It's been a joy to not need to bring 3 chargers along when I travel.
I think the only thing we're missing to make the USB-C experience perfect is cable labelling. It's unreasonable to make every cable perform to the max spec, but if we could standardise on some labelling or colours for cables that are charging-only, 480 mbit (usb 2 speed), 5 Gbit (usb 3 speed), 10 GB (usb 3.1 speed), 20 GB (usb 3.2 speed), plus whatever higher speeds (and I guess Thunderbolt too), then we'd be golden.
I like the cables I have, and by know I know what cables do what, but it ain't obvious without testing.
I scan the emarker on every USB C that comes into the house and add a p-touch label. I chuck out power-only and ultra baseline (60 W/USB 2 cables) with no marker or resistors.
Power-only cables could be handy when traveling as they are essentially a condom, but they can only charge slowly and I always have a better cable with me. I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Some cheaper devices I have (e.g. rechargeable LED light strip) _only_ charge via power-only cables. Was maddening when I realized I had thrown out all but one of the cables that can charge it.
More often than not these are usually cheap Chinese devices that are expecting a USB-C to USB-A (power-only) cable, because they're actually USB-A devices, with USB-A circuitry, modified slightly to appear as if they're USB-C.
Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.
Yep. The two fucking resistors. All it takes 2 x 5.1K, and yet, somehow, people keep fucking it up.
It's not expensive or complex. It's just that somehow, no one thought to look up "how to add type c to your device" online, or ask an LLM, or put literally any effort into making sure the device works as it should.
You're saving a fraction of a cent per device, while banking on customers not sending it back as defective because it didn't charge when they tried it with a random cable.
If it is a deliberate choice, it's a really, really dumb one.
Advertising is primarily about convincing is to buy things we don't need, don't want, or which are 'stupid' in some way.
Half empty plastic packaging, especially the sort where the company spent money to [re-]design it to deceive people - stupid. It should be illegal. Near ubiquitous.
One of my theories is that there is a deliberate choice happening by people who don't realize it is as simple as a couple of resistors and think they need some fancy PD negotiation chip.
Even over on r/usbchardware it is super common for people to conflate "PD" with this missing resistor issue. Part of the confusion is that the devices that people want to charge with are very likely to be PD power supplies.
> I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Just get an USB data blocker. I bought one off the shelf at an airport for 10€. This is the "condom" you are talking about, just a small dongle. Then travel with a fully featured cable!
I also use it to charge my phone at my workplace on the docking stations (which would be a big no-no otherwise). I think our IT provides them on request too, I've seen them advertise it.
Someone shared this with me the other day. Haven't used it much yet but it seems like it will easily beat my previous strategy of plugging things in randomly and getting aggravated: https://www.whatcable.uk
HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
Even purchasing them is a nightmare these days because everything says ultra super duper fast supreme and then the fine print says it's actually just 3.0 (or doesn't say at all sometimes on online storefronts). Multiple time's I've found myself in the store flipping around the box like a rubics cube trying to find the little fine print that tells me if the cable is more expensive because it's gold plated snake oil or actually matches the higher spec I need.
Even then, I've had success with older HDMI and DP cables up to fairly high bandwidths. It's only on a longer cable and a 4K screen, as well as one 1440p screen that was just really picky for some reason, that I've had issues.
Meanwhile, the instant I want to transfer a non-trivial amount of bytes, USB 2 speeds come and make my life worse than it needs to be (or at least it did before I sat down, found decent speedy cables, bought them, and then put them in their dedicated spot for me to find the next time I need to transfer files).
Agreed on the purchase experience though. It was a pain to find decent cables, but at least it's possible to end up in a happy place.
The critical difference is that USB versions keep adding new wires and active components, while the display cables largely stick to tightening the analog signal integrity requirements. Whether an old HDMI cable works for a new display is largely a question of how high the data rate is for the new resolution and refresh rate, vs how much the manufacturer of the cable overshot their analog bandwidth target.
USB hasn't added any active components or wires for short cables since USB C's introduction (which added emarkers and an extra pair of superspeed lanes for full featured cables)
All of the improvements in passive C cables since then are exactly the same "analog signal integrity requirements". Heck, the most common protocol for sending a display signal over USB C is literally just "send a DisplayPort signal over the superspeed lanes".
Now, USB C cables are more likely to have active retimers or redrivers in them, but a lot of that is that the highest speed signals are well above the display side. Even UHBR20/DP80 from a signaling standpoint is mostly just good old 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 3 except with everything pointed outwards (so 80 gigabit unidirectional instead of 40 gigabit bidirectional)
No? Passive fully-featured USB-C cables had the same amount of wires and active components, which really is just the e-marker chip, since day one. The same 5 Gbps cable can now do 20 Gbps if the cable was made well enough.
Active cables are a different story of course, but that's the same for HDMI cables.
I was including USB history before USB-C, because HDMI and DisplayPort have been around much longer than USB-C. And limiting the discussion to "fully-featured USB-C cables" is ignoring most of the real problems.
And somehow just because the store says it's 48gpbs doesn't mean that's true either... I have a cable that is explicitly marked as 48gbps, 8k60, 4k120 compatible and yet it frequently ends up dropping the connection. Swapped to a different 48gbps cable and it works fine. Funny enough when I display the negotiated FRL speed it's only at like 27gbps, so should have plenty of headroom.
I think there are plenty of places that need to be up to spec and whose tolerances may add up.
I have a USB-C cable pretending to do 10 Gbps + 4K60 display port. I've used it to connect my HP laptops to my HP docking station. I have two similar laptops, 840 and 845 G8s, both with two USB-C ports each.
The 840 works as expected. The 845 only works if the cable is plugged in one specific way in one specific port. I now have a Lenovo laptop, also with two USB-C ports. I haven't tried DP-out with this computer, but Linux complains about there being issues when the dock is connected with this cable. On Windows, the whole USB stack sometimes goes foobar after a sleep/wake cycle. If, say, a mouse was initially connected, it'll keep working, but any new USB device won't, even the mouse if disconnected and reconnected. Shutting down Windows takes around 10 minutes and shows some driver issue at the end. Everything works after a reboot.
With a separate no-name docking station, everything works perfectly on the 845, but the 840 can't do 4k60 on it; it doesn't show up in the options. Haven't tried the Lenovo with this particular dock.
Both docks have DP alt mode, not DisplayLink or whatever other USB-attached GPU.
A huge problem for me, the only displayport 2.1a cable I’ve found that works for my RTX 5090 + 240hz uncompressed HDR 4K monitor came with the monitor. It’s amazing that it’s pushing around 80gbps through that wire and it’s an incredible visual experience.
Gods, this is giving me flashbacks. I had to find a usb-c to display port 1.4a cable for my Gsync Ultimate screen with 240hz.
I tried out I think 10 different cables, before I found one that actually worked....
I used to have a box of SCSI cables and adapters, too. I could identify their function by sight, or even by feel if the sun got blotted out and the Earth was cooling and the only way to fix those problems was forming a correct-and-functional SCSI chain in the infinite darkness.
These days, ye olde parallel SCSI bus is gone. We have USB C, which is similar to SCSI in that the number of ways it can work is way more than 1. But because the connectors are all the same and the defacto labeling is awful, I can't necessarily identify the functions by sight or feel. If I have needs that extend very far beyond charging a phone and/or USB 2, then I don't know if any of the USB C cables that I find in a box will support those needs without testing them.
I don't think you even have to go that far back, just USB vs USB-Micro vs USB-Mini is sufficient and maybe more commonly annoyed by people, still today :)
There's no good reason to prevent anyone from using (say) a 1080p HDMI cable to connect a 1080p device to a 4K television, or using a 4K cable to connect a 4K device to a 1080p television.
The problem is certification. I've had lots is USB cables over the years from cheap to expensive. The only ones that reliably did what was on the tin where the USB-IF certified ones.
At this point I have a switched pretty much everything to Club3d. They used to make GPUs but are now firmly connectors only. In the past 5 years no issues with any of the cables I bought from them.
Arguably PCIe lanes the thunderbolt exposes are a differentiating factor, not the maxed-out specs that "plain" usb-c cables can have. Although to be fair, I've never used the PCIe lanes on thunderbolt ports.
USB A cables and ports have the inner plastic piece color coded. White for USB 1, black for USB 2, blue for USB 3 (5 Gbit/s), teal for 3.1 (10 Gbit/s). Red or yellow for always-on
Blue is the only one that's actually endorsed by USB-IF. For the most part USB-IF would prefer if everyone just used their little icons. Luckily manufacturers have a bit more sense and all follow the same color scheme (apart from the occasional black sheep)
The last part is a bigger issue for me. I can use my usb to charge most of my tech but when it comes to the exact cable that my interface needs to use I now have like 30 cables I have to try before I know which one was the correct one.
My MacBook Air is plugged in via MagSafe at home but I'd consider traveling by air with just USB-C. Probably need to throw a hub in there at that point.
I went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.
Anything braided is almost always junk.
I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.
The high data rate cables all need to be stiffer. You can find good 100w or 240w charging cables with good flexibility, so that's a good reason to keep usb-2 data-speed but high-power charging cables.
The measure of a good high-power cable is the resistance. You can gauge it with a usb test load, typical usb power meter, and a usb-pd trigger (all can be pretty cheap, often you can find the trigger functionality combined with one of the other two). Calculate voltage drop for a given current by measuring both sides of the cable, or at least compare different cables with similar load.
But I found a "USB Cable Checker 2" by BitTradeOne which will directly measure and show the resistance in milli-ohms, very convenient! A very good cable measures 150 to 250 mOhm, the worse ones are 3 or 4 times that (at which point this device over-ranges around 1000 mOhm). You can really tell the difference with how some phones and laptops will slow their current draw after voltage droops.
True, braided has absolutely nothing to do with the specs of the cable, but braided "feels" higher quality, so I suspect quite a few manufacturers think they can skimp on the cable quality because of that.
Cost, really? A 2m USB4 cable from Belkin is $20 (eg INZ004bt2MBK). You don't save much going to 4 ft, sadly.
I find their cables to be pretty good (the TB5/USB4). They're certainly cheaper than Apple's. They have a soft rubber coating (not quite silicone) and a good bend radius. Compare to the super-stiff (but good) cables that Dell provide with their monitors.
I buy USB C cables cheap. The last batch were Anker B8752, came in packs of 2, were bought online as clearance items from Menards. They were delivered for free to the store that I drive past twice on most days. They work fine; no complaints.
With tax, the individual cables were $0.55 each. I can afford to stock up on cables at that price, use them whimsically, cut them up for projects, and give them away to anyone when that seems useful. I don't miss them when they get lost; I just get another one. I don't have to decide between buying a decent dinner or traveling with spares; I can just toss some into my bag.
Meanwhile: I can't afford to do those things with cables that are $20 each. That's a vastly different value proposition. If I had $20 USB C cables instead, I'd guard them the same as I do the twenty-dollar bills in my wallet.
Arguably these are different use cases. Cheap fast-charge cables are usually limited to full speed only (linked ones included). For that reason they don’t meet my criteria, as you can’t interchange the charging cable for a data transfer cable.
I’m not advocating using USB4 cable for everything, but I also don’t want to bother testing cables when I can buy a reliably good one for twenty bucks. I’m sure a cheaper equivalent exists.
I hate every part of the concept of testing cables to find ones that work for [insert purpose].
But I love the liberty to use inexpensive not-quite-universal cables with great freedom more than I hate the former.
So since I need a bunch of USB C cables in my life, and I love using them freely, then I'm left with the following optimization: Special cables for special purposes, cheap cables for everything else, and testing them when necessary.
USB-C maximalism is great for travel. I personally recommend travelling with a USB-C desktop charger, but use one that accepts a IEC C7 ("figure-8") cable. Then, travel with only the cable corresponding to your destination (or buy one when you get there). That avoids having a wall wart that might not fit in narrow spaces, or whose weight might make it fall out of older sockets.
If you’ve got one of the older style Mac chargers, the part which plugs into the wall physically separates from the rest of the charger. You can connect different plugs for all the different countries. There is a plastic seam where the charger separates. It’s easy to miss.
I’ve slowly acquired all the global adaptors for Mac chargers. I just bring a usbc Mac charger when I travel with the destination country plug attached.
I wish Apple made gan chargers though. Those look great
I've seen fake Apple chargers in local shops recently, with complete Apple packaging, "made by Apple in California" etc. and only detectable by close inspection of the details, specs not matching any Apple product, device info reported electronically that doesn't match any Apple specs, and the tiny inset writing not making sense when looked at under magnification. So that sounds plausible to me.
If you do that, you're losing grounding, which will result in the machine having that AC leakage buzz when you touch it. The chrome lug that the plug nub slides onto is a ground connection, and the Apple official cords and some country-specific nubs implement the ground brush connector. There is (was?) a third-party Schuko (not Europlug) nub.
Those power supplies often shipped with both a full cord input which was grounded but also a folding two-prong component that made it in to a wall wart and of course was not grounded.
At some point my older Mac charger that I was using for traveling died, so as a replacement I got a few of these styles of adapters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YS7QHM9 (not the exact one I have - but you get the idea). I pair it with one of these: https://www.anker.com/products/a2687-anker-prime-charger-160... which is tiny for the amount of power it can output, which has been enough to cover both me and my wife while we travel. Many US plug chargers allow their pins to fold in, including this one, which makes for a fantastically compact setup when paired with that style of adapter.
Depending on where we are going and what we are doing, I also bring this thing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YDPB8RZ which is kind of an extension cord + USB charger + all-in-one converter as well. The plug is at a right angle and very flat, so it can fit behind furniture and such that straight cables can't.
I do this too, the recent MacBook chargers have 2 usb-c and I have 4 of the plug parts that adapt it. Very minimalist but for short trips with single charger it is great
This might if you’re from the US as I’ve collected the ends over time, but I’ve never seen them for sale except the US one:
AC Power Adapter Wall Folding Plug Duck Head,US Standard Plug Duck Head Compatible with MaBook Pro Air/Maci Book/Phone/Pod Power Adapter Brick
Apple - at least used to - sell an international plug pack if you’re missing some. I can’t even remember where I got some of my plugs. They’ve been doing this for decades, and the international plugs are still compatible.
It’s been years since, but I bought on Amazon a bag of 8 different ends that work everywhere in the world.
It wasn’t from Apple, but it’s basically a plastic shape and 2 or 3 (depending on end) metal parts - it’s hard to get wrong, and easy to test before use.
I think your suggestion and also the author's are too big for my taste. I carry a US-style 45W GaN charger, a couple of usb-c cables, and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to). I carry this daily and for travel even though I live in Europe as this combination is the same size as the EU version of my charger by itself.
For devices I have a work laptop, work phone, personal laptop, personal phone, headphones, usually a couple other small devices, and a mobile battery. I usually only heavily use my work laptop and personal phone. For phones and smaller stuff, I can charge them from the laptop while the laptop charges overnight so I don't typically wish for a second charger. If your laptop has decent battery life, charging at less than max speed is no big deal (I have two 16 inch MacBook Pros).
