Unless you want all cables to be thick, $60, and cap out at 1 meter long, this is not a reasonable standard. 480mbps USB-C is perfectly adequate for many applications. Likewise for 60W cables.
Do we do this for every new version and combination of versions for USB? USB-PD? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort?
While GP’s take is ridiculous (if common), I do think the notion that Apple led the charge on USB-C is mostly a myth, outside of them being active participants on the USB Implementor’s Forum.
That's what the article is about. Calling all these cables USB-C and making them look indistinguishable is a very leaky abstraction.
There are 6 different transfer speeds, from 480mbps to 120gbps.
There’s DisplayPort yes/no.
There are 4 thunderbolt genrations, each with its own marker.
Some of those are dependent (480mbps cables don’t have markers), so it’s not a full permutation problem. Only about 20 different combinations are valid.
Is the proposal to have 20 different physical connectors? Or to prune the space down to 6 or so by requiring all cables to be very thick, or to support higher transfer speeds than make any sense for a charging cable?
It’s not a leaky abstraction. It’s a physical interface standard that does not guarantee electrical properties. Same way you can plug a 6A cord and a 20A cord into the same electrical outlet.
- "USB Speed 2" means [20gbps, thunderbolt 3, displayport, 20 watts].
- "USB Speed 3" means 100gbps, thunderbolt 4, etc.
- "Power 100" means 100 watts minimum.
Make a little logo for each standard - "S2" / "S3" / "P100" which can be branded onto each end of the cable. People who care can look at the logos and tell what a given cable can do.
Thanks for the link. I didn't know those labels also tell you if a cable supports displayport alt mode and thunderbolt 3.
Just set a minimum baseline/standardization for the type of cable/capabilities you need for your highest end device. Only keep those cables, give away the rest, and buy a half dozen new cables so no matter which you select you will always get the right one.
I've rarely found I need a "special" USB-C cable outside of connecting Thunderbolt ports. Those are mostly static on my monitors, with one in my laptop bag. They also happen to be decently labeled on the connector with what they are.
Once in a while I get an incredibly cheap horrible one from some throw away style device and I simply toss the cable immediately.
The only exception I can think of are USB-A -> USB-C adapter cables where the device is so cheap it doesn't implement USB-C PD delivery at all and expects a "dumb" 5V connection. That is a charger issue though, not a cabling one. Those devices are luckily starting to become much more rare.
I purged the house of the worst 5W USB-A charges long ago in a fit of rage. Anything that couldn't do 15W was tossed. We still have more 15W chargers than I could ever use in a lifetime.
I don't have a cable tester, and I don't want to buy one. The companies who make USB cables should be responsible for this testing. I don't want to do expensive homework on behalf of USB cable companies.
From reading TT, it seems there’s just no easy solution to complexity if we want interoperability.
I didn’t hate lightning cables…
Thunderbolt is also a USB C form factor/port, just has better naming and private control over usage.
I have a similar USB tester as the author. It's rather useful and inexpensive. Good bit of homelab kit.
Yes.
YES oh please yes! Give me labels! I'm sick of playing guessing games with my USB cables. Which one should I use for my external drive? This cable is thick! Will it work? Maybe it's only thick so it can send power? It seems impossible to tell, even if I plug it in to my computer. The files are there, I just need to somehow guess that it's a bit slower than it's supposed to go. Another cable feels expensive but its 1m. Will it work? Do I get slower data rates? I can't tell. I hate guessing. Label the cables!
(And yes, I don’t need to look it up. But also I’m extremely familiar with the USB spec and have been tangentially involved with the USB-IF)
> USB-A has many variants
> especially when they aren’t even labeled period
https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/storage/u...
I've never seen white; in order of prevalence, I've seen black, blue, red, and yellow. But such colour coding is not standardized, every manufacturer is free to choose their own rainbow.
USB-C is the connector type, not the cable. The connector type supports multiple protocols, including for interoperability with other connector types as a cable can have USB-C in one end and something else in the other end and users expect the cable connection to just work the USB way.
TECH PHYSICAL-TYPE
USB A/B/C
If the cable supports 60w charging or only 25w, if it's full or half bandwidth, those characteristics seem to me like we are talking about grading quality, so a better expansion would be:
TECH PHYSICAL-TYPE GRADE
USB A/B/C 1/2/3
That allows for 999 possible permutations of usb-c cables.
The best you can get is TB5 (240W, up to 120 Gbps data transfer) and at 1m long they’re $32 or so from CableMatters. Those are admittedly somewhat thicker, but not stiff.
I wish there was a higher baseline data transfer mandated for usb-c. Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask? We had usb 2.0 speeds back when CPUs just barely entered 1 GHz range, it’s practically ancient technology. Admittedly most people never transfer any data over usb, but with this logic we might as well have usb-c that does charging only. Being able to pick any cable and have 5 gbps baseline means that any usb-c cable is fundamentally usable, if slow. 480 mbps is… ugh.
I don’t have an issue with 60W being the baseline, it’s enough for most laptops and the average GaN charger is 65 W (or less) anyway.
5gbps means you add 8 additional wires to every cable, and also would require that both devices on each side implement 5gbps PHYs for their USB (if you mandated it on devices too). It’s a large cost, especially when you’re talking about billions of cables.
This isn’t a great example because, on the ‘other side', car chargers also have different size cables between the ‘charger’ (EVSE) and the car, with the same plug used on them all (especially with NACS, which doesn’t even differentiate between AC and DC plugs). They rely on negotiation to tell the car how much power it can draw. No-one complains about this.
Adding connectors to obstruct functionality, to make each specific use physically incompatible with every other use, was hell. No thanks.
Usb-c rocks, it's flexibility is amazing, and anytime you need a serious business use, good cables are well labelled. This is just yet another HN lightning rod issue where all the very narrowly intolerant particular people come out in hordes, but it's just not really an issue. And everyone else is living much more happily.
Unfortunately, many not-good cables are also labeled similarly as good cables (fraudulently).
They largely do. I’m not sure I understand your point? The amount of current pulled by the car in an EV is dictated by the car (equivalent to the PD controller on USB-C) and the amount of current max is indicated by the EVSE (which, is sort of like an emarker). When you plug that EVSE into the wall, there is absolutely nothing telling it how much current it can pull.
The standardization of the receptacles tells how much current is safe to pull. "This receptacle is 50A rated and can supply 40A continuous" is given by the 14-50 receptacle shape.
(now they’d need to do something crazy like USB-C 40G PD60 as a name in order to fix things, unless the next version of USB is a clean break)
Now they’ve made a mess of things, and cables AND connectors are all over the place.
This way it's simpler to enforce a standard across the industries