Hands-on with the USB Type-C plug | Hacker News Reader

Hands-on with the USB Type-C plug

arstechnica.com

74 pointsmmastrac65 comments

USB started out as a nice clean interface at least far as the cabling was concerned. Originally it had just two kinds of plugs ("A" and "B").

But the number of USB connector types is getting out of control. I'm sure there are good technical reasons as to why they couldn't re-use the same connectors for higher-speeds and greater power, but in some cases the changes do seem gratuitous.

For example, introducing a mini-USB connector and then micro-USB seems to have been poorly planned. The connectors are similar-looking and so close in size that it causes endless confusion. I don't understand why they couldn't have standardized on either the mini or the micro instead of having both.

USB type C is actually an effort to fix that across the board: the cable can be symmetric (C on both ends), all type C ports have the equivalent of on-the-go support, it's as small as micro-B so thin devices can use it, and it supports fast charging with enough power for a laptop.

Hopefully, new devices will have only USB type C ports and nothing else.

http://xkcd.com/927/

Downvoted because enough is enough! The "14 competing standards" comic was really funny the first few hundred times it was snarked into HN comments.

But this time it fits perfectly.

No, to fit perfectly, the type C plug would have been invented to cover the use cases of all of the the previous plugs.

That was not the motivation.

Downvoted because it's not even relevant. This new USB standard was not implemented to merge the use cases of existing standards as per the cartoon narrative. Its purpose is to add new functionality not available in any prior USB standard.

Downvoted because this has become an almost knee-jerk reaction against any attempt at consolidating or unifying multiple standards, which should be the goal.

Micro-USB was intended to entirely replace Mini-USB. While some devices do still use Mini-USB, it's basically deprecated at this point. (You'll note, for instance, that there's no Mini-USB3.)

I recently bought a new camera. They were all equipped with mini-usb. It's standard now, and shows no sign of disappearing.

Agreed. Mini-USB is very popular in the digital camera industry.

Yup. And good old, fat USB B is still seen on most printers and hard drives.

Yeah, now that you mention it. Never thought about that. USB 3.0 B is on my external hard drive enclosure. I wonder if there are ANY printers that use Micro-USB? I've never seen one.

It's a deprecated standard as of 2007, so I'm not sure what can be done by the standards body to stop people using it.

Talking about USB 3, the micro-USB 3.0 connector is just terrible!

I agree, though at least in some low power cases you can use it with a regular micro usb cable and pretend it isn't the weird wide monstrosity that it is.

It was worse 3-4 years ago, pretty much every device today uses micro USB B connectors. There used to be mini-USB A & B, for a total of 3 small size connectors, plus the full size A & B. I'm not sure what definition of 'universal' yields 5 physically incompatible connectors, but I'll take 1 to rule them all any day.

Everybody agrees that the mini plug was a mistake. For better or for worse, the USB IF would like to pretend like it never happened.

Which is too bad because it is the connector used on almost all sport GPSs, many bicycle head and tail lights, as well as many generations of Canon still cameras, not to mention most non-Apple MP3 players. For better or worse, mini B plugs are in practice the most common connector on things which are not cell phones.

Have you ever seen a mini-USB A connector out there in the real world? Or "Micro-A"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mini_usb_AB.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_Micro-A_USB_port.jpeg

I for sure haven't.

I have. four years ago, I bought a bluetooth car adapter that you could clip in the driver's visor (can't remember the model, but it was not a popular one) from BestBuy that had the weird one Mini USB A in the first photo.

It was a PITA to charge it, and I lost the cable.

And we're back to a nice clean interface. In the future, the only thing that won't be using a USB type C connector is Apple products. Everything else will have type C connectors and only type C connectors. Your laptop will have 3-4 type C connectors, and won't have anything else, not even power or DiplayPort. Tablets, phones, etc., same thing. Every monitor will become a docking station. Every cable will be identical.

It's not quite utopia, of course. Cheap type-C cables will be a scourge. They'll work great at USB2 speeds, slow down USB3 devices and won't work when plugged into your monitor.