Additionally, I've converted most of my old favourite micro-usb devices like mouses to usb-c. A search for "usb-c 4.7kohm 5v female" will give you some options for replacing micro-usb with usb-c, with hobbyist soldering skills.
For a beard trimmer, I got an Enchen boost usb-c model for $10 for travel. It works well and even has ceramic blades but I had to add 4.7k resistors to work with a c-c cable[1].
[1] Cheap devices often omit some 4.7k resistors that tell a usb-c charger to output 5V, so it outputs nothing. This is why some devices work only with usb a to c cables, as usb-a outputs 5V by default. If you can manage to add the resistors to the correct pins or replace the connector with one that has them built-in, you can fix this problem. The difficulty of doing this varies a lot by device.
I think they're describing how you can force the two pins of a europlug into a type-G socket, if you first stick a screwdriver or key or something into the earth pin to open the shutters.
This will give you access to electricity, but the contact area is much smaller than it's designed for (round pins in a rectangular hole), so using it for anything high wattage will end poorly.
An often overlooked part of the BSA spec for type-G sockets is they're supposed to have a flat surface surrounding the socket large enough to prevent you using the earth pin of an upside down plug to do this.
(Not recommended at home kids) use a key (or, safer, an upside down UK Earth pin) in the Earth hole to open the Live/Neutral shutter - then insert the EU prongs. The width of the EU prongs is handily the same as the UK holes.
Touring musicians do it if venues don’t have convertors.
Doesn’t work if the EU plug needs a live earth of course.
> It’s important that the charger accepts an IEC C7 cable. This is an international standard, so you’ll be able to find local mains cables at office supply stores or borrow them from nearby appliances, and it’s a two-pin design. Having a two-pin mains lead means you don’t have to worry about finding three-pin (earthed) power outlets in areas where they are not yet universal. It also means that an ultra-compact travel adapter like the Road Warrior can serve as a backup option if you don’t have a local cable.
An earthed-to-unearthed adapter (preferably with some alternate path to ground) seems like a better solution there than restricting oneself to C7 and its 2.5A max current. And when the ground prong is available in the outlet, it's often a useful mitigation against the looseness of worn-out sockets (since it adds another area of support).
I might need to power a lot of things simultaneously. I currently travel with a 6-port USB-C power adapter; while it doesn't blast max wattage over every single port (nor do I need it to quite yet), I'd be unsurprised if one that does eventually hits the market, at which point I'd be inclined to upgrade.
In any case, even for single-device power supplies, pretty much all of the 165W+ ones I have are grounded (either C5 or C13). This includes the one that came with my Framework 16 (which is my backup charger if I need to pack extra light or otherwise don't want/need that 6-port squid).
It's honestly bliss when you get even close to it at home. I'm close, having only one Lightning device left (Apple TV remote) and a couple of USB-A and micro-USB devices I'll probably be stuck with for a while (avalanche pack, cat tracker, et cetera).
short, dumb one or two plug extension cords are great for travel. They're light on the wall side, so the travel adapter on that side generally stays in. Plus it's nice if you need a little extra reach occasionally
ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THIS BECAUSE IT IS INSANELY DANGEROUS buuuut...
... if you're hopelessly stuck without your cloverleaf charging cable you can kind of batter a figure-8 power lead over the phase and neutral pins, and you can probably find a figure-8 power lead more easily than a cloverleaf one.
Don't leave it unattended or where non-hackers can get at it.
My favorite DON'T DO THIS method is plugging European plug in UK socket - using something like scissors in earth to open shutters for neutral/live where EU plug actually fits pretty ok.
The other one is twisting US/JP plug pins so they fit AU/NZ sockets...
If it's one of those lovely old MK sockets like you used to get in the 70s/80s, then the earth pin doesn't open the shutter - it's opened by equal pressure on the phase and neutral pins. It takes a bit of jiggling to get the Euro plug to go in.
I keep both Schuko and UK kettle leads, cloverleaf leads, and figure-8 leads in my laptop bag, having been stuck before.
The best part is that you need to do this when you're on holiday, so all you've got are your keys, so you stab the keys into the slots and ever so carefully balance the round European plug contacts onto each key, and you pray to god that there's no earthquake and you don't cause a fire.
I really wanted your approach to work and went down that pathway with this [1], but its one weakness if you have multiple destinations with multiple socket types. It's not uncommon that I have to go between countries with China/Aus, EU, India (kinda-sorta EU but not), and UK plugs. That's a lot of those C7 cables. Also, having 1-2m of cable lets you put the charger on a bedside table when the only wall socket is buried under the bed for some reason, so that adds up.
I then considered one with the swappable ends, like this [2], but the advantage of the cable is that you don't get the 'this room's only socket is against the desk and fuck you if you want to plug a big wall wart into it' problem, plus as above the cable lets the charger ports be much more easily accessible. Also, many models also only have US/EU/UK adapters, without covering e.g. CN/AU style plugs.
And at that point, you're basically using of those old-style universal adapters with the universal AC input and the sliders to change the output, especially given you can now get them with integrated 65W GaN USB ports [3], so why would you fiddle with attachments you could lose?
So then there's this [4] which is so close to my ideal but isn't quite there. It has the cable advantages, minimises additional swappable weight to get different socket types, and you can even put the adapters straight on the charger if you want to omit the cable.
But then I read about abysmal reliability performance and I'd rather not burn down my hotel room in a third-world country. It does have the ends that I, personally, would like but with all of these you're at the mercy of them designing them for the specific wall socket types you need. And at least with this one, the UK one doesn't include a fuse as it's supposed to, whereas IEC C7 plugs do. Further burnination possibilities.
Really, if a reputable manufacturer made [4] but sank an extra ~50% product price into proper reliability and standards compliance, as well as making a whole plethora of swappable ends for all types of wall sockets that fit both the cable and directly onto the device, I'd probably buy it and never look again. I'd even accept a proprietary swappable end form factor with the vendor lock-in risks just because it's basically the utopian ideal of what I want.
But in the meantime, I'm back to using [1] with generic basic adapters for EU and CN/AU on the end of the UK IEC C7 cable. I'll build a collection of C7 cables for each destination and when I travel to only one I'll take the appropriate cable, but when it's multiple destinations I haven't found a better solution.
I too am a USB-C maximalist, but with a handful of differences from OP:
- You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
- I don't think I could live off just one charging port, but would rather just ditch USB-A entirely.
- I'm using wired earbuds, with a standard headphone jack, but with the number of full-sized cans that are using USB-C in some way it baffles me that there aren't more or them (or any, that I've been able to find) that also support using it for audio input, so you you can play them while charging.
An electric toothbrush can never break: it can only become a toothbrush. You should never see an “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Out of Order” sign, just “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Manual.” Sorry for the exercise.
Generally true, but don't forget that some people are disabled and absolutely need the electric functions. "Escalator temporarily stairs" is funny until your foot is in a cast.
Same goes for those seemingly-useless, single-purpose kitchen devices. You're just probably not in the target audience.
For those of you that are wondering, Mitch Hedburg was a relatively famous stand-up comedian whose special went viral.
In said special was this classic:
“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break; it can only become stairs. There would never be an 'escalator temporarily out of order' sign, only 'escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’”
Re. toothbrush, I have to take the opportunity to give Philips credit for the Sonicare electric toothbrushes they made ~15 years ago. That thing just keeps trucking, it’s incredible. I go on 2 week trips and don’t even bring the charger, and have no worries about it dying.
It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.
Yeah I was going to say, I'm at 20 years on a Sonicare (pushing 25 now that I remember it is 2026, damn...) and it still works fine. Holds a charge long enough that I've never run out on vacation.
They are good! Although my wife manages to kill hers every few years, I don't think I've ever actually had one die myself. I also have my original UV sanitizing charger unit that I purchased new circa 2009!
I've found that one can buy just new handles on ebay though, without the head and chargers, for only like half the super high retail prices or less, even for the "higher end" models, so I do that every 5-8 years or so if one gets too bad.
I got a no-name USB adapter for mine and it hasn't killed it in the couple of years I've had it, that's the one I take for travel. You can search for "USB QP2520" to find one.
I know, right. And the other manufacturers are the same, razors/grooming tools that just have a USB C plug are rare to nonexistent. My assumption is that it's down to some regulation regarding waterproofing somewhere. Though of course USB C plugs can be waterproof.
Part of the reason is that they used NiMH for the batteries in those (I have 3 that are 20-30 years old some predating the Phillips logo). All of mine still work. The NiMH is good for 1000s of deep cycles. The one from the mid 90s is only good for about 15x 2min brushings. Luckily, you can still get new heads for them!
My first Sonicare eventually died of a battery failure 20 years ago. My second would not die and I was stuck buying the old style heads that were hard to clean. I finally gave in and replaced it just recently. Modern lithium cells last forever in low drain, low duty cycle applications like a toothbrush.
I bought a cheap electric toothbrush from a no-name Chinese company. The battery lasts 6 months on one charge with daily use. It cost about $20. I wouldn't be surprised if it's manufactured by the same factories that make Philips' toothbrushes.
Ha I thought mine was on the verge of dying after a good few years of use (amazon reviews were all like, yeah it only lasted a two years), so I ordered a new one, but the old one keeps going so I keep the new one in reserve looming over it menacingly, and it just refuses to kick it lol.
Counterpoint, mine died after a few years to the point where it would only go a few days between charges. Maybe the BMS wasn't good, because this started happening after it completely died on me on a trip once.
Both Philips and the similarly sturdy Oral-B. You know they are good because they have a sealed design that uses induction to charge. By contrast the toothbrush mentioned by the OP won't last long with that flimsy door and the USB port in a wet environment.
But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
> But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
That has less to do with the battery being integrated and more to do with different battery chemistries having different voltage curves.
Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries. The problem is all these devices are tuned to an Alkaline battery voltage curve which is much more slanted than NiMH. NiMH has a nearly flat curve with a sudden drop off while Alkaline have a pretty steady decent (with a sudden drop off).
I'm aware of why it happens, but the net effect is the same. No device powered by AA/AAA is in practice going to be able to detect battery charge level correctly. Combine that with the annoyance of separate chargers versus integrated USB-C, and the result is that I never want to use non-integrated rechargeable batteries. (In practice, I also prefer to avoid devices that use AA/AAA/etc at all, for some of the same reasons.)
> Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries
Wouldn’t the NiMH batteries have to be smarter in that case, keeping track of their own historical behavior? That changes over time, and devices with integrated batteries can take that into account to indicate charge levels. If you can swap batteries, you lose that information.
I'm aware these aren't mutually exclusive. To me, the bigger benefit of not integrating them is that I can just rotate in freshly charged batteries anytime they die, and don't have to care about being within proximity of a charger.
(I also find this important for gamepads, to the extent that I don't just opt to play wired.)
I do wish more devices supported hot-swappable rechargeable battery packs. My headset does that.
But in the absence of that, I'll take USB-C and the ability to charge while actively using. I find that useful even for wireless gamepads, because then I can attach them to a generic charger on one side of the room, and not run a cable across the room to the console/TV area, because the communication is still wireless and only the power isn't.
I use these USB-C rechargeable batteries in my travel kit, too. I love the flexibility of being able to pickup some AA/AAAs, charge the ones that just died, or swap in the 2 spares I travel with.
Why haven't phones just moved to have two USB ports?
A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...
I've needed 2 USB-C ports on one-port devices (phone, Steam Deck) a few times so I got this tiny 2-port hub with micro SD card reader (also has option for 3.5mm audio port instead of card reader): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKV7JSHC?th=1 "Satechi USB C Mobile Hub, 4-in-1 USB C Multiport Adapter, 4K HDMI, 100W Pass-Through Charging, 10Gbps Data"
Because the use case and demand versus the cost of engineering and manufacturing isn’t there. The market for USB headphones is minuscule compared to Bluetooth headphones.
Because space inside a phone is at an extreme premium. And this problem is solved by either using magsafe to charge or using an external hub for more ports.
Wha wha whaat? You'll more likely to see no ports soon than two lol.
I don't remember when I actually plugged my phone for anything other than charging. Must be nearly a decade. And wireless charging is becoming good, albeit not ubiquitous quite yet.
See, I agree with this too. You wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about the random little things that are specific to just one device or another (IR blasters, the DAC on old LG phones, etc) if you could just plug in a second USB peripheral.
But what I'm more getting at is the other way around: that wireless headphones will already have USB-C for charging anyway. And that, particularly for larger ones (that have that port directly on the device, and not in a separate charging cradle), it really seems like a waste that more of them don't leverage that -- so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
There are still wired options, though, right? I don't really miss them, the nostalgia is not strong enough to forget how often the damn cable would catch on something and try to rip the headphones off my head. Or the cord noise. I get that people do not like having to eventually replace a battery, but high quality wireless headphones are a nice upgrade IMO.
My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc.
There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave").
I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars.
Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon.
Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit.
Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm, as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact.
People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to.
____
¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
I find Philips Sonicare toothbrushes break after about a year, long before the battery gives up. Which i guess is another reason not having integrated batteries would be nice. But then they might not make as much money whenever I buy a new one so they probably wouldn't do that
I've never experienced them breaking that quickly, but it's worth pointing out that the cheap models are far inferior. The motors are weaker and they even come with a worse charger that doesn't come with a normal wall outlet plug.
I don't like USB-C for toothbrushes to charge because there's water in the bathroom. The proprietary inductive charger/stand that comes with Sonicare/Oral-B electric toothbrushes are ideal.
Sucks that they are proprietary but they have been trivially easy to clone by third party manufacturers. $7 on Amazon.
I've had the topline ones fail on me three times after a couple of years. Now on a base model, and works just as fine.
The old charging glass isn't compatible with newer ones, so I have a couple of those laying around as junk. All the travel cases used micro usb-a, which is super inconvenient.
So no "ecosystem" buy-in into any Philips line from me anymore. They have a very bad product lines anyway.. Super complex, tons of SKUs with minimal differences. But they do have some good products.
The way I think about these is that, yeah, it's unfortunate that these are not the best products on the market as a product category, and they cost more than they really should.
Of course, another way to think about it is that the most expensive preventative care is better than the cheapest corrective care.
I don't really consider these an "ecosystem" like tech. An ecosystem implies there's a big cost in both time and money to switching to something else.
In my case, I'm either going to buy Sonicare or Oral-B because those are the options with bulk refills Costco. There are brands out there that are cheaper, but not by much. If they break, I buy another one. Such is life.
Of course, you can clean your teeth just as well with a cheap toothbrush and a much less expensive budget if you are diligent and thorough with your brushing. Flossing is also more important, anyway.
But I'm not messing around with my teeth: if my dentist recommends an electric toothbrush, I'm buying one.
This subject also reminds me of the razor blade market. A whole lot of "disruption" has taken place over the years with online shaver brands supposedly offering "the same" product as incumbents like Gillette.
