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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

USB-A has many variants and we don’t call it a different connector. Heck, USB-B and micro USB both have 3.0 variants that are physically different and we don’t call them something different either. I don’t see the problem here. This is just semantics, especially when they aren’t even labeled period… people just see a cable and will try plugging it in.

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The other USBs are no better TBH. I still remember USB Full Speed and USB High Speed. Do you remember, without looking it up, which one is faster? Same form factor, same physical connector.

USB2 has been backwards compatible from the beginning though. I can’t think of a time in the past… 15, maybe 20 years where a USB cable wasn’t capable of high speed, unless it didn’t have data lines at all.

(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)

No, but I can tell you which is faster by looking at the color

  > USB-A has many variants
  > especially when they aren’t even labeled period

What are you talking about? USB-A is color coded. You'll frequently see white and blue. Admittedly this is harder with USB-C because the size, but I don't see why we can't label these things. Not labeling just leads to confusion and fraud.

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/storage/u...

The color coding is optional and ambiguous: Blue is recommended, not required, and there is no difference for 3.0, 3.1 (10gbit) or others. And you now also have red, yellow, green, purple and orange, which have no defined meaning in any standard and are just whatever a manufacturer wants to do. There is nothing preventing someone from selling standard 4 conductor A ports with red coloring.

> You'll frequently see white and blue

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.

Sometimes. They’re not required to be labeled, though. I would agree that the blue connector for USB3.0 is more common… but again it’s not universal and certainly not every device ever does this.

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