> But I shouldn't have had to do any of this. It's time cables came with a label of their own, or some sort of color coding.
There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable. There should be a single connectivity/performance spec, and if the cable meets it, it can be called a USB-C cable, and if it doesn't, it should have to be marketed as USB-JUNK or something.
This is what happens when the spec is awful and says "the cable must do 480Mbps, or it must do 40Gbps, or... whatever, have fun!"
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.
So, call it USB-D or something, if one cable is significantly different (in purpose, performance, form factor) than another cable. Don't just call everything the same label, and let the non-technical buyer beware.
Ehem, we already do that. USB-C is an umbrella term and everyone has a homebaked organizing system to tell which USB-C cable can do what, or a homebaked testing routine where we run through 5 cables each time we need to connect something.
That's what the article is about. Calling all these cables USB-C and making them look indistinguishable is a very leaky abstraction.
So there are 4 different current-carrying levels, from 2.5A to 5A EPR.
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 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.
I mean, if you care about this and it annoys you the fix is very simple and relatively cheap.
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.
> 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
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.
Buy nice cables from a trusted brand and bin anything else. You're going to be overpaying though because there's not a lot of reason to be powering your laptop with a 480 Gbps TB 4 USB-C cable.
That’s not all you need to do though; once you have bought all Cable Matters or Anker cables, you still need to remember which one charges your iPhone quickly, and which one is thunderbolt-capable but missing the lightning bolt, which one is charging-only, etc. I have a whole mess of cables - and several of these dongles (you need a usb-a capable one, and only that other one reads thunderbolt markers, etc). I spend the time to label any cable that I buy myself, and wish the vendors would do it instead.
From reading TT, it seems there’s just no easy solution to complexity if we want interoperability.
I've done this and the answer is they all charge my phone quickly and I know the handful that are the highspeed cables either by the markings or knowing which of them are the good cables.
Some chargers will re-negotiate depending how many cables are plugged into the adapter. Which is fine, but sometimes makes it tricky to know if it's the cable, the plug, or the number of cables causing a slow charge
I think Apple much rather tells users that this is exactly what they warned them about when they were forced to support USB-C and will advise users to only buy official cables from Apple.
No, they mean USB-C, the port they switched all but a handful of their devices to before any other manufacturer.
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.
Eh, I can’t find it now so a thousand grains of salt, but I read a good article back in the day about how much Apple’s experience with in-market Lightning shaped USB-C’s physical connector and electrical handshake.
> Or do we now need to resort to labeling cables and checking the label?
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!
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
So a USB-D would imply a different physical connection and end up confusing the consumer even more.
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
And define which quality the cable should present to achieve higher or lower grade levels, depending on the convention.
There are names for all of the features. It would be cool if there were some sort of color code or physical indication of a cables capability, but one of the cool things about usb-c is that the same connector works for really cheap stuff and really high end stuff. For example, in a pinch I can charge my MacBook (slowly) from a $5 gas station usb charger.
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.
I have several 1m long TB4 cables (100W, video, 40Gbps) and they’re neither particularly thick nor were they anywhere close to $60.
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.
> Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask?
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.
And for the applications it not adequate for, a different cable should be used. But instead I have a drawer full of USB c cables and no idea which ones are which.
That's still an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason. Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs? There is zero reason why 480mbps USB-C should exist when we already had 480mbps USB-A, except for misguided designers prioritizing aesthetics over usability.
Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
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.
No, we need to transfer a lot of power instead. So those with 800v cars need to be mindful to visit certain charger stations/types over other ones in order to get a fast charge, vs relying on the car to boost it from an older station.
In a world following your proposed rules, we’d never get to 480Mbps USB-A, because we already had 4-wire 12Mbps USB-A ports with just D+/D- and power and creating 480Mbps USB-A from that would be “an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason” and not all 12Mbps capable USB-A cables would support the 480Mbps spec.
Except usb-c will have a baseline level if working even with your very lightweight cheap flexible usb2 60w cable.
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.
> Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
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.
"absolutely nothing" is overly strong wording for a plug-in EVSE.
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.
But you can buy an EVSE capable of pulling 40 amps and plug it into a 20A rated receptacle. It will happily pull 40 amps until the breaker pops. Most EVSEs that are plug in have adapters to do explicitly this purpose.