One of the other cool features of USB C is "alternate modes", where two sides can negotiate a handoff of some of the lanes to things like DisplayPort:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8558/displayport-alternate-mod...

I did not know that. This is seriously cool. Power, data, and video over that one cable. It's going to enable one universal way to dock your laptop, directly into your screen. It's what Thunderbolt could have been, if it was cheaper and could carry power.

The one thing lacking is the ability to distribute precise timing, to the order of nanoseconds. It would be ultimately cool if it was possible to synchronise USB peripherals to this sort of accuracy.

"USB-inSync" was an attempt to do this, but it wasn't part of the standard and Chronologic, it's distributor, seems to be defunct.

All I really want is an analog audio lane for audio to replace 3.5mm jacks.

Why analog? There is audio in the Displayport stream, and there is no reason your screen couldn't hook up a USB DAC as well. Your headphones could go right into your screen, if that's what you want to accomplish.

I'm not an expert on creating reliable electronics, but the new iOS connector is just a "tongue", whereas this new type-c connector is a "hole" that accepts a "tongue", and the plug the type-c connector fits in is a "tongue" that accepts a "hole" that contains a "tongue" (sorry for the simplistic terminology)

Surely, this is going lead to a whole new generation of loose, flaky cable connections, just as with the previous USB connectors (and unlike the new iOS connectors, which never seem to lead to loose connections)

Doesn't seem so.

Looking at the pictures, the design seems to consist of a receptable which looks like a Lightning connector with a piece of shielding around it, and a plug which looks like a Lightning receptable. If anything, it's mechanically close to Lightning than to the current USB connector, so there's no reason to assume that it will have bad connection.

FYI: The correct terminology for "tongue" would be male and "hole" is female.

I'm not sure this is what parent^ is referring to. The "male" USB is box-shaped, and the "female" USB has the interior protrusion (with the pins on it) and then the larger slot. The apple lightning cable is just a tab that goes in a hole.

Similar to a barrel power connector versus a headphone plug.

Yea but the male usb still goes inside the female. It's really crude but the designations are supposed to mirror human reproductive organs, male goes inside of female.

Anecdotally, the Lightning cable seems to be a bit flaky itself, getting 1.5 stars from 1646 reviews on Apple's store: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD818ZM/A/lightning-to-usb...

Hopefully Type C will be better than Micro-B and Lightning. Also, Type C can deliver 100W of power, which I'm not sure Lightning could do...

The only people who ever review items like cables are ones who ran into failures, so that’s a very skewed sampling.

Online product reviews have self-selection bias, yes, but it is not true that cables are reviewed only or even mostly by people who were not satisfied. For example, on Amazon we can see a 4.5 star mini USB cable with 679 reviews [1]. Similarly, Monoprice has a 5 star USB extension cable with 160 reviews.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-USB-Male-Mini-Cable/dp/B0...

[2] http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=...

And the Apple Lightning cable has four stars with nearly 4k reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-to-USB-Cable/dp/B0097B...

Either there's a big difference in quality between the cables Apple sells on Amazon vs the Apple Store, or there's something else going on.

No, the negative reviews on Lightning cables mostly have to do with people complaining they have to buy new cables.

With the lightning cable the problem is with the reinforcement between the connector and the cable. And it's a problem Apple has had with pretty much every cable they've ever made.

The actual connector itself is pretty damn good.

When your cat chews up the cable, of course you're going to leave a bad review. Get it together Apple!

The soft-touch plastic used on Lightning cables has the amazing property that stress failures look just like the cable was chewed on. Not even joking. It basically disintegrates and falls apart.

The Lightning connector design exposes all the pins to the hazards of the world (the most dangerous being ESD, pin shorting being another). In order to make the industrial design work electrically, Apple had to put a tiny chip inside each lightning connector. This chip also handles switching around which side of the connector is active.

