Ask HN: Does anyone else question USB-C as an “improvement”?
- Not knowing the capabilities of any port or device. Reminds me of the Plug and Play days: "well let's plug it in and see what happens".
- Power delivery? Passthrough? Good luck finding the magical combination of supported devices, wattage, etc. Even when I thought I found the right one my laptop would occasionally end up in some weird state between discharging and charging - taking power but not acknowledging it in software and slowly discharging but not as much without power...
- Display Port alt-mode. Where do I even start... Some cables mostly work but running two 4k displays reliably at 60Hz seems to be near impossible. Occasionally a display drops completely and there's some sort of strange reboot/shut down/kill power to everything combination I haven't quite figured out yet. They randomly drop from 60Hz to 30Hz or don't initialize at 60Hz. Then some cables don't support DPMS, DDC, who knows what else.
It seems that with high speed (10gbit or so from what I recall) via USB A, extremely capable HDMI, and dedicated charging ports prior to USB-C that was the epitome of connectivity, function, and reliability.
Initially I attributed all of this to the inevitable quirks of any new technology but after several years it seems as though these issues (and more) may never get sorted out.
What am I missing?
197 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadPerhaps I've been lucky, but I've only had good experience with external monitors et al.
My experience has been so frustrating and such a time sink if you have recommendations of working hardware combinations I'm happy to hear. I'm already > $3k in hardware at this point. What's another $1k or so?!
Depends on the device, I've had low-quality USB-C devices whose transfer speed inexplicably decreased when connected "the wrong way". Not knowing which orientation is the right one until you initiate the transfer is frustrating, and worse IMHO than physically preventing the wrong orientation.
Of course, this issue affects only a subset of mediocre hardware... But the fact that [1] this is possible is quite a downside to USB-C.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2021/03/22/cursed-usb-c-when-plug-orien...
USB-C has much more complexity and corners that can be cut than USB-A.
The cheapness of USB-A is also valuable. The other day I bought 5 USB-A to B cables for less than 5 bucks for various microcontroller-related hackery. I can treat them as disposable and won’t hesitate to cut one open should I need some kind of shielded multi-core wire.
In USB-C land, a single cable would cost more than that.
Also, you can express disagreement without throwing Reddit-style sarcastic snarks.
External monitors with combined USB and display have generally behaved a lot worse with Windows than Mac OS with symptoms like: some endpoints work and others don’t (often the USB Ethernet doesn’t work), the monitor that the Mac enumerates in 5 seconds takes 50 sec on Windows, etc.
https://i.imgur.com/yyEwOHK.png
[1] In truth, both sides of USB-A have male/female parts.
Nobody ever really told the general public that, and now manufacturers are messing it up too.
I mean I don't know if it has any data connections or anything, I think it came with either a JBL speaker or a power bank, but it's pretty clever.
When the kids were getting to the age where they had their own devices, the learning phase was painful (for me more so than them). They kept getting confused between the lightning cable used for their iPad and the micro-usb cables used for everything else (like their battery pack and the random kid gadgets they had that used micro-usb for power supply). Their learning phase was painful (for me) as they'd try whatever cord they came across first in whatever device they needed it for, and continue that cycle until they got a match. And with no sense of how easy it is to break charging ports, they'd be pretty aggressive about it. Same with trying the USB-A side of the cord in the charger/battery, aggressively trying one direction before finally flipping it to try the other (and flipping it again because third try's the charm).
The kids love them because they Just Work for everything with no fuss (at least until recently when USB-C started popping up in some stuff like their Bluetooth headphones). The durability is a bit mixed, as some of the cords started having issues after just a few months while others are still going strong after years of daily use. But between how handy they are and the price, it's worth just treating them as expected consumables and getting enough at once to stockpile.
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32847997542.html
Eg: now that there are cheap 4K 60Hz, displays, we are not happy... We need at them at 144Hz. And being able to chain two of chose. With good speakers... etc etc
Birds eye view: every issue is minor and current state of tech is awesome...