But if you shave your head bald you'll know that a Harry's razor is really inferior compared to a Gillette razor. Sometimes the overpriced brand names are simply the best options on the market, even if they have been cost-cut or are otherwise "not what they used to be," and I feel similarly about Sonicare. I could buy some off-brand electric toothbrush and maybe it's 70-90% as good, but that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
A electric toothbrush does a much better job at cleaning your teeth though. I have a basic oral B one that I can get new heads for cheaply and easily and it has a usb-c charger. It’s great honestly. I’m sure it’ll die one day but so do normal toothbrushes. I’ll crack the shell open and recycle the battery it’s not a big deal. I had a random Amazon one before that broke after a few months but the very basic “old” style electric brushes seem to last some years. The more “UI” and features it has the less it’ll last
You're probably missing out on the feeling of really, really clean teeth. Regular brushing never gave me the feeling of ALL biofilm getting stripped from the enamels.
For the vast majority of things I need to power or charge, dumb USB charging is fine, and I have a 10-port Anker “IQ” charger that works great for most of those things. Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist? I don’t need 65W on each port. I just needs lots of ports for gadgets that can trickle charge for hours at night (4 kids, lots of devices). I mostly want to standardize on USB-C host cables, but no one makes a cheap device for doing that more than a decade after USB-C became a thing.
The reason is because while you want to use the low end the general public does not understand that USB-C is the connector only and that various levels of power and data depend on the cable and the device at both ends.
If you sell a 10 port USB-C charged someone is going to plug 10 MacBooks into it and complain it doesnt work.
Macbooks aren't the absolute best example anymore, since 20W is plenty to charge ARM-based MacBooks in a few hours, so a 200W 10-port charger could do a fine job with 10 MacBooks.
But your point is still valid. As a nerd I really appreciate being able to use say, my 100W laptop charger or the car jumpstarter pack I have to charge up my earbuds or an electric toothbrush, since it reduces the number of weird little cables or chargers I have to keep track of, but it sure does baffle the non-technical majority that their toothbrush charger fits their laptop 'for some reason' but of course does nothing - plus the confusion when they realize they could physically plug the toothbrush into a pair of headphones, or plug two portable batteries together.
I've seen 1000W (or so they claim) 10 port USB-C chargers on Amazon. Not Anker, just a no name Chinese brand I am not going to trust. But they do seem to exist. Like the sibling comment says, I assume it's because people expect USB-C charging capabilities to be a lot higher.
Do you believe the 16 TB uSD cards from no name Chinese brands on Amazon as well? If so, I have a bridge to sell - limited time offer!
500W (with 1 port being true 240 W) is the highest legitimate one I've run across - and I search often for real alternatives to buy. Even bulky GaN PC PSUs selling for $500 can't exceed 700W without assisted cooling due to efficiency->heat reasons.
I had a pair of sennheiser urbanite headphones that used USB (micro :( ) for digital audio input, and you could use them while charging. Was shocked and disappointed when i eventually replaced them with Audio Technica ones that could only charge via USB but didn't do audio via USB, only bluetooth or analog.
I agree (and am sad) that it's not a ubiquitous feature, but headphones with a built-in dac do exist
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
My solution to this was to get an electric razor that doesn't use batteries. My 20-year-old no-battery electric Norelco razor was bought in a chain pharmacy. I've looked in recent years, and I don't see them any more in brick-and-mortar stores, but they're still made, and available online.
The (minor, IME) downside is that electric razors without batteries are generally on the low-end of the spectrum, rarely including the fancy (even non-battery-related) features found on the high end electric razors.
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.*
I thought the same, but that'll happen with devices that use AA batteries too.
I was using a cheap Panasonic EW-DJ10 water flosser that uses AA batteries, but the battery compartment contacts would corrode after some time.
I then switched to one of those China USB-C water flossers, but I think the built-in lithium battery's nearing the end of its life since it'll cut off randomly now. I also used to worry about charging it, since the USB-C port would need to be dried out before I plugged the charging cable in.
No idea what's a happy medium for electronics that need to work near water.
> - You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
I've had an Oral B electric brush for around 3 years now and it hasn't skipped a beat. I'd hate to have to change batteries when I can just pop it on a inductive charging dock every night.
Just recently acquired a set from "Philips" that is an 8-pack of lithium-ion AAs with a charging-case that connects to USB-C (Note: the case itself doesn't have its own battery, like an earbuds case would -- it's just a normal charger that doubles as a case). Sounds like this would be great for your toothbrushes and such!
For what an anecdote’s worth, I have the same rechargeable Norelco razor that I’ve had going on 17 years. Same nicd battery it came with; gets recharged about once every three weeks. I think it’ll relive me.
I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
Here's how the last few broke:
* Phone with typical inadequate battery + external portable battery pack plugged in, shoved in together in pocket running Google Maps navigation via bluetooth, and biking. My thigh bent the USB connector.
* USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
* USB-C plugged into phone and sat on while on car seat. Another thing any half-competent design intern would have listed on their stress test scenario list but it seems the senior designers missed
* Laptop plugged in on the edge of standing desk, USB cable got jammed in gap between adjacent desks.
I much preferred real, sturdy mechanical connections. They should just miniatureize the IEC power connectors and put straight up 19VDC through them.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
I do everything on your list. I also have young children who grab and play with things. Our household breaks 1 USB-C plug per year, if that.
I don't know if you were embellishing for effect, but anyone breaking 50 connectors a year probably isn't going to have success with anything short of a fully ruggedized connector solution, which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices.
Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
> which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices
Not true. 1990s connectors hardly ever broke for me. They were all super rugged. I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
I buy the DC barrel jacks, those I've had inordinate problems on the inside of devices as they wear out but never on the power plug itself.
VGA connectors? I've bent the shield on more than one VGA or DVI cable, and it's a nightmare to get a pin straight enough if you happen to bend one... but possible sometimes.
> Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
I put fully ruggedized connectors on several shipping products. You would not like the cost nor space requirements.
> I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
VGA and SCSI connectors are rarely exposed like a phone connector and they're in a completely different class anyway. Nobody wants a phone with a giant SCSI size connector on the bottom.
I hate to say it, but the fact that you have this many anecdotes of dropping "several-kilogram objects" on to connectors is a clue that you're an outlier in how hard you treat connectors, if breaking 50 USB connectors a year wasn't already an indicator.
Expecting consumer connectors to stand up to this outlier level of abuse is unrealistic.
This is a success! USB-C was designed so that the part most likely to fail is the inexpensive plug, not the socket.
One of the problems with USB mini-A was that the socket would fail, meaning the device had to be repaired or discarded. Combined with the short lifetime (about 300 insertions) it was a disaster which is why you almost never see it.
You’d be more unhappy of those failures had happened in your expensive device rather than your cheap cables.
Perhaps you are just not careful with things, I’ve been an early adopter and never broken one ( I probably have at least 40 different ones, some of which get plugged/unplugged multiple times a day).
My kids haven’t broken a single one either and they destroyed plenty of lightning cables.
The GP comment is one of those HN comments where I can't tell if someone is making up a ridiculously high number to tell a story online, or if there really are people out there breaking 52 USB-C plugs per year going about their normal lives.
I mean I don't know how people avoid breaking them. Prying paint cans open, rappelling from height, driving nails into roofs... don't you find them fragile for these daily operations?
Tangentially related anecdote: I used to break tons of stuff all the time (my whole family growing up did), and I just assumed that all things just have finite lifespans, until I started dating someone who's tremendously careful and called me out on it. Then for a long time I just assumed I was a clumsier than average person.
Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.
Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.
Is IEC really the gold standard for connectors to you? I always thought they feel terrible to plug in. There's no snap or solid bottom-out indication to when it's "connected." And it just sits in the socket from friction that doesn't feel particularly solid. It's the kind of connection where if it gets yanked a little bit and the connection fails, it's not obvious because it's half-seated in the socket.
I'm not sure this is the brag you think it is... You should be happy you're breaking the plug.
Also "phone with typical inadequate battery". Just get a battery replacement and make sure you only use it between 60% and 80%. If you don't do that you're degrading the battery.
You might think "but now I only have 1/5 of the capacity" yeah and it will now last much longer than if you degraded the battery.
That’s impressive, I have managed to break a lot of micro connectors (not even from proper stress, just from prolonged normal use) but I have never managed to break a USB-C cable or connector!
I can't think of any connector that would work well shoved in a pocket moving around. Had to re-solder too many headphone jacks back in the day, and anything that screws in would cause way too much leverage, probably ruining the small slim device.
There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side). Those are pretty robust, get the cable out of the way more reliably, and provide a much smaller lever for physical forces on the connector. They aren't the solution for everything, but they solve a lot of issues
For everything else there are magnetic USB-C connectors
> They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
> USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
Seems like you managed to break one even though it was in the environment that you're saying they're designed for. Maybe you're the problem and USB-C, the technology that billions of people manage to use just fine without breaking on a daily basis, is perfectly fine.
I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside. Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge, but all the cables look the same, and you don't tend to know in advance.
If switching to a type-A charger fixes it, it’s probably the device manufacturer’s fault, not the cable. Many manufacturers that need the 5v standard you’d normally get from an old type-A charger screw this up.
For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…
I know of something expensive that omits it too! My insulin pump controller is a junkpile android phone (a NUU Mobile N5004L for the curious) whose only purpose in life is to run a singular android app.
The device charges via usb-c, but refuses to do so if the charger is any relatively modern usb-c based brick. Only usb-a!
Ugh, that’s infuriating to read, if not at all surprising. This sounds at once totally over-engineered (in the modern day, negative sense of the word) while being simultaneously under-engineered (in the traditional sense).
I don't think it's cost reasons these are being omitted. The customer refunds would easily exceed the savings. It's most likely designers just swapping a micro usb port with a usb c one in an old design while making no other changes and seeing it works with the A to C cable they have.
I share your theory about micro usb, yeah. I know it’s not cost savings, it’s just lazy/ignorant. If they’re changing the footprint on the board for a type-c port, they can add some smd resistors.
This is really only a problem if you buy cheap cables. Pick the baseline spec you want your USB cables to meet, and throw out all the ones that don’t. Problem solved.
It’s still a minor frustration if you have to borrow a cable, but that’s solved by packing a cable, and by encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables.
Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.
Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".
I do electronics professionally. This is likely because in order to save a bit on BOM costs, the device itself doesn't have the necessary pulldown resistors to signal to turn on VBUS.
USB-A has always-on VBUS while USB-C doesn't. Because the spec allows for always-on VBUS in a USB-A to USB-C cable, some devices just assume that they're always being powered by one of those cables.
I doubt it’s even saving cost, it’s just incompetence. It works with the USB A to C cable, so job done. They’ve probably never plugged it into a PD charger, and probably just copied the schematic from the last (defective) product and will copy and paste it into the next one too.
It's because they are straight up defective. The USB-C spec is pretty clear in that the power pins have 0v until you signal for a voltage. This isn't a failure of USB-C, you should just return defective devices to the OEM.
Thankfully this defect is becoming less common outside of temu junk.
That's because they didn't implement USB C correctly. Maybe it was to save less than a penny on the BOM, maybe it was arrogance ("it works for me! send it!"), or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, they didn't do it right.
By standard, USB C provides no power at all unless the device being powered follows the rules. They're easy rules to follow. The minimum viable way of doing it right requires just two tiny resistors inside of the device.
Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.
40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2. That said, outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor, you don't need a 40gbps cable.
> 40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2.
I dunno, Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap. DOCSIS 4.0 does 10Gbps on some really ancient cables. I'm sure Cat9 will do even better, at least the cat people and the doc people are trying harder than the USB people.
Unifi even has a PoE-over-coax solution. Add some Anker GaN shit and I'm sure it can be miniaturized.
> outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor
As soon as I need a "special" cable to connect a laptop to a monitor, we're effectively back to the 1990s-2000s when I needed a special monitor cable. There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
The whole point of this thread was "one type of cable for everything" and "grab any USB-C cable from your personal stash and they all work for every use case".
99% of user use cases for USB are charging batteries and copying a word document on a flash drive. For those cases literally every port and cable works. For video, in every office and home, the thunderbolt cable just sits in the monitor at all times with just the USB end free. Meaning there is no confusion around which cable is the video one because the video one only ever sits connected to the monitor.
While I now no longer have to carry around a bag of chargers when I travel or fish through a bucket of black DC adapters for the right one.
There's tons of confusion when I have new usb-c devices like a portable usb-c monitor or a VR headset or some other gadget. I have cables that seem beefy because they do power, but they don't do data, and I end up having to go through a pile of USB-c cables to find one that does data. It's frustrating!
Is it really though? People are selling cables, but 40Gbase-T hardware does not exist, and 10Gbase-T hardware is already crazy power hungry and the SFP+s heat up much you burn yourself if you touch them. Meanwhile USB-C 10 Gbps works on an iPhone.
Meanwhile, Coax is huge and stiff. Good high-speed USB-C cables actually have mini coax inside.
> There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
I completely disagree.
When the only difference between cables is max speed, that's still a huge improvement over a nest of different cable types, half of which are custom. And it's easy to get into a position where all your USB-C cables differ only by max speed.
Which is worse because they all look sort of the same, but they are not the same.
It's even worse for non-techies, who don't understand what a gbps or a watt is, and who will leave a 1-star review, or worse, trash their cable, because their cable was "slow" but was meant for 240W PD but only supported USB 2.0. They purchased it initially because it had 5 stars.
Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
The situation in the early 2000s is I could spot the cable I needed from a mile away.
Just about every data cable standard has different speed capabilities on a per-cable basis. Ethernet, HDMI, and displayport have the same issue and usually with even worse labeling.
> Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
That requires they never increase the speed again. Seems like a bad starting point.
And most people will accept the tradeoff of different cable speeds when it means long charging cables can be 10x cheaper. The problem is when manufacturers choose to use bad labels.
And if you push people off USB they're going to use 27 different kinds of cable and you won't be able to spot which generic black wire you need from across the room.
Also, if we pretend they set the max speed in stone in 2013, it's easy to get yourself a full set of 240W 10Gbps-per-lane do-everything cables in every length from 0 to 2.5 meters. $25 isn't an amazing price but sticking with passive cables keeps you out of the real nasty prices.
USB 2.0 cables can be thinner, more flexible, longer, and cheaper. You could decide to only ever use thunderbolt cables for everything, but you'd be paying $40-$100 for a cable as thick as a mains power cord and doesn't offer any benefit at all to charging your phone.
We need better labeling rather than making every single USB cable a 40gbit thunderbolt cable.
I have some Thunderbolt cables that are like $80 apiece because they're like 3 meters long. I have like five or six of them because each one only carries one video signal.
(I used Thunderbolt so that touch and pen inputs could go over the one cable. These days though I just use a MacBook Pro, and hook up a capture card when I need to access the Windows)
The apple usb c charging cable is like $30, it is well worth the money of you are into software defined radio I can report. Not sure what magic they pulled of, but all the tricks in the book it seems!
