Correct that this is only a worry about disconnects.

> The concern I have is less about initial arcing (i.e. intentional [dis]connections), and more about long-term sustained powerdraw

I think devices usually monitor voltage to make sure there isn't too much loss, and you're probably not going to get enough loose pins at the same time to see dramatic issues.

It's a valid concern, but it's a concern you'd see on almost any type of plug, isn't it?

> Does low voltage world have the same 80% derating as insidewireman-land (NEC/AHJ)? i.e. does a 240W PD USB-C allow continues 240W delivery (by protocol/standard/regulator), or is it neutered to 180W for "long-term loads" == 3+hr runtime (e.g. a computer display), with only ≥181W-peaking allowed..?

They're not worried about heating that takes more than 3 hours, so that specific kind of derating isn't part of the spec.

The 3 or 5 amp limit is designed around continuous load.

> I just cannot see how such a small connector/cable can deliver sustained 240W, in the realworld that I've lived in.

Well for sustained current we're worried about the amps, right? You get the same resistance and heat in the plug regardless of voltage.

Before USB C, we were putting 3 amps over a single pin each way in a USB Micro connector. Now with USB C we're putting 5 amps over 4 pins each way, with the new pins almost as big as the old pins.

>you're probably not going to get enough loose pins at the same time to see dramatic issues ... it's a valid concern, but it's a concern you'd see on almost any type of plug, isn't it?

nVidia_12VHPWR_sweating_bullets_.gif

(if unfamiliar, the 12VHPWR is the fire hazard found on some modern GPUs)

----

In the trade-offs of amps verse volts, there are tradeoffs to be made. Yes, I agree that amperage is the primary generator of heat... but is voltage not the primary degenerator of insulations/gaps (particular one so user-interfacing). In a perfect world...

kids_phone_cord.frayed

----

Thanks for the great discussion. I'm learning/adapting. This oaf breaks.things.lots

I'm aware of the nvidia thing. But these particular pins have much less individual leeway, and they're a few mm apart in a pretty tight shell so you can't get the same kind of crooked install.

More voltage has more dangerous aspects, but 48 isn't all that high and in a steady state it's not causing problems.

>I'm aware of the nvidia thing.

For anybody unaware: a product has been built specifically to avoid a "rated" connector from melting down brand new perfectly installed GPUs.

[•] <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/load-balanci...>

Plenty of USB-C cables are capable of charging at 5 amps continuously and do so today. How is the voltage relevant to how much power is dissipated in the cable? That’s the only difference between a 100W charger and a 240W charger.

>How is the voltage relevant

I'm envisioning some future frayedAF school laptop cord, where an increasing voltage correlates to higher likelihood that those amps can more-readily arc/jump (across melt, muck, and matter).

At the end of the day, an increase of either voltage and/or amps calls for a sturdier design (of ports and cables).

> At the end of the day, an increase of either voltage and/or amps calls for a sturdier design (of ports and cables).

The cables themselves are already plenty tolerant from an insulation standpoint for 48V. Voltage is low enough to not harm anyone. The ports, as already mentioned elsewhere, are designed to have snubber circuits for rapid reduction in voltage during an unplug. There's a keep-alive to cut voltage as soon as it doesn't detect things plugged in anymore (or, perhaps, the cable gets damaged and can't communicate).

Seems to me like the sturdier design is already accounted for. I don't think "it's small therefore I don't like it" is a valid reason to distrust the standard inherently.

>I don't think "it's small therefore I don't like it" is a valid reason to distrust the standard inherently.

Thanks for writing this; it's where I fundamentally disagree, but appreciate your perspective. IMHO that's exactly the problem.

> For example, cables often state that they can handle up to 240W ... but no 240W USB-PD chip has ever gone into production -- you won't even find one at the hottest USB-PD trade shows[0] in China.

Your information is out of date. You can buy 240W chargers from Framework which I assume are just rebranded Delta chargers:

https://frame.work/products/power-adapter-240w

The Framework 16 supports this 240W charging input, as well.

You don't need to test at 240W. You primarily need to test that it can handle 5 amps with limited voltage drop. You can also test that it handles 48 volts but basically any cable can handle 48 volts. The chance that either one of those very mild operating conditions compromises the other when you combine them is minimal.