The corollary of this is that some technology getting close to perfect means it's several years old, obsolete and ready to be thrown away to make place for a shiny new thing that's starting from scratch as far as ironing various bugs go.
Pre Plug and Play you had to have a cheat sheet of IRQ assignments and memory ranges next to any computer so you had a halfway decent chance of getting a new ISA expansion card to work. The early days of Plug and Play were reminiscent of USB-C today - as I noted plug it in and hope (Plug and Pray). However, from my anecdotal experience the reliability of Plug and Play advanced very rapidly and within a few years it was extremely clear to anyone that this was a significant step.
Fast forward to now and you have PCIe with rapidly increasing speeds, a thoughtful connector design, and variable lane support. All with backward compatibility and downgrade of lanes and speed. Sure I've had a few issues (mostly in the early days) with weirdly wired slots and devices refusing to come up at max supported revision and lane configurations. But at least in those few limited experiences I've never had PCIe not work or have any fundamental reliability issues.
Backing up 2TB of data to a USB drive shouldn't give a bit error after transferring 1TB successfully.
Of course there was the same variety of standards and connectors and in some instances even incompatible electrical implementations there too; just without the advertising of "everything is supposed to work together".
maybe our progress has been limited to the propaganda side alone.
But is it really fair to compare 80s/90s connectivity to 2020 while skipping over the decades between 2000 and 2020?
"fair?" I dunno. the problems recur, the intermediate period had "VGA standards" that flowed over a wide range; and others that exhibited the same problems we see with USB-C here.
I'm pretty sure they had similar issues with crap like antenna connectors and tube socket standards back when they were the cutting edge, too.
(But don't ask me about the shenanigans Windows needs to see in the USB descriptor to allow programs to access an otherwise driver-less USB device - yech)
I mentioned RS232 serial because that was a true "cluster f**" with the issues I enumerated and more.
VGA was fun too. I remember early Linux documentation materials warning users that the wrong scanline modes for X could fry the hardware. Not sure if that was an actual occurrence but I remember triple checking just to make sure :).
I have a USB C cable that has a small screen built in to the connector that will display wattage, it's a really nifty product (search Amazon, there are a bunch of random brands selling them). I hope to see more screens/visual indicators built in to cables to communicate what's happening over the connection, that'd help with the problems you've outlined to an extent.
* it’s possible to have a USB C cable that’s really entirely passive, but in that case it falls back to USB 2 speed and the default USB power, as if it had a Type A connector on it.
The only USB C cables with any sort of active components in them are electronically marked cables for >60W charging, and USB4 ("Thunderbolt") cables with active transceivers. Everything else is purely passive.
But I am surprised by your assertion. I check every type c cable that comes into the house and have not seen one without any kind of e-marker for many years (admittedly I buy all the cables in the household, and we never had any old android phones).
As I mentioned, you can't get any more than baseline power delivery over a cable that isn't e-marked with its current capacity -- this check (SPO prime) is the first thing you have to do BEFORE talking to the remote device. Also any modes from 3.1 gen1 or beyond (TBH I think it's 3.0 or beyond but I don't have the spec in front of me) need a e-marker chip to tell the endpoints what the cable is capable of. Unfortunately OSes are poor at reporting this info.
I do wish that someone would make a type c charging cable that supports PD 2.0, 1.2 -- love those USB version names -- or even 3.0, but allowed no data transmission between endpoints. Basically a USB C condom cable. Haven't seen any of them.
PD negotiation takes place over the CC pins, not over the USB data pins.
This, and much more, is explained in TI's document "A primer on USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery Applications and Requirements":
https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/slyy109a/slyy109a.pdf
https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/slyy109b/slyy109b.pdf
I would be very surprised by that. Most USB-C cables are not electronically marked -- this is usually only present in higher-end cables marketed for charging laptops and tablets.
> As I mentioned, you can't get any more than baseline power delivery over a cable that isn't e-marked with its current capacity
Depends what you mean by "baseline power delivery". As far as I'm aware, all USB-C cables, even ones without an electronic marker, support up to 60W (3A @ 20V).