If you're buying a cable for a specific device in a specific circumstance than by all means get the cable that meets that. Then it's not a problem about "what is its functional support", it doesn't matter, that's your mouse cable that you use for your mouse on that desk. That's the monitor cable you use to plug things into that monitor. That's the dock cable you use to plug things into the dock.
For all the cables that are your flex carrying around places where you don't know how it'll be used tomorrow, get a good cable and you won't have any issues.
Yeah? I use a $15 cable for my mouse. And then when my mouse is done charging I put the cable back in the bag with my portable monitor, which the same cable also works for.
> encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables
One of the main advantages of a single standardized plug is reducing e-waste. This just sounds irresponsible. Having a single tool that covers every possible use case is rarely a good solution.
Device makers need to stop including these garbage 4 cm A to C cables. I have enough USB cables and bricks to last my whole life. I don't need to collect a million more spec violating ones in a drawer I will never use.
Things are shifting though. Ikea ships their USB-C stuff without cables now.
I have two different fast charging cables, for two different devices that charge fast with those cables, on those cables, but not if you swap them around. Thankfully they have different colors, so there's some hope of keeping track of which cable to use for which device.
Sure there is. Buy reputable brands from reputable marketplaces that clearly state the specs, and if you get products from them that don't comply stop buying from them.
on 0401 5k resistor is fractions of a penny. its just silly at this point. My belief is that they all used some crappy reference schematic which omitted it once upon a time, and that's proliferated amongst all the cheapo designs.
> Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge
You can fix that by buying USB-C to USB-C adapters with 5.1 kiloohm resistors.
It should have taken the manufacturer less than one cent to include the resistors, but as a consumer product they will unfortunately cost at least a dollar each.
Buy yourself a handful of good cable for charging. (I quite like the silicone anker 643) And throw everything else away in a box.
For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.
Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.
> I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside.
Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.
USB-IF actually does have pretty clear labeling and standards that address most of the issues being posted in this thread. But most USB devices and cables are not certified and not compliant with the specs.
Short of making USB proprietary and behind a licensing and certification scheme there is no way to solve this. People need to stop buying cheap junk.
I read about this so often, yet it's a problem I just never encountered. If I need super high bandwidth like connecting a display, I pick one of those annoyingly unlflexible fat cables. Easy. They even tend to feature the TB4 flash icon. Surely I would not expect any of the light and nimble ones to do that trick. When I need strong PD, it's also either one of those or one of the far more flexible but still quite thick braided ones. Often they have some hinge gimmick connector to prevent any hope for bandwidth one might be tempted to have. All other cables, I expect nothing but legacy USB. Yeah, and some of those won't do data at all (curiosly those are never the lightest cables in my stable, the lightest ones tend to do the legacy USB "gear not, some bits will eventually get through!" just fine)
I wish there are easy ways to figure out the maximum current and wattage supported by a cable. So many cables don't label themselves except on the box!
Note there is a link at the end of the article to a device which can test cables and determine exactly that! But it's a sign of the problem that you need that thing.
With USB-C cables I tend to throw them out unless they are premium cables that cost upwards of $20, I mean I could keep the cheap ones around to charge this or that but cheap cables have this way of going bad, like they are supposed to work if you plug them in either way except they don't, you plug your cheap device in overnight to charge and it doesn't really charge, etc. No way I could trust my wife to handle it.
Personally I think USB got worse in a lot of ways in the 3.0 generation, like at 1.0 they designed a bus architecture that could enumerate 127 devices on a root hub. USB 3.0 doesn't promise anything and ff you start plugging in hubs to your laptop you will hit undocumented limits and find devices start dropping out randomly when you've plugged in several devices and it gives me the heebie jeebies because a mass storage device could drop out. I know mainstream filesytems today are pretty durable but still...
Even the simplest 3-wire cable with nothing but wires in it will handle 45W charging already, which is enough to power my laptop. It needs to be physically broken to not work. If it doesn't, it's usually the device's fault. There are many cheap devices out there that are just USB-C-shaped and don't actually implement the spec, working with some kinds of cables and not working with others.
Personally I have stopped buying cables that do not disclose this information. There are pretty fine alternatives that do, so I see no reason to take gambles.
My only issues so far come from charging protocols rather than cables anyway.
Moreover, stuff like how many watts a cable supports are issues that happen regardless connector type.
Not saying this device is not cool, but one can also get this info easily in a computer, if you find out what to look for. One had presented a utility here some time ago with a menu bar icon showing this information
These PD testers are cool (I thought about buying one), but honestly, for the price of a tester, one can buy 2, maybe even 3 good quality cables and just throw away the rest.
Fair point, I just have oodles of cables (literally 10-20+ per combo of micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C <-> micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C each) and I like having them all organized by capability so that when I need one I can grab from right bin.
Before getting the tester I just kept buying new "known good" cables whenever I needed one since my cable drawer was just a huge unknown.
> Reads eMarker chip parameters in Type-C cables, providing detailed performance information (e.g., maximum current, voltage, data transfer rates) to help users fully understand cable capabilities and ensure safe, efficient device usage.
This is an acceptable failure mode. I'd be nice if there was a standardized LED flash or color that you could get so if your relative said something isn't working, you could ask, "Is it flashing three times?" or whatever.
The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
> The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
I remember my parents had a D-Link ADSL modem and a D-Link router. They even stacked onto of each other with rubber feet! They had identical-looking power bricks, with the same barrel plug.
And then you go someplace, realize you left your charger at home, and find out despite your friend having dozens of barrel type power connector power adapters not a single one match the size/voltage/amperage/polarity of your device.
Or you just borrow their USB-C adapter and don't have any worries.
The thickness / durability of the cable is a pretty good indicator, if it's thin and flexible it'll only do basic charging if it's thick and durable it's because it's packing enough wiring to do power delivery, video etc, everything except probably Thunderbolt.
Usually they won't charge because they're not actually USB-C devices but are just broken and only pretend to be one (mostly due to missing resistors on CC lines, but there are other ways a device can be non-compliant too).
Yeah I have some devices that expect the manufacturer charger (I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something) and I'm not even sure what was the point in giving it a USB C connector.
I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expecting 5V, there's a healthy chance it'll .. stop expecting 5V.
We blame usb-c for all this, but it does feel like some mffrs are going out of their way to screw it up.
Imagine if all USB-C cables had a patent owned by the consortium and an identification chip made by the consortium. The spec could require that devices would not use the cable at all unless the chip is cryptographically verified, and bad cable manufacturers could be sued into oblivion for breaking the patent.
The more I age, and the more I expect my devices to justwork™, the more I appreciate Apple’s pro consumer monopolistic moves.
This kind of defect is extremely rare since this would basically be a USB killer frying every other device you plug it in to. 99% of the time it's the device is missing some resistors on the cc pins which signal to the charger to send 5v. Since usb-c it defaults to 0v until you request something. But USB-A has no CC pins so it just puts 5v out at all times.
Yeah maybe USB-D will get it right. But probably not. I had such high hopes for USB-C. Now I keep a couple USB-C to USB-A adapters lying around to force the charger (which is just a normal home outlet with a couple built-in USB-C ports) to speak old school USB-A charging instead of trying to negotiate PD with a shitty device that did not implement USB-C correctly.
Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.
It's not a flexible specification, its straight up bad engineering. The specification literally says if you do not want negotiation, you must add the resistor.
Unfortunately the EU has written USB-C into law, so there will never be a USB-D. I guess we should be glad they didn’t do this 30 years ago, or we’d still be using PS/2 connectors.
> And yes, USB as main connection standard was driven by Apple. But USB as main charging standard was set by the EU.
Hard disagree. Yes, they were quick to say that if you want to connect a device to their computers, you'd better be prepared for it to be USB. But their computer market share simply wasn't there to drive anything. More of a "lead by example" deal.
With phones OTOH, they COULD have driven it, but in the end they had to be whipped by Brussels to adopt standard USB(c).
I would like the USB-C connector was more durable. I've literally never killed a USB-A connector, but enough lateral force and USB-C just breaks. I suppose it was made so small due to mobile devices, which is understandable, but came with tradeoffs.
Try the relatively recent Anker Prime cables, the ones that are both braided and soft. I haven't managed to break one yet, despite breaking several past Anker cables that also claimed to be durable.
I don't have a problem with USB C cables, and even if I did it wouldn't be a big deal. The cables are cheap compared to the devices they charge. It is broken USB-C ports that frustrate me about them, or ones with worn out clips.
What way are you breaking them? The two failure modes I've seen are the port getting full of pocket lint for phones (easy to fix) and the port ripping off the PCB. The second one is a design issue where some ports are entirely surface mount rather than having the grounding pins go through the pcb to anchor it on.
Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)
Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.
I agree. Lightning is such a better connector and one of the main reasons I still haven't replaced my phone. If lightning could've just been updated for higher bitrates it would have been so much better.
I went through lightning cables fast. Unsure why, maybe I sweat a lot, or keep my phone in humid places.
But every so many months I had to replace the cable because the 4th pin would be burned.
I don't have that issue with USB-C. But I do feel that the lightning receiver is less fragile over the USB-C one. Removing lint from a USB-C receiver is harder.
There was also a separate issue. Apple until recently had always used this type of plastic that easily degrades and certain peoples skin oil (mine included) causes the plastic to just dissolve. Turns yellow then brittle and then just comes apart. But that's not really related to lightning.
I would happily be a USB-C enjoyer if manufactures stopped forgetting the stupid CC resistors meaning that you device will not charge with a C-to-C cable.
It should be considered a defective design and recalled, I have been burned several times by this.
I used to think of myself as one as well but that's changing as of late.
Looking back 15 years or so, I remember the old ThinkPad and Dell Latitude/Precision docking stations functioned reliably for as long as I can remember.
Today I have a variety of USB-C and thunderbolt 3/4 docking stations, all of which have been affected by various issues. The the manufacturers of these things don't care.
The latest casualty is a Pluggable TBT4-UDZ, which randomly decided one day that I should only have one working monitor instead of two. Doesn't matter if I use Windows, Mac or Linux. Meanwhile, the same monitors & cables work fine with my desktop.
I appreciate USB-C as a means to charge my stuff, but from now on, I'm going to try and use other ports and cables for everything else. Every laptop's settings will assume only the main screen will ever be used. I've no time to get used to a nice multi-monitor setup just to have it taken away when the USB-C dock starts acting up.
The USB-C and Thunderbolt docks are annoying! It basically boils down to the fact that they come in two variants, with and without Displaylink.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on your port configuration, number of monitors and OS (the Displaylink docks require drive installation).
FWIW, on Linux, the best choice for me was a non-Displaylink one from Lenovo.
I've always been a thinkpad fan but their docks were clunky huge uncomfortable things for me.
I had a hp nc2400 that had a very nice little dock where you'd set the laptop on top of two guide poles an then slide the dock connector in from the side. A very compact design.
The thinkpad docks just always used so much space on my desk.
I've done a decent amount of traveling - honestly the most important thing has always just been to have stuff that works. Charging things has rarely been an issue. A few extra cables in the luggage is not a big deal.
Terrence's issue here is that he is over complicating things:
- Toothbrush - Just take a non-battery toothbrush, it's perfectly fine and will not break down or need charging.
- Tracker - I'm doubtful you will get it back in most countries. Always keep the essentials such as phone, wallet and passport on your physical person where possible.
- Bug Bite Zapper - Do as the locals do, they too don't want to be swamped with insects.
+1 on the toothbrush. It's how I use up all the non-electric toothbrushes I get at the dentist (who always tells me to use an electric toothbrush).
The only thing that perpetually annoys me for charging is the Apple Watch, which requires the dumb little puck charger and doesn't have enough battery life to make it even one extra day without being charged. I wish it had gotten the inelegant "flip it over a shove a cable in" like the Magic Mouse did.
I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max and I don’t want to get rid of it or anything, but I am kind of looking forward to the glorious day that it breaks. Once it breaks, any phone I get (iPhone or Android) will have USB-C, along with my laptop, with One Adapter To Rule Them All when I travel.
That’s the dream, anyway. Life rarely works out quite that cleanly for me.
I’m a cold-dead-hands 13 Mini owner, but even I’ll admit to the temptation of replacing the last device I have that doesn’t use USB-C with something that does.
When my wife finally upgraded her iphone to one that uses the usb-c, finally the last non-usb-c device in the house was gone. It has drastically simplified our lives. Each car only has a single usb-c cable now and that's enough for long road trips even. We got a set of Anker cables ~5 years ago and they still haven't worn out yet
My Kindle Oasis might be the last micro usb device I own. I always said I’d buy the usb-c version the day they released one. Instead they discontinued it :(
So many kids toys use custom brick chargers, especially remote control cars. I refuse to buy anything that isn't USB-C, I'm not keeping track of all of those.
I think that's changing too, my son got some cheap radio controlled boat a few weeks ago, the remote uses AA and the boat has USB-C as input (interestingly enough, it has a weird USB-C cable with a built in light to signal when charging is done).
I recently bought a very cheap RC car for my kids, and it was USB-C rechargeable but instead of having a port it just has a USB-C cable that comes out of it and plugs into a power brick. I love that.
The USB-C idea is great, but the port design is not. If you search with the keyword "USB-C" and "tugged", you'll find a lot of horror stories ranging from bent socket/connectors to fried systems.
I really like the idea of single port all capable, but the current design of USB-C port is just not up for the task. At least you need a port design that is fail-safe, not fail-dead, to do this job.
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Fairly high. Nitpick time: The Gameboy Color[0] took a standard-size battery that you can still buy today. It did not need to be charged, but you did have to turn the system off to swap batteries unless you had a barrel-jack adapter.
Barrel-jack DC wasn't quite standard, but you might be able to find something compatible if you went to an electronics supply store and paid careful attention to the listed input voltage and polarity on the device. Regardless, most people didn't bother tethering their Gameboy and just fed it batteries since it ran forever on them.
The real proprietary hellhole started with the Gameboy Advance SP, and didn't end until the Switch used Type-C. Hell, the SP is basically a modern smartphone:
1. Proprietary form-fitting battery pack
2. Custom power input connector
3. No separate headphone output
Bonus points: the headphone adapter Nintendo sold for the SP didn't have a power pass-through, so you had to choose between headphones or charging. Though there are third-party ones now that do both headphone output and USB-C power input.
To add insult to the injury, the charging port of Nintendo DS Lite was almost mini-USB, but not quite - with enough force and some metal bending it was apparently possible to make it work with regular mini-USB cable. Absolutely idiotic design, especially since that port was just 5V input anyway, anyone with soldering iron could tweak USB-A cable to work with the proprietary charging connector.