Super helpful -- integrated this into the guide. Thank you.

This is overthinking it a bit. You mostly only need that stuff to tell you why it isn't working. If you want to know if it's up to the job, you can just measure the error rate, which just means sending a lot of data across and counting the errors. There might be some faults which only occur when the cable is in a particular position, but you can at least detect it when it happens.

The interface IC almost certainly also estimates signal quality, but it's likely hard to get that information out of it.

> modern USB-C cables [...] have "e-Marker chips" inside the plugs

If only they all did. I have a significant percentage in my pile with no e-Marker chip. They'll be the first to be culled once I get around to that, mind.

This is the right idea.

Per Dave Barry

"The plug on this device represents the latest thinking of the electrical industry's Plug Mutation Group, which, in a continuing effort to prevent consumers from causing hazardous electrical current to flow through their appliances, developed the Three-Pronged Plug, then the Plug Where One Prong is Bigger Than the Other. Your device is equiped with the revolutionary new Plug Whose Prongs Consist of Six Small Religious Figurines Made of Chocolate. DO NOT TRY TO PLUG IT IN! Lay it gently on the floor near an outlet, but out of direct sunlight, and clean it weekly with a damp handkerchief."

Feels like the appropriate place to put this link: https://www.lttstore.com/products/ltt-truespec-cable-usb-typ...

I would love it if newer revisions of USB specified standard colors for indicating negotiated mode and cable support.

The main issue I have is the lack of visibility.

“The lie”, “The Gap”, “The Trap”…

Ugh.

I'm hoping someone makes a HN frontend with a slop detector at some point. It's getting ridiculous.

I get the frustration over standards for high speed and high power applications. I note this:

For many/most applications, 5V/1A power + 480Mbps USB 2.0 data is supported on every or almost every USB cable and device, and exceeds requirements. USB C being ubiquitous and capable of these makes it a the most consolidated/universal power + data standard I have experienced in my life. It's also a small connector that's easy to plug in.

There are exceptions: Charging your laptop or phone benefits from higher current. External drives or other mass data transfer benefits from high speed. I look at the electronics devices (Computer peripherals and otherwise), and most are fine with USB-C for power and data, not coming close to the limits on either.

> Charging your laptop or phone benefits from higher current.

And voltage. Mostly voltage.

And on top of that, Apple has that thing where only some devices can charge from their adapters. I have a special adapter just for non-Apple things because the white bricks (despite the usb-c) sometimes just refuse to give power to things. So frustrating.

Mostly, that's non-compliant devices. Doesn't make it work any better, but I wouldn't assume Apple is doing it wrong here.

USB-C ports aren't allowed to provide power until after configuration, but a lot of USB-C chargers provide 5V regardless. This is wrong, but it does mean you can use a dumb C-to-micro cable which doesn't include the necessary electronics. (A pull-down resistor at least.)

And of course there's no way to tell by the looks of the cable.

Yeah this is right. I bought a cheap wireless mouse, with a USB-C port for charging. None of the USB-C chargers in my house would charge it, so after awhile it inevitably went flat and I took it back to the shop - since it was faulty.

The guy in the shop plugged it in to a USB-A port via a cheap A-to-C cable, and the mouse immediately came to life. Of course. I felt like an idiot.

I didn't get a faulty unit. Whoever designed the mouse was treating the USB-C plug like a newer micro-usb port. The mouse just expected 5V over the port. They clearly didn't bother testing it with a proper USB-C charger.

I returned it anyway and got a mouse that wasn't broken.

It annoys me so much when new electronics do this because the fix is both well known by now and only requires 2 dirt cheap components on the circuit board (5.1k resistors to ground on the CC lines).

As a hardware engineer among other things, that was one of the first things I learned about interfacing with USB C. How do so many consumer devices keep getting this wrong in the year of our lord 2026?

Something I've also see some shitty peripherals do is only hook up one side of the USB-C connectors. To get it charging, you'd need to orient the cable right.

Absolutely baffling, but it only happened to me for brands where I should've figured.

I had a bike light that charged over USB-C. I thought I was going nuts when I couldn’t charge it with any combination of cables and chargers I had. That is until I dug up the cable that came with it, a cheap looking yellow USB-A to USB-C cable. With that cable, I could charge it from anything.