It’s not hard to make a functional standard, the USB folks just don’t care, IMO. If they had simply worked on better naming, things would be much more clear.
(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.
How would better naming make things more clear when manufacturers don’t want to put labeling on cables, generally? Even if it was a USB-IF requirement, that doesn’t have any teeth. Ports tend to be decently well labeled, but you can only cram so much into these things.
Why would speed capability be replaced with power capability? They are orthogonal capabilities intentionally so you don’t have to overbuild cables in either direction if you don’t intend to.
> There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
Then USB is forever frozen in time, unless we start using new connectors.
This was the tradeoff we got when standardizing on one connector. The protocol versions change (USB, USB-PD, Thunderbolt), the cables that go between each connector change based on the needs of the spec they supports. But the connectors stay the same.
In my opinion, this was a poor tradeoff and now we’re living in the hell we asked for.
If you want every cable to support the latest and greatest of whatever exists as of right now, you can do that. By all means, buy Apple’s USB-C Thunderbolt 5 cables. They’ll run you $70 apiece but you’ll be buying a cable that makes no compromises.
My personal approach is to just use whatever cable came with the device for anything for which that’s convenient and plausible. For mobile devices with relatively limited charging speeds over USB-PD and for which portability and durability are typically important, I buy the latest Apple woven cables. For high-bandwidth devices I spend the big bucks on the Apple Thunderbolt 5 cables. I discard any cables of unknown provenance.
N=1, but my quality of life has greatly improved. Literally all devices I use daily (laptop, phone, mp3 player, Bluetooth speaker, headphones) I charge from a single cable.
I'm still grateful for this unification every time I charge my phone via the laptop charger.
Now we live in a world where any cable can connect any two devices, but what happens and what’s supported is a complete and total crapshoot. The more devices and cables you own, the more chaotic things become.
I have devices that take USB-C cables but won’t charge if the cable supports USB-PD.
I have a monitor that supports Thunderbolt 3 and two Thunderbolt 3 laptops. It took me multiple tries with various switches and Thunderbolt cables to find a combination that worked.
I have had multiple other situations like this, and the only practical solution I’ve found is to aggressively get rid of cables of questionable provenance, unless you can keep them permanently connected to or associated with the device they came with.
I suspect I’m running into this sooner than most because I’ve gone all-in on USB-C. I have gotten rid of every device possible that used USB micro or USB-A.
For simple electronics that just need to charge? Fine, sure, outside of random cable/device pairs charging slower than expected, it’s nice. For anything that actually depends on features on the cable or on a combination of features supported by the devices on each end? Total chaos.
The full cable that is between the two connector ends has an enormous matrix of specifications it can support. There are variations of bandwidth, power delivery (or not), Thunderbolt versions (or not), DisplayPort versions (or not) and other things I’m forgetting.
A cable that supports all of these things costs like $70+.
Between two devices, the cable, and enormously complicated interop between variations of the supported standards, there are myriad ways for devices to fail to work together.
> A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
This would completely defeat the point.
There is a range of needs for cables. Some devices have simple needs for power/data transfer/extra functionality, and some devices have more. A $3 USB-powered lamp does not need a cable for gigabit data transfer and 100W charging - this cable would be more expensive than the product. Similarly, new features & performance levels will emerge and we want to be able to use these in new cables backward compatibly.
Given a range of needs, you have two options:
- A single cross-compatible connector, but with a range of capabilities
- Different types of connector for every capability
We used to be in the latter situation, USB-C is an attempt to do the former. Having different capabilities for same-shaped cables is the goal.
Labelling would be great, but standardizing one single spec for all cables would defeat the point.
But the current situation is I can take two devices with a USB C connector, connect them with a USB c cable, and they won’t work. Is that really better?
In almost all cases they will work, just slowly. There's always some power, and almost always some data (power-without-data cables exist, but they're very rare, mostly a specialist security thing).
If the power isn't enough to power a device, that's annoying, but it's strictly better than when we had a unique power cable per-device. We've replaced "carry a charger per device" with "carry one charger for your highest power device, and it can do everything else too". And even with just a low-power cable you can usually trickle-charge overnight or something.