This is a rather stupid to rave about, but I was in amsterdam several months ago, and I forgot to bring my NA to EU plug adapter. I was a bit miffed having to buy a new travel charger, but it's become the best one I own. (Only because all the other chargers I own were spawned into existence around me/came with some device)
65watts isn't even that much, but its enough that I don't need:
- the mac charger that's always connected to the magsafe cable I can't use with anything else,
- the dinky iPhone brick with the cable that needs USB-C on both ends,
- and the slightly less dinky pocketbook e-reader charger with the cable that needs USB-A on the brick-end and micro USB on the business-end.
2x 65 watt USB-C ports and 1x USB-A running at whatever anemic power USB-A is capable of pitfully spitting at my ancient e-reader without drawing the ire of UL or something (5v/500ma still?), perfection.
You should go purpose-buy a charging brick, anything is better than the freebie ones you get with stuff.
I'm the same. Though I still think they could have made USB much neater as a protocol, USB-C now does everything I need for goto-connectivity.
I recently looked at the connector and reflected on how insanely small it is. It's no wonder it took decades to get to this point, and it's a very neat physical design at a great price. 16 pins and 10A in that little thing. Amazing.
It took that long because nothing it does now was ever a requirement. It was created as serial/parallel port replacement (fun fact - max speed parallel port is faster than USB 1.1, at ~2.5MB/s).
If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.
Sort of. USB-C cables have an emarker chip inside them which reports the capabilities of the cable. The USB controller on your laptop reads this chip and makes use of the info, but as of today there is no standardized way for the controller chip to pass this info up to the OS. I assume most of them don't even provide an interface at all for the OS to request it.
I vaguely recall someone from Google working on this issue for Chromebooks. I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this since they control the OS and hardware. For now you can buy tester devices which read the emarker info and show it on a small display. There's also more advanced testers which test the actual signal integrity and error rates, but these are very expensive and made for the cable manufacturers.
There's also the issue that most USB cables are cheap junk that either is non compliant, or actively lying about it's capabilities. Which is hard to solve since anyone can sell USB cables without needing to pass testing.
I have made my peace with the fact that, unless I'm willing to replace otherwise perfectly functional items just to change the port, USB-C nirvana is a long way away at our house.
The Lightning holdouts:
* My wife and I both still have Lightning phones with plenty of life left in them. My 14Pro was actually replaced under AppleCare not quite a year ago, so it's nearly new!
* I have two sets of headphones that are Lightning: Airpods Pro and Max. Both still have great battery life despite years of use. If either failed tomorrow, I'd buy a new example, but I'm not spending that money without good reason.
* I have a full suite of Apple desktop peripherals (trackpad, mouse, and keyboard) that I swap in from time to time for variety. Like most Apple kit, they're all very well made and will last a long time -- and all charge by Lightning.
MicroUSB holds on, too:
* The battery charger for my bicycle's derailleurs is MicroUSB -- and SRAM still isn't selling a USB-C version, which is crazy. I could by an aftermarket one, but why?
* Likewise, the charger for my camera batteries is Micro.
* My bicycle headlight and taillight are both Micro.
* We have two Kindles that are both Micro.
All these things work just fine. The MicroUSB stuff is less annoying, since most of those things don't need to travel, but the Lightning holdouts are the ironic downside to Apple's generally high level of hardware quality.
I'm reminded of one my favorite south park bits, where Cartman freezes himself to wake up in a future that has a nintendo wii, only to discover the technology of that time doesn't support the plug-in format for the wii.
I agree with using a single ubiquitous power standard for small electronics and electrics. That’s almost what USB-C is these days. We need better labelling of cable capacities when there are 20w and 120w cables that at a glance look the same.
I was afraid this article was going to say one connector for everything when it said maximalist. If it had said to kill eSATA, SPF+, RJ-45, DisplayPort, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and a bunch of other ports it would have been far more controversial. I’ve seen people saying we don’t need card formats anymore because everything can just be an external USB-C flash drive. I’m glad this article wasn’t that maximalist.
For many things, though, a barrel jack is sufficient and doesn’t require the additional cost and complexity of USB-C. Barrel jacks have their own problems (is it inner positive or negative, what current is required, what’s the diameter of the inner and outer rings), but after that it’s as simple as it gets, both electrically and mechanically.
The USB spec does have labeling standards that are pretty clear. But uncertified temu junk obviously doesn't use them. There shouldn't even be such a thing as a 20w cable, the minimum with no emarker chip is 60w.
I think my only big complaint with USB C these days is that the sockets wear out quickly.
The charging port on my motorola phone got so loose that I frequently end up with an uncharged phone after a full night of "charging", just because the cable's own weight keeps yanking it out of the phone. The phone is not even 3 years old.
It would be nice to get a user replaceable USB port. Meanwhile, I'm not sure if those magnetic USB cables help this situation any bit or they further damage the port.
Have you checked the port for lint? I have found those disposable flossing sticks are an excellently sized, non-conductive edge of plastic you can use to dig in there and remove the bits preventing the cable from getting a good connection.
Are you sure it's not the cable? Theoretically, USB-C is designed in a way to prevent this exact thing from happening, where the springs that help retain the cable are in the _cable_, not the device.
(This is a frequently toted-out argument about USB-C superiority over Lightning.)
I recently ran into a problem with a device I bought online. It was refusing to charge and I thought it was dead. I contacted the manufacturer and they suggested the charging brick I was using was too powerful and to use a weaker one. Sure enough, a weaker one worked just fine.
So if you only bring a single power bank on a trip, make sure it can power all of your devices, especially if some of them are by third-party unknown manufacturers.
> But the benefits far outweigh the glitches. Using my USB-C cable tester, I can be sure all the cables I have can deliver the amount of power my devices need.
You can't be saying the first with a straight face if you then type the second about a specialized hardware testing device that no average consumer will ever use
Sure you can, the fancy tester is just geekery at this point. Any cheap Amazon Basics cable from the last few years will do 100w PD just fine.
The average consumer is never going to find most of the weird configurations that cause problems with USB-C cables (i.e. shit like wanting DP-altmode at 4K120hz over the same cable you are running 100w PD)
If you're so out of touch with the average consumer experience, read comments to this post (e.g. a charger turned out to be too powerful for the device/cable, wasn't there supposed to be negotiation baked in?) or any other popular post about usb-c
I don't know what to tell you man, I manage (and/or help manage) hundreds of USB-C devices, across work, family and friends, all using cheap cables and a random mix of cheap charger bricks and MacBook chargers. Apart from one charger brick that caught fire randomly, I haven't seen an issue in years.
Yes, but some cheap USB-C devices only charge when the other end is USB-A.
This is not to spec, and to my knowledge this was a cost-cutting measure done by Chinese companies to cheapen manufacturing costs.
So for that reason I CANNOT simply rely on USB-C, I also have to have a USB-C-to-A converter and a USB-A-to-C cable, which is of course ridiculous. Thanks, China.
The "cost" they're cutting of course being 2 simple resistors, that cost absolutely nothing. So less of a executive decision and more a case of whoever designed the board didn't do a quick google search to figure out how the connector works.
Resistor cost is irrelevant. It's way more likely the device was updated from micro-usb to usb-c by the most junior person and it was missed. Then, any change carries some cost so that design is not changed later.
This year I grudgingly switched from an iPhone 13 Mini to a Pixel 10, largely to get the full integrated Pebble experience, but having USB-C has been a surprising and delightful upgrade to my home/travel experience.
For sources, I basically have an INUI battery bank and a 100W wall adapter, then everything is a USB-C sink: Lenovo X1, Pixel 10, Nintendo Switch, Sennheiser headphones
Had it not been Braun insisting not making a USB-C shaver I wouldn't have brought a Panasonic Lamdash Pro. But also thanks to that I discover Panasonic being better shaver overall.
The next phase I wish hotels all around the world provide USB-C Port by default with a few high power port of 60W Plus.
My ONLY problem with it is it's just a bit too small. That creates mechanical problems within the plug which are annoying. Plug it in and pull it out 1 too many times and eventually you get a loose connector cable that needs to be replaced.
Generally that's fine as all my chargers have replaceable cables, it's just an annoyance.
> Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?
There is already a robust market for chargers with a few connectors.
But I would like having a table with a plethora of sockets and cables available.
Lots of times, I come in and want to charge a bunch of things. Charge a few drone batteries + the controller. laptop, camera + camera batteries. charge things for a long drive, or a longer trip.
As to cables, sometimes I need USB-C, but there are lots of things that require other connectors like micro-usb, or a garmin watch. And sometimes cables go to other devices like wireless chargers.
> "What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?"
I usb-c modded my DSi a little while back and it's awesome. No worries about trying to find an out of date charger, just smash it in the same one my phone uses and it's fine. I used this one https://github.com/giltesa/Nintendo-DSi-USB-C-Mod and while the reassembly of the DSi was a nightmare, it works fine apart from that. Needed a bit of case modding with some side cutters though
Please, please, please: we NEED a magsafe version of USB C
Yes, you can buy adapters, but you end up w/device warts that don't work w/normal USB-C cords and my understanding that they are for the most part pretty dangerously out of spec
Magnetic coupling is an incredibly underutilized user experience tool
As much as it still pisses me off reading the Surface product head's comment that if you love USB-C then you love dongles -- while shipping a Mini DisplayPort connector -- I also think it's a waste that they didn't contribute their magnetic docking to the upstream spec.
We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")
> What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
Likely not, at least police won't care about location info. Theft is painful for many reasons, especially because most countries don't consider it "serious". And trying to find thieves yourself is a bad idea either.
Best advice is to be aware of your belongings at all times.
Yeah, but you need to know where to buy it, how to get it delivered etc. Getting a Gameboy Advance cable in Denmark is $18.5 and delivery might take a week or so.
Anyway, the exact charger for a GameBoy Colour doesn't exist as the GBC takes AA batteries and can't charge them even if you connect the power brick to it.
I think one thing that we have come to think as electronic consumers, or just consumers in general, is to expect the absolute best modern version of everything (plug, AI model, car...). I think it is pure conditioning and we forgot the simplicity and convenience of things just working even with apparent downsides relative to acme version. Could USB-C be better? Probably. Is just settling on a standard so you don't have to think about it preferable? I think so. Consider USB-C standardization as an expression of a specific system of values.
I love traveling with this Anker 160W charger, which has 3 USB-C ports.[0] I just found out about GaN technology last year and I can't believe it isn't more widespread. This one can charge two MacBook Pros and an iPhone at full speed.
I recently got the Anker 140W. I bought a MacBook, and apparently they come without a charger these days. So instead of buying an expensive Mac charger, I figured the widely recommended Anker 140W offers a lot more functionality for less money.
Yep, I gave up on them for now. One of my older laptops also needs a charger that has the third ground pin, lest the trackpad become laggy due to electrical joise. I couldn't find a compact gan charger with a three pin plug and the third actually being connected to ground.
I draw the line at cheap unbranded rechargeable toothbrush. I’d be too worried about fires with cheap cells. I’m happy to pay the premium for top brands for anything with lithium-ion batteries.
I go to Europe enough that I ditch the universal adapter and get a European ubs-c wall plug. A little more maximalist at home to store but more minimalist while traveling.
This USB-C toothbrush is something I've been looking for so I don't need to bring a special charger.
What would be even better is an electric toothbrush that doesn't contain a battery that would work with USB-PD plugged in. Why? Because I like putting my electric toothbrush in my checked bag because it's not essential, and technically you're not supposed to put lithium batteries in checked bags.
I too jumped on board with USB-C right away. Only downside is some hardware manufacturers use sloppy fitting USB ports. This was a major issue on my Touchbar Macbook Pro. Just slightly bumping the cable would lose sync with my dock.
I imagine whatever replaces USB-C in the future should fix this issue and make a more solid connection like USB-A. However USB-C could be the last wired interface as everything in the future will move to wireless.
Try a different cable and make sure the ports aren't full of rubbish. A good cable and clean port makes a fairly good connection with a solid click. Lot of time I've used a sewing needle to fish incredible amounts of pocket lint out of peoples phone ports and cables connect so much better.
I too love USB-C, though sadly my laptop only has two of those ports, and only one of them can do power delivery and display, so my only choices are between having a powered laptop with only the built-in display, or on battery with external display, or carrying an extra power brick..
My son plugged a cheap Switch controller into a cheap Switch charging block/dock to charge the controller. I don’t know who shot first but they’re all dead.
I love USB-C and I guess the device(s) weren’t to spec, but if it plugs, it ought to be safe. Kind of a surprising miss to be honest. Usually the cheap Amazon crap isn’t this bad.
What solution are you proposing though? As long as people can buy USB-C connectors on the open market, they're going to be able to create devices that horribly deviate from the spec in terrible ways. But it's better that they are available for people who do follow the spec in their designs, instead of, say, trying to tightly control parts availability.
A compliant device has quite a lot of protection against all sorts of faults (short to VBUS etc.) but if the device was non-compliant then all bets are off.
Who knows, the charger might have been so non-compliant that it could have somehow got mains onto the connector, which is potentially deadly so probably good if it's stopped working...
But at the end of the day you shouldn't judge a standard by dodgy and possibly dangerous electronics that completely fail to comply to that specification!
I thought Nintendo had designed a non-compliant USBC port on the Switch. The conspiracy theory was this was deliberate to strangle the third party accessory market.
The problem is just if you don't want to replace stuff that is not broken.
My BT in-ears charge with Micro USB, my 2 bike lights do, my flashlight does. The only downside of my Suunto watch is the proprietary charger cable (USB A on the other end)
I agree. I'm looking at replacing my braun series 7 shaver, and I'd love if the replacement product had usb-c.
what really gets me though is products that support usb-c and then don't support PD, so you end up charging at a glacial pace. The most upsetting incidence of this I've seen is a powerbank charging via usb-c but not supporting PD. So slow!
Meanwhile, that Xbox roughly needs 12 V at 7.5 A (let's say 90 W, but the internal supply is 165W) . So there is just no easy way to do it with USB-PD. Technically, you can make/buy some sort of USB-PD bench power supply to do this, but I'm unaware of anything on the market right now. One that I use (DPS-150) is limited to 5A output.
You're better off buying some chunky power bank (like Anker Solix) that has your regular wall plug outlets.
It's such a rare beast that I didn't include it. Here is what one of these looks like: https://frame.work/products/power-adapter-240w at that point you might as well just take an Xbox power supply. Also, still going to have the problem that Xbox takes 12V and USB-PD just does not provide more than 5A at any voltage.
Doesn't help that many market their power adapters as such, but when you look deeper, it's something like 2x75W + 3x50W + 4x10W.
As far as I could tell the cable is dumb. If you plug the cable into a regular USB-C socket (which I do not recommend) then the tip is +5V and the rest is ground.
In fact it's designed to plug into the plug marked "mobile" on the amp and the 3.5mm end goes into the line out of something else, providing AUX input, which is mixed straight through to the output of the amp (which is thankfully a regular 3.5mm headphone jack).
I guess they over-ordered USB-C sockets and decided to yolo it, or else for some reason only USB-C footprints fit into the space on the PCB. (But they still had to manufacture or were able to obtain these cursed cables ... it doesn't make a lot of sense.)