> This is wrong

I understand the technical reasons behind it, but in this case - the actual expectation is to be able to use usb-c to charge other gadgets.

I think we should expect gadgets to not be outright broken in the first place.

That's what I'm trying to say about Apple's charging bricks

There’s nothing broken about the Apple brick.

If you had a device that wanted 12V input on a USB-C port without negotiation (these products exist, and are dangerous because they come with chargers that just output 12V without any negotiation at all…), whose fault is it? The vendor who chooses to ignore the clearly defined spec to save a few cents and risks damaging devices, or the vendor who follows spec and prevents damaging random devices?

Yes, and in case of 5V, the vendor isn't even saving "a few cents", but a tiny fraction of a cent. USB-C devices without pull-downs are only poorly pretending to be USB-C.

I can do one worse.

I have aquarium lights. They require 48VDC at 1A, which makes it quite a bright light; they’re nice, really…

But the connector is USB-A, and worse, marked as being USB. The power supply just provides 48V unconditionally.

They're spec complaint with genuine USB-PD charging capability. Some devices are counterfeit with fake USB logos & USB-C connectors but not compliant with the specs. I blame the counterfeit sellers & manufacturers.

Not necessarily, Apple only implemented the latest and greatest USB charging spec in some of their devices (AVS). Their chargers speak the new protocols so their devices and their chargers will work, but a charger from a few years back can easily deliver 100W following the spec (PPS, other PD standards) but be unable to deliver high power charging on some Apple hardware.

Neither side is wrong per se, though it's quite annoying that Apple didn't implement PPS. Then again, if you're buying Apple, you should probably expect these kinds of shenannigans and be ready to need to buy dedicated peripherals.

Whaaaaaaaaat?!

Apple, somewhat famously, build their power adapters incredibly well.

If they’re not charging something my default assumption will be: that thing doesn’t support PD.

https://youtu.be/SUlNKYI07SY?is=sJ2ICaXwxCsBJiXA

https://youtu.be/rwEh4jsVew0?is=NeRD7hAk-6KABAyc

Your blind trust in Apple is misplaced :)

I've run into problems with Apple chargers not charging my Lenovo laptop. (I used to be an Apple fanboy, but after a MacBook Pro that required 6 repairs, I switched to Lenovo).

I've been much happier since switching to Anker chargers, works much better with my Lenovo and drastically more portable than the Apple ones. It's better able to fit certain situations where the Apple brick won't fit into sockets that are close to the ground / desk, at least not without a bulky extension cable.

A bit of snark, but don't forget the Apple charger recall:

https://support.apple.com/ac-wallplug-adapter

(That said, I do think Apple's chargers were designed far better than most, and I loved that they put so much design thought into the world travel kit. Anker doesn't have the interchangeable heads, but it turns out their chargers are multi-region and a simple adapter head does the job just as well, in a smaller form factor than the Apple bricks. I still somewhat miss Magsafe as well, Magsafe 1 was excellent.)

It's even worse. The same USB-A-to-USB-C cable will either charge or not charge my iPhone, depending on where I plug in the USB-A part. But the port that won't charge my phone will happily charge my headset, using the very same cable. That kind of excludes the cable as the source of the suckage, and puts the blame on either the (supposed) power source or the phone. I've observed the same effect with other devices I wanted to charge, too. Some devices just won't accept certain USB power sources while others are more promiscuous.

USB-A gives 7.5W (1.5A at 5V) if advertised through BC1.2 or 2.5-4.5W otherwise, any protocols letting you draw more than that are either obsolete or proprietary.

Apple implements the USB-C/USB PD specs to a t and is unforgiving if you don't do either.

At work, our quick test for if a device implements USB PD correctly is to plug it into an Apple power supply (optionally with a PD protocol sniffer in line). If it doesn't work (either no/intermittent VBUS or the wrong VBUS), it's always been the case that the device is doing something wrong.

It can be annoying but strictly speaking their fault.

Yup. I have a work laptop that is meant to charge via USB ... But only one of the two ports will charge ... They are right beside each other! An evil trick at the office is to move someone's USB cable from one port to the other.

thinkpad?