The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support. Would it be better to have a whole different USB-C2 spec which requires display support (and so is significantly more expensive)? If the connector is the same you have the same problem (it's just labelling) and if it's not that sounds like you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
You’re somewhat underplaying it - plugging a cheapo random Chinese knock off cable into my MacBook is effectively useless. Plugging a 480Mb cable into a thunderbolt dock is effectively useless.
> The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support.
Between charging, data transfer and monitors we’re now at the three primary uses for USB that may or may not work at their advertised performance depending on what combination of devices you use and what connector you use. And to be clear, trickle charging a high power device is “degraded” in the same way that GitHub was “degraded” yesterday.
Yes I do think a different spec is the right solution - why should the charging port for my electric toothbrush accept a cable that’s plugged into a Nintendo switch dock on the other end? Something like USB 3 MicroB is an example of how a “high featured” device can share with the power delivery.
> you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
Yes. This is the worst case scenario: You don't have the required cable.
In an alternative world with no unified connector, you also likely don't have the required cable. The result is the same.
It's just that in this world, the worst case scenario happens a lot less. There is often a fallback when you don't have the required cable and you get some functionality. But, most people most of the time the cable they have does what is needed.
You can still use the cable that came with the device. Are there a lot of manufacturers who are shipping cables that are not sufficient for their device?
And if the complaint is that cables are the same color, can they not be labeled? Everyone who wants different cables should just treat their USB-C cables as different cables. They get everything they want and the people who want the benefits of mixing cables (at the cost of them sometimes not working) can get what they want.
I think you’re technically right, but the point of the connector is to indicate what it will work with. It’s all well and good until you grab one of the white or black cables and put the wrong one bacj.
> they get everything they want
No, we get a bunch of cables which share a connector that pretend they’re interconnectable when they’re not. At a glance, my phone, MacBook and toothbrush cables are identical. I don’t want have to tell my wife or anyone who visits “don’t use the second charger from he left”
USB-C is just a connector. A cable can be a USB-C connector USB 3.0, power delivery 3.1 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector Thunderbolt 4 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector DisplayPort 1.4 cable.
Yeah, and it also can be a RS-232 compliant serial link cable with 4 wires that are RX, TX, GND, and a +5V for good measure, attached to a USB-C head, can't it? I mean, that'd be totally fine, right?
Yeah and that's the confusing part. Just imagine saying "Yeah this is german power plug, but it might support just 120V, but the device will negotiate once you plug it in.
Also keep in mind that the standard supports cables with USB-C connectors in one end and USB-A connectors in another end. What do you expect the USB-C end to do?
I think you didn't put a lot of research in before making this recommendation. Labels make more sense because the top tier USB c specs are darn expensive.....
There should be proper error correction. So you will have "this is a fast cable" versus "this is a slow cable", and NOT "this is a good cable" versus "this is a broken cable". Unfortunately, the second situation is the one we're in.
Spec range is not the issue, its the inept thinking of designers that people should qll become little detectives and find out themselves what which cable does. Which is ridiculous assumption and judt doesnt work in real life.
Clear big labeling saying version, speed, watts or similar mix so everybody can quickly glance and know whats being sold. Whatever chinese crapware has mislabeled is another topic.
A label is fine. With USB the risk is that the thing doesn't work as well as it could. It's been the situation forever with extension cords that they have the wire gauge printed on them, and in that case the risk is that if you choose the wrong cable you will burn your house down. Labels are good enough.
This is basically Thunderbolt and why most of cables I buy are either braided charge cables or Thunderbolt 3/4 for data. They’re usually labelled with their version too.
You do have to worry about active bs passive after 1m or so length.
I am not a fan of the USB-C spec, the naming of all the sub specifications/versions is a nightmare.
Do people really not remember the hell of every device having it's own cable which was incompatible with all the others? Going around to a friend's house and finding out, no, they don't have the cable that can charge your phone.
It is a strict improvement to be able to transfer data or charge at degraded speeds, compared to not being able to plug it in at all. Wanting all your cables to end up entirely incompatible just because you don't want to bother checking labels (modern cables come with clear ones, I have ones that clearly say 40Gbps/240w on them) is, frankly, silly.
There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable. There should be a single connectivity/performance spec, and if the cable meets it, it can be called a USB-C cable, and if it doesn't, it should have to be marketed as USB-JUNK or something.
This is what happens when the spec is awful and says "the cable must do 480Mbps, or it must do 40Gbps, or... whatever, have fun!"