The tracking of your bag is great. But when it comes time for you to go retrieve it from the thief… how is that going to go? Are you going to wrestle with them?
Id check for transient suppress on the charger. I had a expensive powerbank that was charging be damaged ( as in no longer worked) by a power transient.
I'm still driven absolutely mad by how many devices are being released in 2026 that refuse to charge if they're connected to a port that negotiates USB Power Delivery. They don't fall back to 5V, they just don't charge at all.
Devices like this usually come with an A-to-C cable in the box and that's a warning sign, but an even more twisted version of this is when they come with a C-to-C cable and a Type C charger that does not support PD. That's the only combination they tested, and that's your problem now.
I now carry enough adapter cables that I can deliberately take PD out of the equation just to work around these devices.
The USB-C "hate" for the "one cable, much protocols and transports" you read on HN are just in the power-users bubble. For the rest of humanity, USB-C is a blessing with very few drawbacks, especially considering that the biggest usage by far is as a power cable. Data transport is a secondary usage that some people would probably never use in their lives.
The problem with many cheap USB-C devices is that they lack a required resistor on the USB-C pins, which means they won't charge from a compliant USB-C PD charger, only through a USB-A to USB-C cable.
It's idiotic that companies don't even test this properly and never read the specs, but here we are. Many cheap Chinese devices like toothbrushes will have this problem.
Similar things for video (tiny HDMI male adapter), and even my walkie-talkie (the Chinese market has come up with Motorola programming cable adapters that are just little dongles - https://www.ebay.com/itm/800104798120 - I can reprogram and even reload AES256 keys into my radio!).
PD triggers let my travel CPAP run off of battery (using a Transcend Micro - it only needs a 19V PD trigger and a solid 100W).
And of course... an Ecoflow solar hat and a battery I can shove in my back pocket for when I'm wandering around in the open air.
... and I just realized I can hook my Sony Reon Pocket cooler up to the solar hat...
Keep in mind that you can buy cables that are USB-C on one end and whatever on the other end. I have multiple USB-C to 12V barrel jack cables for this reason specifically. No idea because you still need a special cable, but better than nothing.
Trimmer: I purchased this from Amazon USA for $70 on sale, now listed at $96. I am happy with it, but haven't had it long enough to comment on durability: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H "Manscaped Beard Hedger Men's Premium Beard Trimmer, 20 Length Adjustable Blade Wheel, Stainless Steel T-Blade for Precision Facial Hair Trimming, Cordless Waterproof Wet/Dry Clipper"
I personally hate USB-C as it's a poorly designed connector. It's flimsy and can easily broken yet at the same time difficult to insert.
I've had a couple be broken by getting "squashed" because there's no mechanical support because of the rounded edges so the metal easily pancakes.
They also seem to be easily damaged such they stop connecting through a failure mechanism I haven't quite figured out (my macbook air no longer reliably connects to them).
Finally, the ports don't have reliable insertion and they're sharp, so they scratch up whatever device they're on as people repeatedly miss the insertion position resulting in surface scuffing. Phones especially should not be using them because of this issue and should be using something like lightning that did not have any sharp edges which avoided most scratching.
USB-C is great for charging, which is what most of these are. Especially if it's replacing Lightning which is the worst port of all time.
USB-C is not so great for PC peripherals because of how hard/pricey it is to get more of those ports and how unclear the capabilities are. That's why so many peripherals are still USB-A. Some keyboards even have USB-C input but come with an adapter to -A because they know that's how you're plugging it into your PC. Also have never had a reliable video dongle, so either the display has USB-C or it's gonna be annoying. So uh yeah HDMI is great on my MBP, please add a USB-A port too now.
I like the fact that we're aligning on one connector but it's hard for me to praise USB-C in and of itself. The connector feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not, and especially on lower-end devices.
The charging standards, voltages, and data rates, are frustrating because they're almost never labeled. This is especially true on low end, cables, and device devices. The worst offenders will only charge with a USB-A to C cable with low voltage, which is not what I hope for when I see a USB-C port on a device.
For video input or power supply? I doubt we would ever see it for power supply.
For video input it seems almost deliberate since the TV brands all benefit from licensing out HDMI and forcing it to be the only way to connect to a TV.
USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.
There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:
To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.
Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.
Except this isn't true. Different power delivery capabilities, different standards. Some can transfer data, some can transfer 4K, some support quick charge, others don't. I love USB C but different cable standards all looking identical is infuriating sometimes
USB-C connectors are so flimsy compared to USB-A, it feels like a real step backward. It barely takes any pressure on the cable to make my charging cable fall out, or to rotate it just enough that it loses connection.
Not to be that guy, but the USB-C specification requires an extraction force of 8–20 N for a new connector, measured on the sixth unplugging cycle after five conditioning cycles. After 10,000 insertion/removal cycles, the permitted range is 6–20 N.
Equivalent hanging mass:
8 N is 0.82 kg
20 N is 2.04 kg
So the problem you have is likely one of your manufacturer not producing equipment suitable to pass the USB-C spec.
As an aside, the specified extraction force for USB A is:
10 N minimum when new
8 N minimum after durability cycling
So pretty much the same, in some cases even less.
I don't have problems with USB-C connectors per se. I think HDMI is worse in terms of durability.
Are they? I can easily dangle my Phone of my USB-C cable. Maybe this is a regional problem. Within the EU I rarely ever had any mechanical problem with USB-C, where applied reasonably.
The cable will not just fall out. On my clean iphone I can hang the phone from the cable and lightly swing it around without it disconnecting. If it's just falling out it's because something is mechanically wrong or it's full of gunk.
It's been a joy to not need to bring 3 chargers along when I travel.
I think the only thing we're missing to make the USB-C experience perfect is cable labelling. It's unreasonable to make every cable perform to the max spec, but if we could standardise on some labelling or colours for cables that are charging-only, 480 mbit (usb 2 speed), 5 Gbit (usb 3 speed), 10 GB (usb 3.1 speed), 20 GB (usb 3.2 speed), plus whatever higher speeds (and I guess Thunderbolt too), then we'd be golden.
I like the cables I have, and by know I know what cables do what, but it ain't obvious without testing.
I scan the emarker on every USB C that comes into the house and add a p-touch label. I chuck out power-only and ultra baseline (60 W/USB 2 cables) with no marker or resistors.
Power-only cables could be handy when traveling as they are essentially a condom, but they can only charge slowly and I always have a better cable with me. I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Some cheaper devices I have (e.g. rechargeable LED light strip) _only_ charge via power-only cables. Was maddening when I realized I had thrown out all but one of the cables that can charge it.
More often than not these are usually cheap Chinese devices that are expecting a USB-C to USB-A (power-only) cable, because they're actually USB-A devices, with USB-A circuitry, modified slightly to appear as if they're USB-C.
Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.
They skipped out on literally 2 resistors. That's it, that's all that is required for real USB-C charging.
Yep. The two fucking resistors. All it takes 2 x 5.1K, and yet, somehow, people keep fucking it up.
It's not expensive or complex. It's just that somehow, no one thought to look up "how to add type c to your device" online, or ask an LLM, or put literally any effort into making sure the device works as it should.
Those two resistors cost money. It's not incompetence. It's a deliberate choice.
You're saving a fraction of a cent per device, while banking on customers not sending it back as defective because it didn't charge when they tried it with a random cable.
If it is a deliberate choice, it's a really, really dumb one.
Yup. Buy it, test it, post a review, return it. It's the only message you can send.
If it works (aka enough people buy it) it aint stupid
Could not disagree more.
Advertising is primarily about convincing is to buy things we don't need, don't want, or which are 'stupid' in some way.
Half empty plastic packaging, especially the sort where the company spent money to [re-]design it to deceive people - stupid. It should be illegal. Near ubiquitous.
One of my theories is that there is a deliberate choice happening by people who don't realize it is as simple as a couple of resistors and think they need some fancy PD negotiation chip.
Even over on r/usbchardware it is super common for people to conflate "PD" with this missing resistor issue. Part of the confusion is that the devices that people want to charge with are very likely to be PD power supplies.
It's because they take PCBs spec'ed for micro-usb and just replace the port with USB-C.
I've read countless stories of designs sent out getting backroom-cost-reduced by removing the most ridiculously cheap parts.
Out of interest, is that all that's required for the power negotiation handshake? I would have expected more complexity?
Just two resistors to say ‘I am a device, give me 5V’ - you only need more negotiation = a chip - to get more than 5V
Thanks!
Complexity is cost.
Some manufacturers don't want to do the power negotiation aspect which is the cause of this, I believe.
Not even power negotiation but a simple resistor would be too costly for them to implement.
Thankfully I’ve never encountered one. But I’ll check before discarding if I ever get a device that comes with one, thanks!
> I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Just get an USB data blocker. I bought one off the shelf at an airport for 10€. This is the "condom" you are talking about, just a small dongle. Then travel with a fully featured cable!
I also use it to charge my phone at my workplace on the docking stations (which would be a big no-no otherwise). I think our IT provides them on request too, I've seen them advertise it.
> This is the "condom" you are talking about, just a small dongle.
That only works when both sides speak proper USB-C PD and not "5V or some weird-ass proprietary stuff over D+/D-".
Someone shared this with me the other day. Haven't used it much yet but it seems like it will easily beat my previous strategy of plugging things in randomly and getting aggravated: https://www.whatcable.uk
HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
Even purchasing them is a nightmare these days because everything says ultra super duper fast supreme and then the fine print says it's actually just 3.0 (or doesn't say at all sometimes on online storefronts). Multiple time's I've found myself in the store flipping around the box like a rubics cube trying to find the little fine print that tells me if the cable is more expensive because it's gold plated snake oil or actually matches the higher spec I need.
Even then, I've had success with older HDMI and DP cables up to fairly high bandwidths. It's only on a longer cable and a 4K screen, as well as one 1440p screen that was just really picky for some reason, that I've had issues.
Meanwhile, the instant I want to transfer a non-trivial amount of bytes, USB 2 speeds come and make my life worse than it needs to be (or at least it did before I sat down, found decent speedy cables, bought them, and then put them in their dedicated spot for me to find the next time I need to transfer files).
Agreed on the purchase experience though. It was a pain to find decent cables, but at least it's possible to end up in a happy place.
The critical difference is that USB versions keep adding new wires and active components, while the display cables largely stick to tightening the analog signal integrity requirements. Whether an old HDMI cable works for a new display is largely a question of how high the data rate is for the new resolution and refresh rate, vs how much the manufacturer of the cable overshot their analog bandwidth target.
USB hasn't added any active components or wires for short cables since USB C's introduction (which added emarkers and an extra pair of superspeed lanes for full featured cables)
All of the improvements in passive C cables since then are exactly the same "analog signal integrity requirements". Heck, the most common protocol for sending a display signal over USB C is literally just "send a DisplayPort signal over the superspeed lanes".
Now, USB C cables are more likely to have active retimers or redrivers in them, but a lot of that is that the highest speed signals are well above the display side. Even UHBR20/DP80 from a signaling standpoint is mostly just good old 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 3 except with everything pointed outwards (so 80 gigabit unidirectional instead of 40 gigabit bidirectional)
No? Passive fully-featured USB-C cables had the same amount of wires and active components, which really is just the e-marker chip, since day one. The same 5 Gbps cable can now do 20 Gbps if the cable was made well enough.
Active cables are a different story of course, but that's the same for HDMI cables.
I was including USB history before USB-C, because HDMI and DisplayPort have been around much longer than USB-C. And limiting the discussion to "fully-featured USB-C cables" is ignoring most of the real problems.
And somehow just because the store says it's 48gpbs doesn't mean that's true either... I have a cable that is explicitly marked as 48gbps, 8k60, 4k120 compatible and yet it frequently ends up dropping the connection. Swapped to a different 48gbps cable and it works fine. Funny enough when I display the negotiated FRL speed it's only at like 27gbps, so should have plenty of headroom.
I think there are plenty of places that need to be up to spec and whose tolerances may add up.
I have a USB-C cable pretending to do 10 Gbps + 4K60 display port. I've used it to connect my HP laptops to my HP docking station. I have two similar laptops, 840 and 845 G8s, both with two USB-C ports each.
The 840 works as expected. The 845 only works if the cable is plugged in one specific way in one specific port. I now have a Lenovo laptop, also with two USB-C ports. I haven't tried DP-out with this computer, but Linux complains about there being issues when the dock is connected with this cable. On Windows, the whole USB stack sometimes goes foobar after a sleep/wake cycle. If, say, a mouse was initially connected, it'll keep working, but any new USB device won't, even the mouse if disconnected and reconnected. Shutting down Windows takes around 10 minutes and shows some driver issue at the end. Everything works after a reboot.
With a separate no-name docking station, everything works perfectly on the 845, but the 840 can't do 4k60 on it; it doesn't show up in the options. Haven't tried the Lenovo with this particular dock.
Both docks have DP alt mode, not DisplayLink or whatever other USB-attached GPU.
A huge problem for me, the only displayport 2.1a cable I’ve found that works for my RTX 5090 + 240hz uncompressed HDR 4K monitor came with the monitor. It’s amazing that it’s pushing around 80gbps through that wire and it’s an incredible visual experience.
Gods, this is giving me flashbacks. I had to find a usb-c to display port 1.4a cable for my Gsync Ultimate screen with 240hz. I tried out I think 10 different cables, before I found one that actually worked....
> HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
What if we just have different connectors for different specs? Then you'd know what supports what by what fits into the connection in the first place.
I have a box full of old SCSI cables that adapt between the various SCSI standards, it's pure hell. USB-C is a dream.
I used to have a box of SCSI cables and adapters, too. I could identify their function by sight, or even by feel if the sun got blotted out and the Earth was cooling and the only way to fix those problems was forming a correct-and-functional SCSI chain in the infinite darkness.
These days, ye olde parallel SCSI bus is gone. We have USB C, which is similar to SCSI in that the number of ways it can work is way more than 1. But because the connectors are all the same and the defacto labeling is awful, I can't necessarily identify the functions by sight or feel. If I have needs that extend very far beyond charging a phone and/or USB 2, then I don't know if any of the USB C cables that I find in a box will support those needs without testing them.
I don't think you even have to go that far back, just USB vs USB-Micro vs USB-Mini is sufficient and maybe more commonly annoyed by people, still today :)
There's no good reason to prevent anyone from using (say) a 1080p HDMI cable to connect a 1080p device to a 4K television, or using a 4K cable to connect a 4K device to a 1080p television.
that sounds terrible; HDMI/DP are backwards-compatible on purpose, you can use your fancy-shmancy modern output with a now-ancient display
[dead]
The problem is certification. I've had lots is USB cables over the years from cheap to expensive. The only ones that reliably did what was on the tin where the USB-IF certified ones.
At this point I have a switched pretty much everything to Club3d. They used to make GPUs but are now firmly connectors only. In the past 5 years no issues with any of the cables I bought from them.