Of course there's also the issue of whether your cable is suitable and your charger suitable too.

We appear to have taken a good idea and made it shit very quickly.

> made it shit very quickly

What? The USB mafia has been at it since usb 1.1 or at best 2.0...

A suitable USB cable for all features is ten times the price of a normal cable. That's why many smartphones come with USB-C cables and not actually rated Thunderbolt cables.

If the USB forum enforced their specifications, everyone would be complaining that their cables are now ten times the price, and people would still buy knock-off cables.

Same goes with chargers: I bought a 100W charger that stops delivering 100W after it overheats about half an hour into a session. I could spend twice as much on a charger that sustains the charge, but I probably wouldn't have bought that charger at all for that price.

USB-C would either be branded a bullshit expensive standard (like Apple's Thunderbolt cables are generally regarded) or an incomplete standard that gives manufacturers too much leeway.

I, for one, am quite happy that I can just buy a USB C charger now rather than spend 180 euros on an OEM replacement, even if I ocassionally need to throw a cable into the "garbage that came with an accessoire" bin.

Nothing is stopping you from buying those 100$+ USB4/Thunderbolt5 cables that can do everything all at once.

I mean, it's dumb to charge a phone with it, since you don't need 80Gbps capability, but it'll fit your requirement of not being confusing :P

Mine work at both but connecting dock to different port re-names every monitor output

Not exactly the same situation but some older MacBooks had an issue where you had to charge from one side of the laptop and not the other. Technically, the wrong side would charge it just fine but it would also make the computer quickly overheat and throttle until it was unusable, frozen or until it crashed.

I find this immensely frustrating.

My work laptop (HP ZBook Studio 16 G11 - the current model) will will only charge from the USB C ports on the left side, not the right side. Unfortunately, that is low down my list of charging complaints for that laptop. It will not charge from USB C unless it is given a power supply that is at least 100W, even if it then only draws a fraction of that.

There is an exception, where it will charge from a lower wattage power supply (like 60W) when in standby or turned off. Often, it is happily charging away, and as soon as you wake it up, it stops taking any power. As soon as I need more, it takes less. And it is definitely not the case that it is draining faster than it is charging. It just stops charging.

Presumably, the justification for all this mess is that it is only supposed to be charged from the barrel plug 180W power supply, but with a weight starting at 1.73 kg, I would rather not lug a 1/2 kg power supply too.

Perhaps in all their efforts to make it slim and lightweight, they wanted to avoid extra power circuitry. After all, in their efforts to slim it down, they also cut an HDMI/DisplayPort, a camera cover - everything in fact except 3 USB C (not all thunderbolt), a USB A and a 3.5mm audio port. Our office meeting rooms are nicely wired with HDMI and USB-C chargers, but people are still forever trying to locate an HDMI adapter, or going back to their desks to get their power supply.

Unfortunately, the USB label is trying to capture too many things and they really should've learned their lesson with USB 2.0 but they didn't.

So USB 1.1 was 12Mbps (theoretical). USB 2.0 as 480Mbps (theoretical)... kind of. It got complicated because a distinction was made between USB 2.0 Full Speed and USB 2.0 Hi Speed. "Full" Speed was just USB 1.1 (12Mbps). USB 2.0 Hi Pseed was the 480Mbps. I assume they didn't want to confuse consumers who might wonder if they can plug USB 1.1 and 2.0 together but they just created more confusion. Nikon famously started saying USB 2.0 for Full speed, as just one example.

So the version number is useless to consumers and should never be used.

This got a whole lot worse with USB 3.0+ because more capabilities got added to the standard but not all cables supported them so you could look at a cable and have no idea what it could do. Capabilities include:

- Data. This started at 5Gbps for SuperSpeed but has gone higher with subsequent versions.

- Power (max wattage varied)

- USB Alt Mode (DP, HDMI or TB over USB-C)

So how do you capture at least 5 capabilities of a cable? You can't make a cable do everything. That's prohibitively expensive and also massively limits cable length.

Whatever the case, saying things like "USB 3.2 Gen 2" was not the answer.

Afaik alt mode is a data stream, so as long as your cable is not gimped (e.g. charging only) and supports USB3 data streams at sufficient speeds it ought work?