As you can imagine, embedding a chip inside a connector is pretty expensive. The USB-IF doesn't actually make hardware. They create standards that other companies can use to make hardware. It would be crazy for them to spec something out that requires the kind of NRE that Apple must have paid to produce their connector.

The USB-IF gets around the ugly pin shorting and ESD problems by simply adopting the same connector design that every other connector uses. They hide the pins behind a shroud so that fingers and other objects can't reach in to short anything out or cause ESD events.

That chip could just as well sit in the device at the other end of the cable. I bet USB cables have one, too. It is not as if USB connectors are immune to accidental shorting (rain, cables that get crushed)

Also, embedding a chip in a connector expensive? I have no idea what the chips Apple puts in cost, but cost depends on the chip and the number of cables you order.

That must be why I have three lightning cables which I use daily, and about 80 USB cables (one with each new device!) which sit in a pile collecting dust and tangling up the cat. Seriously, do we really need the price of usb cables tending asymptotically to zero? "Three cables should be enough for anybody."

Tell that to someone who buys a printer.

> This chip also handles switching around which side of the connector is active.

I don't think it does actually, think that's handled mostly by the device - the data pins just connect straight through to both sides of the connector.

Not really, it's a little more complicated as Chipworks described:

http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/r...

As someone who's suffering from connectivity issues on a Lightning device, I have to disagree with your assessment of the iOS ecosystem right now.

I could care less that it is now reversible. Yes it was annoying, but having to keep 4++ different cable types, adapters and all is just as annoying.

What bothers me more is the durability of the pins. The contact surface wears out rather quickly, especially on the now prominent micro-USB connectors, leading to unstable, shaky connections.

One of the design points of micro-USB was to put the moving parts in the cable, so it should be the cable that wears out rather than the device connector, and those are cheap to replace.

Why didn't they just copy Apple's Lightning design?

There are enough similarities in purpose, and enough differences in functionality -- USB C has an additional differential signal pair, etc -- that having the designs be similar would only cause confusion. Additionally, Lightning's patented, so making things close in design would require paying royalties to Apple.

Fantastic. Because making a flat bit of plastic and metal that goes into another bit of plastic and metal constitutes "intellectual property", the world will be stuck with a crap design for another 10-20 years.

This is the sort of stuff that ensures eventual aliens will say "let's not go to earth for it is a silly place".

Where's the mini-C and micro-C? throws away a pile of USB cables

Are small-run PCB fabs ready to punch all those mid-mount cutouts? I'm scratching my head about the mid-mount.

> Where's the mini-C and micro-C?

Eternally non-existent, since C is the size of micro-B, small enough for ridiculously thin phones and tablets.

Routing in PCBs isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. In fact, at this point, we're routing tabs and such wherever its appropriate to avoid the need to to lay out multi-job panels to allow for v-scoring. Mid-mount USB connectors have been getting a lot more popular lately for smaller packages.

Very, very cool!

Somewhat meta to the article, but isn't it interesting that there is only one English word for a male connector (i.e., plug), but numerous names for a female connector (jack, receptacle, outlet, socket, slot).

I generally refer to the two ends as male and female respectively.

I consider jack to refer to the male connector, e.g. 3.5 mm jack means the plug on a pair of headphones. Interesting that it's not universal.

same here (european, non english country, if that matters)

And so you should, because that's what it originally referred to: jack is short for jackknife.

Did they purposefully go out of their way not to copy the Apple Lightning connector? Because this design is just stupid.

Patents etc... They may have other reasons as well, like price of replacing a plug/wire vs. damaged socket. I've broken many a plug by pulling on the wire at an angle due to laziness, but luckily, nothing in the port broke.

Apple's Lightning connector isn't capable of most of the things that USB C does. It doesn't support anything faster than USB 2, doesn't even have enough pins to support USB 3 or DisplayPort let alone both at the same time, can only deliver a fraction of the power, etcera. In some ways it was actually less capable than Apple's old 30-pin dock connector.

What's stupid about it, exactly?

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