Wasn't there a push at some point to enforce some sort of spec labeling for USB-C cables? Or was that a fantasy in my head?
That's what Thunderbolt 4 and 5 cables essentially are - USB-C cables with guarantees on speeds and PD power.
Arguably PCIe lanes the thunderbolt exposes are a differentiating factor, not the maxed-out specs that "plain" usb-c cables can have. Although to be fair, I've never used the PCIe lanes on thunderbolt ports.
USB3 has/had some color labeling standards, but I only remember seeing it with type A.
USB A cables and ports have the inner plastic piece color coded. White for USB 1, black for USB 2, blue for USB 3 (5 Gbit/s), teal for 3.1 (10 Gbit/s). Red or yellow for always-on
Blue is the only one that's actually endorsed by USB-IF. For the most part USB-IF would prefer if everyone just used their little icons. Luckily manufacturers have a bit more sense and all follow the same color scheme (apart from the occasional black sheep)
The last part is a bigger issue for me. I can use my usb to charge most of my tech but when it comes to the exact cable that my interface needs to use I now have like 30 cables I have to try before I know which one was the correct one.
My MacBook Air is plugged in via MagSafe at home but I'd consider traveling by air with just USB-C. Probably need to throw a hub in there at that point.
I went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.
Anything braided is almost always junk.
I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.
The high data rate cables all need to be stiffer. You can find good 100w or 240w charging cables with good flexibility, so that's a good reason to keep usb-2 data-speed but high-power charging cables.
The measure of a good high-power cable is the resistance. You can gauge it with a usb test load, typical usb power meter, and a usb-pd trigger (all can be pretty cheap, often you can find the trigger functionality combined with one of the other two). Calculate voltage drop for a given current by measuring both sides of the cable, or at least compare different cables with similar load.
But I found a "USB Cable Checker 2" by BitTradeOne which will directly measure and show the resistance in milli-ohms, very convenient! A very good cable measures 150 to 250 mOhm, the worse ones are 3 or 4 times that (at which point this device over-ranges around 1000 mOhm). You can really tell the difference with how some phones and laptops will slow their current draw after voltage droops.
Braided works fine? I have plenty of Ugreen and others from Amazon, what matters is what's inside.
True, braided has absolutely nothing to do with the specs of the cable, but braided "feels" higher quality, so I suspect quite a few manufacturers think they can skimp on the cable quality because of that.
It doesn't just feel like high quality... a lot of bending results in fewer cable replacements necessary, usually.
The labeling is already standard, but since it's an awful standard, we aren't golden
Why not buy only 100W power and data cables?
I did that. I regret it. All of my cables are thick and have a large bend radius.
That would be USB4 cables. They do have the problem of being awkwardly thick and stiff if you're using them for a lot of things.
That tells me my 100W cables must be around half that power then! I have no thick tables other than the USB (Thunderbolt?) one from the Dell dock.
And then there are the crappy devices that aren't compliant with USB PD and only charge with a USB-C to USB-A cable.
My thin ones are crap but convenient, thick ones are good but... thick. Gets me by without much effort.
Thickness, and also cost.
Cost, really? A 2m USB4 cable from Belkin is $20 (eg INZ004bt2MBK). You don't save much going to 4 ft, sadly.
I find their cables to be pretty good (the TB5/USB4). They're certainly cheaper than Apple's. They have a soft rubber coating (not quite silicone) and a good bend radius. Compare to the super-stiff (but good) cables that Dell provide with their monitors.
Cost, really.
I buy USB C cables cheap. The last batch were Anker B8752, came in packs of 2, were bought online as clearance items from Menards. They were delivered for free to the store that I drive past twice on most days. They work fine; no complaints.
With tax, the individual cables were $0.55 each. I can afford to stock up on cables at that price, use them whimsically, cut them up for projects, and give them away to anyone when that seems useful. I don't miss them when they get lost; I just get another one. I don't have to decide between buying a decent dinner or traveling with spares; I can just toss some into my bag.
Meanwhile: I can't afford to do those things with cables that are $20 each. That's a vastly different value proposition. If I had $20 USB C cables instead, I'd guard them the same as I do the twenty-dollar bills in my wallet.
Arguably these are different use cases. Cheap fast-charge cables are usually limited to full speed only (linked ones included). For that reason they don’t meet my criteria, as you can’t interchange the charging cable for a data transfer cable.
I’m not advocating using USB4 cable for everything, but I also don’t want to bother testing cables when I can buy a reliably good one for twenty bucks. I’m sure a cheaper equivalent exists.
I hate every part of the concept of testing cables to find ones that work for [insert purpose].
But I love the liberty to use inexpensive not-quite-universal cables with great freedom more than I hate the former.
So since I need a bunch of USB C cables in my life, and I love using them freely, then I'm left with the following optimization: Special cables for special purposes, cheap cables for everything else, and testing them when necessary.
It's not perfect, but pragmatism seldom is. :)
USB-C maximalism is great for travel. I personally recommend travelling with a USB-C desktop charger, but use one that accepts a IEC C7 ("figure-8") cable. Then, travel with only the cable corresponding to your destination (or buy one when you get there). That avoids having a wall wart that might not fit in narrow spaces, or whose weight might make it fall out of older sockets.
I wrote about it a few years ago; the post does not have affiliate links: http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2024/10/06/travel_tip_us...
If you’ve got one of the older style Mac chargers, the part which plugs into the wall physically separates from the rest of the charger. You can connect different plugs for all the different countries. There is a plastic seam where the charger separates. It’s easy to miss.
I’ve slowly acquired all the global adaptors for Mac chargers. I just bring a usbc Mac charger when I travel with the destination country plug attached.
I wish Apple made gan chargers though. Those look great
Those Apple chargers in fact use the C7/C8 connector to interface the plug adapter, so you can skip their official parts and use any compatible cord.
I for years used a power cable from an Xbox with my old Magsafe1-era Macbooks.
Huh I was going to say you may be talking about a differen thing, but I checked and they actually are C7/C8: https://ptcomputers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/without-power-...
So in this universe Apple doesn't invent its own standards...
You might or might not be very surprised to learn they recently abandoned the C7/C8 https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/02/apple-140w-power-adapte...
Even the MacRumors commenters who are generally cheerleaders are scratching their heads about this one. And so do I.
Unless, as purplefox speculates:
> My guess is that's a fake one.
I've seen fake Apple chargers in local shops recently, with complete Apple packaging, "made by Apple in California" etc. and only detectable by close inspection of the details, specs not matching any Apple product, device info reported electronically that doesn't match any Apple specs, and the tiny inset writing not making sense when looked at under magnification. So that sounds plausible to me.
There is a detailed teardown here: https://www.chargerlab.com/teardown-of-apple-140w-usb-c-powe...
And a discussion here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256262949?sortBy=rank
And you will notice that the regular power adapter cable is not compatible with the new 140W charger: https://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/mw2n3x/a/power-adapter...
If you do that, you're losing grounding, which will result in the machine having that AC leakage buzz when you touch it. The chrome lug that the plug nub slides onto is a ground connection, and the Apple official cords and some country-specific nubs implement the ground brush connector. There is (was?) a third-party Schuko (not Europlug) nub.
Those power supplies often shipped with both a full cord input which was grounded but also a folding two-prong component that made it in to a wall wart and of course was not grounded.
The issue with a generic cord is that it won't connect the earth pin on those chargers.
But it does work in a pinch.
> The issue with a generic cord is that it won't connect the earth pin on those chargers.
Nor does the two-prong "wall wart mode" tip many of them shipped with. The ground was only connected on the extended cord attachment.
Same here, I used a black power cord from an old stereo.
At some point my older Mac charger that I was using for traveling died, so as a replacement I got a few of these styles of adapters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YS7QHM9 (not the exact one I have - but you get the idea). I pair it with one of these: https://www.anker.com/products/a2687-anker-prime-charger-160... which is tiny for the amount of power it can output, which has been enough to cover both me and my wife while we travel. Many US plug chargers allow their pins to fold in, including this one, which makes for a fantastically compact setup when paired with that style of adapter.
Depending on where we are going and what we are doing, I also bring this thing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YDPB8RZ which is kind of an extension cord + USB charger + all-in-one converter as well. The plug is at a right angle and very flat, so it can fit behind furniture and such that straight cables can't.
I do this too, the recent MacBook chargers have 2 usb-c and I have 4 of the plug parts that adapt it. Very minimalist but for short trips with single charger it is great
This might if you’re from the US as I’ve collected the ends over time, but I’ve never seen them for sale except the US one: AC Power Adapter Wall Folding Plug Duck Head,US Standard Plug Duck Head Compatible with MaBook Pro Air/Maci Book/Phone/Pod Power Adapter Brick
> I’ve never seen them for sale except the US one
Apple - at least used to - sell an international plug pack if you’re missing some. I can’t even remember where I got some of my plugs. They’ve been doing this for decades, and the international plugs are still compatible.
It’s been years since, but I bought on Amazon a bag of 8 different ends that work everywhere in the world.
It wasn’t from Apple, but it’s basically a plastic shape and 2 or 3 (depending on end) metal parts - it’s hard to get wrong, and easy to test before use.
New 70W Apple charger is GaN (and much smaller than the old 67W one) FWIW, it's a shame it is single port, though.
Older style? It’s still the case for the charger that came with my M4 MacBook Air.
I think your suggestion and also the author's are too big for my taste. I carry a US-style 45W GaN charger, a couple of usb-c cables, and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to). I carry this daily and for travel even though I live in Europe as this combination is the same size as the EU version of my charger by itself.
For devices I have a work laptop, work phone, personal laptop, personal phone, headphones, usually a couple other small devices, and a mobile battery. I usually only heavily use my work laptop and personal phone. For phones and smaller stuff, I can charge them from the laptop while the laptop charges overnight so I don't typically wish for a second charger. If your laptop has decent battery life, charging at less than max speed is no big deal (I have two 16 inch MacBook Pros).
Additionally, I've converted most of my old favourite micro-usb devices like mouses to usb-c. A search for "usb-c 4.7kohm 5v female" will give you some options for replacing micro-usb with usb-c, with hobbyist soldering skills.
For a beard trimmer, I got an Enchen boost usb-c model for $10 for travel. It works well and even has ceramic blades but I had to add 4.7k resistors to work with a c-c cable[1].
[1] Cheap devices often omit some 4.7k resistors that tell a usb-c charger to output 5V, so it outputs nothing. This is why some devices work only with usb a to c cables, as usb-a outputs 5V by default. If you can manage to add the resistors to the correct pins or replace the connector with one that has them built-in, you can fix this problem. The difficulty of doing this varies a lot by device.
> and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to).
What type of adapter is this? EU and UK plugs are very different.
I think they're describing how you can force the two pins of a europlug into a type-G socket, if you first stick a screwdriver or key or something into the earth pin to open the shutters.
This will give you access to electricity, but the contact area is much smaller than it's designed for (round pins in a rectangular hole), so using it for anything high wattage will end poorly.
An often overlooked part of the BSA spec for type-G sockets is they're supposed to have a flat surface surrounding the socket large enough to prevent you using the earth pin of an upside down plug to do this.
(Not recommended at home kids) use a key (or, safer, an upside down UK Earth pin) in the Earth hole to open the Live/Neutral shutter - then insert the EU prongs. The width of the EU prongs is handily the same as the UK holes.
Touring musicians do it if venues don’t have convertors.
Doesn’t work if the EU plug needs a live earth of course.
> It’s important that the charger accepts an IEC C7 cable. This is an international standard, so you’ll be able to find local mains cables at office supply stores or borrow them from nearby appliances, and it’s a two-pin design. Having a two-pin mains lead means you don’t have to worry about finding three-pin (earthed) power outlets in areas where they are not yet universal. It also means that an ultra-compact travel adapter like the Road Warrior can serve as a backup option if you don’t have a local cable.
An earthed-to-unearthed adapter (preferably with some alternate path to ground) seems like a better solution there than restricting oneself to C7 and its 2.5A max current. And when the ground prong is available in the outlet, it's often a useful mitigation against the looseness of worn-out sockets (since it adds another area of support).
> C7 and its 2.5A max current
If 250 W (in the absolute worst case, a 100 V .jp grid) is not enough for travel purposes, I have no idea what will satisfy your requirements.
I might need to power a lot of things simultaneously. I currently travel with a 6-port USB-C power adapter; while it doesn't blast max wattage over every single port (nor do I need it to quite yet), I'd be unsurprised if one that does eventually hits the market, at which point I'd be inclined to upgrade.
In any case, even for single-device power supplies, pretty much all of the 165W+ ones I have are grounded (either C5 or C13). This includes the one that came with my Framework 16 (which is my backup charger if I need to pack extra light or otherwise don't want/need that 6-port squid).
> USB-C maximalism is great for travel
It's honestly bliss when you get even close to it at home. I'm close, having only one Lightning device left (Apple TV remote) and a couple of USB-A and micro-USB devices I'll probably be stuck with for a while (avalanche pack, cat tracker, et cetera).
Yes! I've been doing this for years!
Figure-8 cable is usually easy to find in some old media player in someone's house.
That said usb-c chargers are quite ubiquitous now that you'll likely to find one anyway.
Also 6ft usb-c cables are very neat. IDK why Apple even ships that 3ft e-waste.
short, dumb one or two plug extension cords are great for travel. They're light on the wall side, so the travel adapter on that side generally stays in. Plus it's nice if you need a little extra reach occasionally
That sounds less janky than my solution: US wall wart charger -> 6ft extension cord -> international adapter.
(If you want to overvolt an extension cord, make sure it's completely passive: no light, switch, or surge protector.)
C7 is great advice.
But also pack a short length of cat5 twisted pair just in case. When all else fails, it allows to rig up most anything.
You should write up and publish your notes on how to fabricate connectors from cat5 wire, in the field. It would be a hit.
PoE maximalism would be interesting.
ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THIS BECAUSE IT IS INSANELY DANGEROUS buuuut...
... if you're hopelessly stuck without your cloverleaf charging cable you can kind of batter a figure-8 power lead over the phase and neutral pins, and you can probably find a figure-8 power lead more easily than a cloverleaf one.
Don't leave it unattended or where non-hackers can get at it.
Don't make a habit of it.
This will get you out of a hole.
My favorite DON'T DO THIS method is plugging European plug in UK socket - using something like scissors in earth to open shutters for neutral/live where EU plug actually fits pretty ok.
The other one is twisting US/JP plug pins so they fit AU/NZ sockets...
If it's one of those lovely old MK sockets like you used to get in the 70s/80s, then the earth pin doesn't open the shutter - it's opened by equal pressure on the phase and neutral pins. It takes a bit of jiggling to get the Euro plug to go in.
I keep both Schuko and UK kettle leads, cloverleaf leads, and figure-8 leads in my laptop bag, having been stuck before.