Which just gives two properties to care about: data rate and power. I can’t remember a usb plug which didn’t have the space to add 2 numbers / 8 characters.

The two things every IT person now needs, a USB-C cable tester[0] and a USB Charger tester[1].

0. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3014680/your-usb-c-cables-ar...

1. https://www.fnirsi.com/products/fnb58

Never forget Rands was in Jerkcity (now Bonequest) and had them retroactively replace his character with atandt:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052437/http://www.jerkci...

https://bonequest.com/715

I thought I recognized the name rands somewhere!

Wow he was totally replaced, how weird, here's another example and they totally changed the strip:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170918052444/http://www.jerkci... https://bonequest.com/712

> The USB situation.

> The lie.

> The gap.

> The names.

> The age.

> The trap.

> The buy.

> The truth.

> The chain.

> The lunacy.

> The cheat sheet.

Fucking LLMs have literally ruined the word "the" for me.

It's not ruined, it's corrupted.

This person is apparently writing a book! I hope they put more care into it than this.

They've always written at least a little bit like this.

It read okay to me?

Also, I encourage people not to change their writing style just to avoid patterns that AI likes to use. I'm going to continue my em dashes.

This article is generated slop, and the reason to avoid it is that it’s terrible writing.

The discussion here is much more interesting IMO.

To be fair, even state of the art of high-speed data cables are thick and relatively inflexible. I simply wouldn't want every cable to be a high-speed cable if that meant they were all chunky. I do agree that it should be clearer at a glance what you can expect from a port or cable.

Was HDMI any better? =P

And somehow, we survived.

Yeah people complain about USB-C but I'm struggling to think of any port that has managed the spec evolution any better.

Nightmares of null-modem cables and hardware handshaking still haunt me.

IME, having the right cable is 100x more useful than having a fast one.

That said, the only weirdness I've experienced is a device that came with a USB C to A cable that would not take power from a C to C

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984833 ?

It's not about USB, it's cry about Apple.

Don't cry, just throw all bad apples away.

The problem with USB-C is more in explaining it to the non-technical than it is a problem for HN crowd.

The most straightforward solution is to buy the highest speed/power rated cables from Apple/Anker and throw away whatever slop comes with your devices. As far as I can tell, there is generally no downside to using the best cable for everything, aside from cost. But then you are spending $70 at Apple or $45 with Anker per cable.

Short of doing that I have dealt with every stupidity between brand new 2026 cables that are USB-2 speed, power cables that do not move data, data cables that do not offer power, and even cheapo cables that are directional and do not work if plugged in the other way.

Another problem with USB-C is the non-standard connector plastic shapes/sizes. Some percent of my cables don't fit into my personal and/or work iPhone cases because they have an oddly sized plastic connector.

None of this seems optimal for explaining to my senior parents why [Device A] won't plug into [Device B] via [Cable C].

I think USB-C is certainly a step in the right direction.

The remaining problem is the lack of CLEAR, easy to understand markings on the cable that indicate whether it’s intended as power delivery cable or as a 10Gbps data cable or as a thunderbolt-capable cable or any of many combinations in between those. This should not be limited to physical markings on the cable itself but also in the form of electronic self-identification so that you could plug in a cable and have the OS tell you exactly what cable you plugged in. Why not? We have power-delivery protocols, adding cable self-id would be a trivial addition.

I suspect the vendors of these, and perhaps the designers of the spec too, have deliberately made this confusion an integral part of the standard. It creates churn and consumers buying more cables than they need.

Just switch to a different brand then.

I hate obviously AI written posts so much. Not spending my time with reading

What in the slop is this.

Yet another interesting article wit grey text on white background, making it very hard for me to read.

I wish people would realize doing this can lockout people with some eye issues.

Fixed, thanks for the feedback.

@dang, can we please get a flag function for ai slop?

"The lie, the age, the gap, the trap, the names, the buy, the ..."

I really don't come to HN to read such a stuff and HN is full of it since months. Please let us flag it and filter it out.

Seconding this. The lack of downvote button makes burying low quality posts like this impossible.

I agree. AI slop is clearly a huge category of HN content now and lots of people don't want to read it. Maybe it can be a different thing to flagging so instead of just being removed it gets an "AI generated" label?

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