> Also any modes from 3.1 gen1 or beyond (TBH I think it's 3.0 or beyond but I don't have the spec in front of me)
3.1, maybe. USB 3.0 is detected passively -- if the SS pairs are present, the cable supports USB 3.0, and its use is negotiated over USB 2, just like it was with legacy USB 3 cables.
I've owned the car for three years, and didn't notice the charging difference until a few months ago.
There is no excuse for such a low charge rate, considering the vehicle is a plug-in hybrid and has more than enough battery capacity to charge a phone!
Remembering to plug in my phone at night, or carrying around portable spare batteries is a thing of the past now. It's great!
The spec is higher to achieve certification, but it encapsulates it all (power, bandwidth, etc).
When I was building out my desktop setup the rule of thumb basically became "if I'm not questioning why this is costing so much then it's the wrong component".
Except that if it's not on that fast charger, the only speed indicator is the damn bubbles, so I gotta watch for a few seconds and guess if it's faster or slower than other bubble animations I've seen in the past. Every other charger in the house has been a mystery for the last 2 years.
I've recently picked up a couple of 65w GAN chargers which seem nicely compact and powerful enough to be the only chargers I use for everything from now on and never think about this nonsense again.
I just wish they printed the max wattage on cables and chargers.
I'd rather have relatively high confidence that once inserted it would generally work and stay working.
As I see it USB 3 is already a disaster. USB 1 and USB 2 worked on a tree topology where you could plug a tremendous number of devices into a single port and have it really work.
With USB 3 it seems there is some limit to what you can plug into a root hub and once you go over the limit you plug in a mouse and your keyboard drops out. I looked in the specs to find what the limit is and they don’t say, they also don’t promise that any specific topology of hubs is going to work.
You'd have to go to a ridiculous amount of chained hubs for the spec to get in the way of your use case. However, in practice there seem to be a great many hubs and host controllers that don't implement the spec well. Even expensive motherboards come with controllers that don't support USB 3 well enough. When you buy a laptop, you just have to hope those ports are hooked up to your processor's controller because there's no way you'll find out before it fails. Having said that, support has become much better the last few years.
I remember when USB was first announced there were videos from trade shows of people plugging in 100 devices. But the reality was that the manufacturers of USB chipsets clearly took shortcuts here and there, rightly never expecting people to actually stack 17 USB hubs in some sort of tentacle nightmare of cabling, and so it never quite worked properly at the extremes.
After USB-C I can even charge my MacBook with my Nintendo Switch charger, and I can always find someone that’s got one spare in the office. I’m so done with those incompatible circle-pin chargers!
I could hook a lightning cable up to a car battery, and you'd blame the connector.
The switch console, however, has a non-compliant USB port, which can be damaged when hooked up to a standard USB-PD charger; the pins can get mechanically shorted. Blame Nintendo for that one.
I’ve charged my MacBook with all sorts of USB-C chargers with no issues, including from USB power banks (I was never able to charge my laptop from a standard portable external battery before usb-c!).
This story is about wildly out of spec junk hardware.
OP should be fine plugging in their Switch via spec-compliant cables.
* Granted, it's a problem of many if not most phones now, but arguably it was Apple who started that insane trend.
Samsung cutting off upgrades to my 1 year old phone is why I switched to iPhone. I didn't want to mess with CyanogenMod on a phone I used for work. I'd prefer a phone with software and hardware that lasts 5 years instead of a phone with software that lasts 1 year and hardware lasts 10.
I have a OnePlus6T that runs a mainline linux kernel. This will run forever.
That doesn't correlate to my experience. My iPhone 5S:
- Cannot make calls or text, because the towers that power 3G have been shut down.
- Charges perfectly fine over lightning
- Is stuck on iOS 12
- Takes pictures (we agree on this one!)
Meanwhile, it needs a new battery to have a longer lifespan. That's the only single point of failure.
