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Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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