An Engineer's Guide to USB Type-C [pdf]

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29 points·sohkamyung··5 comments

Discussed 11 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862165 (81 comments)

Find https://fabiensanglard.net/usbcheat/index.html to be quicker and easier to understand (posted a month or so ago)

I’ll go ahead and post the obligatory comment about how it’s a bit ridiculous that they didn’t include in the spec an easy way to quickly visually identify the capabilities of the cable (data vs power etc). Single biggest flaw of the spec in my opinion

not that it really solves your problem, but any compliant USB-C to USB-C cable is required to support at least 60W of power and USB 2.0 speeds.

Unfortunately, beyond that it gets pretty bad and spotty for a casual user. I make sure to only buy reputable cables that support 240W (this isn't an expensive feature: it just means the cable supports 20V, effectively), and I have only two cables that support the full Thunderbolt data rate. But those are effectively tethered to my Thunderbolt dock and I don't use them generically.

It feels like there is enough consumer frustration and confusion that this has been changing. A standardised mandatory marking in the spec would have been nice but it has been no problem for me to find cables with clearly-printed power and bandwidth ratings recently. History will consider this a minor teething problem.

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