I'll contrast that to the various Android devices, where the first point of failure is the USB port.
I will say, at one point I thought that the lightning port was failing. A piece of trash had gotten trapped in it. Removing the blockage fixed the problem.
When they flip to USB, they’ll use some sort of wireless solution.
You’d think Photos app (abomination) would be smart enough to get them directly wirelessly, but no you need to get them on iCloud first…
All my 2+ years old Apple cables (Lightning or USB-C) have issues with their insulation, yellowing and fraying, but their connectors are still good. So they get shrink-wrapped and off they go.
It seems it's caused by Apple using some kind of biodegradable polymer instead of the usual PVC.
There's way more usb-c cables around than lightning
For a mobile device with only a single port, I think making that port USB-C is undeniably the best move. But for a desktop or laptop with four, six, eight ports with different functionalities... That's the point of OP's post.
On the other hand though, from the perspective of a person who just buys and uses tech without thinking too much about it, USB-C is actually kind of great. The device will work perfectly with the included peripherals (unless the manufacturer screwed up massively) and whenever I connect things differently, I'll at least get some use out of it. In a pinch, I can charge my phone on my laptop charger, my laptop on the charger for my wireless headphones and my wireless headphones on the charger for my phone. Neither of them charge as quickly as if they were attached to their original chargers, because they all have incompatible fast charging protocols, but it still works.
Personally, as someone who gets a lot of crud in the port, I can say cleaning out USB-C is far easier than B micro, and less risk of pin damage.
Though I agree with much of what you are saying, particularly the compatibility aspect
USB-C doesn’t ensure that you have any of these features. It’s just the style of connector.
You can have best-of-breed USB with any connector type you want, but obviously the most current hardware is using usb-c.
Not really relevant, but I know, now, to not have any expectations based on the fact that I’m using usb-c.
However, I don't skimp on USB-C stuff anymore. I buy the nice expensive GaN chargers, and I buy nice cables. And I don't have problems.
Similar spec ones from Best Buy, etc also worked.
I would also say that the USB-C ports seem to get dirty in ways that end up affecting how the cable seats for a hours or years it always seemed to be reliable positive connection way more than I've had with other USB types. I haven't really looked at the mechanics of it but the number of times I feel like I've plugged in and gotten positive connection only to find out the connection was loose is way higher than I had with USB-A. With USB-A if you got it into the connector whether it was for an hours or years it always seemed to be reliable and not something to worry about.
Are you sure you can blame this on your USB-C charger and not your laptop's battery management firmware ?
Its possibly just that your laptop GUI is not showing you what's going on it the background.
It is quite likely that the laptop lets the battery drain a bit and then intermittently trickle charges.
"Fix low battery cutoff causing system to not power on or charge if the laptop is allowed to self discharge. We suggest updating to 3.07 to prevent this issue."[0]
[0] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/framework-laptop-bios...
Now you can see why.
You didn't even mention the physical fragilities. The cables don't last, but the connectors on cheap laptops/electronics REALLY don't last. The thin pcb inside always cracks or shorts or gets covered with goo. Once it gets jiggly, something shorts and blows up the USB chips inside.
They need a USB-D that is more Lightning-like.
I have a box full of USB adapters. A to B, A to A-female. Micro to A-female, and on and on and on.
It's not great that your charging speed may be limited by the cable specs, but it charges much faster with the wrong kind of USB-C cable than if you have micro-USB when the device takes mini-USB.
And the fact that even HAS PD is amazing. My laptop, phone, and headphones all charge with the same cable. That's much easier for travelling.
Sounds stupid, but it is what it is.
There should be a tiny symbol on the connector, giving you exactly this information. Looking through my USB C cable some of them actually have it. Most have no information on them.
I can not look up the IEC norm at the moment, but I'm sure they forgot about that little detail.
Standard power connector for everything: Check
High speed communications that are capable of even video: Check
Is it perfect? No. Is it plagued by committee design? Sure.
Does it solve 80% of the problems? Yes.