The best part is that you need to do this when you're on holiday, so all you've got are your keys, so you stab the keys into the slots and ever so carefully balance the round European plug contacts onto each key, and you pray to god that there's no earthquake and you don't cause a fire.
Or so I heard someone else do.
I have spent some time on this too.
I really wanted your approach to work and went down that pathway with this [1], but its one weakness if you have multiple destinations with multiple socket types. It's not uncommon that I have to go between countries with China/Aus, EU, India (kinda-sorta EU but not), and UK plugs. That's a lot of those C7 cables. Also, having 1-2m of cable lets you put the charger on a bedside table when the only wall socket is buried under the bed for some reason, so that adds up.
I then considered one with the swappable ends, like this [2], but the advantage of the cable is that you don't get the 'this room's only socket is against the desk and fuck you if you want to plug a big wall wart into it' problem, plus as above the cable lets the charger ports be much more easily accessible. Also, many models also only have US/EU/UK adapters, without covering e.g. CN/AU style plugs.
And at that point, you're basically using of those old-style universal adapters with the universal AC input and the sliders to change the output, especially given you can now get them with integrated 65W GaN USB ports [3], so why would you fiddle with attachments you could lose?
So then there's this [4] which is so close to my ideal but isn't quite there. It has the cable advantages, minimises additional swappable weight to get different socket types, and you can even put the adapters straight on the charger if you want to omit the cable. But then I read about abysmal reliability performance and I'd rather not burn down my hotel room in a third-world country. It does have the ends that I, personally, would like but with all of these you're at the mercy of them designing them for the specific wall socket types you need. And at least with this one, the UK one doesn't include a fuse as it's supposed to, whereas IEC C7 plugs do. Further burnination possibilities.
Really, if a reputable manufacturer made [4] but sank an extra ~50% product price into proper reliability and standards compliance, as well as making a whole plethora of swappable ends for all types of wall sockets that fit both the cable and directly onto the device, I'd probably buy it and never look again. I'd even accept a proprietary swappable end form factor with the vendor lock-in risks just because it's basically the utopian ideal of what I want.
But in the meantime, I'm back to using [1] with generic basic adapters for EU and CN/AU on the end of the UK IEC C7 cable. I'll build a collection of C7 cables for each destination and when I travel to only one I'll take the appropriate cable, but when it's multiple destinations I haven't found a better solution.
[1]: Ugreen Nexode 100W GaN 4-port charger: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B6MZYKTF?psc=1
[2]: Ugreen travel charger: https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-65W-Fast-Charger-Ports/dp/B0...
[3]: Any permutation of this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/MOMAX-Universal-Adapter-Internation...
[4]: SlimQ 100W Charger w/ extension cable and swappable ends: https://slimq.life/products/100w-3c1a-usb-c-charger
I too am a USB-C maximalist, but with a handful of differences from OP:
- You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
- I don't think I could live off just one charging port, but would rather just ditch USB-A entirely.
- I'm using wired earbuds, with a standard headphone jack, but with the number of full-sized cans that are using USB-C in some way it baffles me that there aren't more or them (or any, that I've been able to find) that also support using it for audio input, so you you can play them while charging.
An electric toothbrush can never break: it can only become a toothbrush. You should never see an “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Out of Order” sign, just “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Manual.” Sorry for the exercise.
Generally true, but don't forget that some people are disabled and absolutely need the electric functions. "Escalator temporarily stairs" is funny until your foot is in a cast.
Same goes for those seemingly-useless, single-purpose kitchen devices. You're just probably not in the target audience.
RIP Mitch Hedburg
Love this comment <3
For those of you that are wondering, Mitch Hedburg was a relatively famous stand-up comedian whose special went viral.
In said special was this classic:
“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break; it can only become stairs. There would never be an 'escalator temporarily out of order' sign, only 'escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’”
RIP indeed.
Re. toothbrush, I have to take the opportunity to give Philips credit for the Sonicare electric toothbrushes they made ~15 years ago. That thing just keeps trucking, it’s incredible. I go on 2 week trips and don’t even bring the charger, and have no worries about it dying.
It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.
Yeah I was going to say, I'm at 20 years on a Sonicare (pushing 25 now that I remember it is 2026, damn...) and it still works fine. Holds a charge long enough that I've never run out on vacation.
They are good! Although my wife manages to kill hers every few years, I don't think I've ever actually had one die myself. I also have my original UV sanitizing charger unit that I purchased new circa 2009!
I've found that one can buy just new handles on ebay though, without the head and chargers, for only like half the super high retail prices or less, even for the "higher end" models, so I do that every 5-8 years or so if one gets too bad.
I saw this posted somewhere too, but my first Sonicare lasted 10 years, next one 5 and last one 2 which also mirrors my experience.
If only Philips would support USB-C for their OneBlade electric razors, instead of a USB-A to proprietary figure 8 barrel plug cable.
I got a no-name USB adapter for mine and it hasn't killed it in the couple of years I've had it, that's the one I take for travel. You can search for "USB QP2520" to find one.
I know, right. And the other manufacturers are the same, razors/grooming tools that just have a USB C plug are rare to nonexistent. My assumption is that it's down to some regulation regarding waterproofing somewhere. Though of course USB C plugs can be waterproof.
Part of the reason is that they used NiMH for the batteries in those (I have 3 that are 20-30 years old some predating the Phillips logo). All of mine still work. The NiMH is good for 1000s of deep cycles. The one from the mid 90s is only good for about 15x 2min brushings. Luckily, you can still get new heads for them!
Also, it looses functionality gracefully in that it is still a perfectly serviceable toothbrush even if it is out of battery.
That said, I have never had a Sonicare run out of battery either.
I have a sonicare. great. The travel case it came with is actually an inductive charging case with a USB-A hidden inside ready to be unfurled.
The pricier ones have a case with just a USB-C port.
it's possible current models have moved on. My toothbrush is a couple years old now (which is a good thing!)
EDIT: just looked. current ones have bluetooth and an app. sigh.
My first Sonicare eventually died of a battery failure 20 years ago. My second would not die and I was stuck buying the old style heads that were hard to clean. I finally gave in and replaced it just recently. Modern lithium cells last forever in low drain, low duty cycle applications like a toothbrush.
I bought a cheap electric toothbrush from a no-name Chinese company. The battery lasts 6 months on one charge with daily use. It cost about $20. I wouldn't be surprised if it's manufactured by the same factories that make Philips' toothbrushes.
And of course, it charges with USB-C.
Ha I thought mine was on the verge of dying after a good few years of use (amazon reviews were all like, yeah it only lasted a two years), so I ordered a new one, but the old one keeps going so I keep the new one in reserve looming over it menacingly, and it just refuses to kick it lol.
Counterpoint, mine died after a few years to the point where it would only go a few days between charges. Maybe the BMS wasn't good, because this started happening after it completely died on me on a trip once.
Philips knows how to penny pinch. Don't buy the more recent low end models.
Their kid's app has been great.
Same. I was given one as a gift for graduation college in 2012 and it's still going strong
Both Philips and the similarly sturdy Oral-B. You know they are good because they have a sealed design that uses induction to charge. By contrast the toothbrush mentioned by the OP won't last long with that flimsy door and the USB port in a wet environment.
Another vote for the Sonicare.
> I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rechargeable+aa+batteries+usb+c
But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
> But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
That has less to do with the battery being integrated and more to do with different battery chemistries having different voltage curves.
Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries. The problem is all these devices are tuned to an Alkaline battery voltage curve which is much more slanted than NiMH. NiMH has a nearly flat curve with a sudden drop off while Alkaline have a pretty steady decent (with a sudden drop off).
I'm aware of why it happens, but the net effect is the same. No device powered by AA/AAA is in practice going to be able to detect battery charge level correctly. Combine that with the annoyance of separate chargers versus integrated USB-C, and the result is that I never want to use non-integrated rechargeable batteries. (In practice, I also prefer to avoid devices that use AA/AAA/etc at all, for some of the same reasons.)
> Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries
Wouldn’t the NiMH batteries have to be smarter in that case, keeping track of their own historical behavior? That changes over time, and devices with integrated batteries can take that into account to indicate charge levels. If you can swap batteries, you lose that information.
I'm aware these aren't mutually exclusive. To me, the bigger benefit of not integrating them is that I can just rotate in freshly charged batteries anytime they die, and don't have to care about being within proximity of a charger.
(I also find this important for gamepads, to the extent that I don't just opt to play wired.)
I do wish more devices supported hot-swappable rechargeable battery packs. My headset does that.
But in the absence of that, I'll take USB-C and the ability to charge while actively using. I find that useful even for wireless gamepads, because then I can attach them to a generic charger on one side of the room, and not run a cable across the room to the console/TV area, because the communication is still wireless and only the power isn't.
I use these USB-C rechargeable batteries in my travel kit, too. I love the flexibility of being able to pickup some AA/AAAs, charge the ones that just died, or swap in the 2 spares I travel with.
Why haven't phones just moved to have two USB ports?
A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...
I've needed 2 USB-C ports on one-port devices (phone, Steam Deck) a few times so I got this tiny 2-port hub with micro SD card reader (also has option for 3.5mm audio port instead of card reader): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKV7JSHC?th=1 "Satechi USB C Mobile Hub, 4-in-1 USB C Multiport Adapter, 4K HDMI, 100W Pass-Through Charging, 10Gbps Data"
Because the use case and demand versus the cost of engineering and manufacturing isn’t there. The market for USB headphones is minuscule compared to Bluetooth headphones.
Because space inside a phone is at an extreme premium. And this problem is solved by either using magsafe to charge or using an external hub for more ports.
Wha wha whaat? You'll more likely to see no ports soon than two lol.
I don't remember when I actually plugged my phone for anything other than charging. Must be nearly a decade. And wireless charging is becoming good, albeit not ubiquitous quite yet.
See, I agree with this too. You wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about the random little things that are specific to just one device or another (IR blasters, the DAC on old LG phones, etc) if you could just plug in a second USB peripheral.
But what I'm more getting at is the other way around: that wireless headphones will already have USB-C for charging anyway. And that, particularly for larger ones (that have that port directly on the device, and not in a separate charging cradle), it really seems like a waste that more of them don't leverage that -- so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
>so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
Yes! And you could charge them off your phone!
If I could dream: wouldn't it be nice if you had headphones with charging cables attached to them so that you never had to worry about losing them.
And phones could have a convenient extra port for plugging such headphones into.
Ah, one could only dream.
There are still wired options, though, right? I don't really miss them, the nostalgia is not strong enough to forget how often the damn cable would catch on something and try to rip the headphones off my head. Or the cord noise. I get that people do not like having to eventually replace a battery, but high quality wireless headphones are a nice upgrade IMO.
Heh. I hate having any attached cables, they're too easy to fray. But otherwise I am with you, I only buy wired headphones.
See, you also lose me at non-removable cables as a point of failure, for the same reason OP loses me at "toothbrush"
Oh, a great new idea then!
What if the same port could be on both headphones and phone?
For convenience, we could make it, like, round so it could go in which every way.
Then you could use whatever male-to-male cable you want if and when the one you have goes bad.
You shouldn't use your phone while charging, that's bad for the battery.
Because physics sucks! USB ports take space, a phone is not Mary Poppins' bag :-).
My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc.
There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave").
I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars.
Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon.
Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit.
Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm, as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact.
People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to.
____
¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
> My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
I know what you're saying, but to be a little pedantic about it it's actually only USB 3.
(I wish there were mobile devices supporting USB4; it would bring them significantly closer to feature parity with larger devices.)
It's better to use a dongle for that.
I find Philips Sonicare toothbrushes break after about a year, long before the battery gives up. Which i guess is another reason not having integrated batteries would be nice. But then they might not make as much money whenever I buy a new one so they probably wouldn't do that
I've never experienced them breaking that quickly, but it's worth pointing out that the cheap models are far inferior. The motors are weaker and they even come with a worse charger that doesn't come with a normal wall outlet plug.
I don't like USB-C for toothbrushes to charge because there's water in the bathroom. The proprietary inductive charger/stand that comes with Sonicare/Oral-B electric toothbrushes are ideal.
Sucks that they are proprietary but they have been trivially easy to clone by third party manufacturers. $7 on Amazon.
I've had the topline ones fail on me three times after a couple of years. Now on a base model, and works just as fine.
The old charging glass isn't compatible with newer ones, so I have a couple of those laying around as junk. All the travel cases used micro usb-a, which is super inconvenient.
So no "ecosystem" buy-in into any Philips line from me anymore. They have a very bad product lines anyway.. Super complex, tons of SKUs with minimal differences. But they do have some good products.
The way I think about these is that, yeah, it's unfortunate that these are not the best products on the market as a product category, and they cost more than they really should.
Of course, another way to think about it is that the most expensive preventative care is better than the cheapest corrective care.
I don't really consider these an "ecosystem" like tech. An ecosystem implies there's a big cost in both time and money to switching to something else.
In my case, I'm either going to buy Sonicare or Oral-B because those are the options with bulk refills Costco. There are brands out there that are cheaper, but not by much. If they break, I buy another one. Such is life.
Of course, you can clean your teeth just as well with a cheap toothbrush and a much less expensive budget if you are diligent and thorough with your brushing. Flossing is also more important, anyway.
But I'm not messing around with my teeth: if my dentist recommends an electric toothbrush, I'm buying one.
This subject also reminds me of the razor blade market. A whole lot of "disruption" has taken place over the years with online shaver brands supposedly offering "the same" product as incumbents like Gillette.
But if you shave your head bald you'll know that a Harry's razor is really inferior compared to a Gillette razor. Sometimes the overpriced brand names are simply the best options on the market, even if they have been cost-cut or are otherwise "not what they used to be," and I feel similarly about Sonicare. I could buy some off-brand electric toothbrush and maybe it's 70-90% as good, but that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
A electric toothbrush does a much better job at cleaning your teeth though. I have a basic oral B one that I can get new heads for cheaply and easily and it has a usb-c charger. It’s great honestly. I’m sure it’ll die one day but so do normal toothbrushes. I’ll crack the shell open and recycle the battery it’s not a big deal. I had a random Amazon one before that broke after a few months but the very basic “old” style electric brushes seem to last some years. The more “UI” and features it has the less it’ll last
You're probably missing out on the feeling of really, really clean teeth. Regular brushing never gave me the feeling of ALL biofilm getting stripped from the enamels.
Yea, first time I used an electric was great, haven't used a manual since.
For the vast majority of things I need to power or charge, dumb USB charging is fine, and I have a 10-port Anker “IQ” charger that works great for most of those things. Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist? I don’t need 65W on each port. I just needs lots of ports for gadgets that can trickle charge for hours at night (4 kids, lots of devices). I mostly want to standardize on USB-C host cables, but no one makes a cheap device for doing that more than a decade after USB-C became a thing.
The reason is because while you want to use the low end the general public does not understand that USB-C is the connector only and that various levels of power and data depend on the cable and the device at both ends.
If you sell a 10 port USB-C charged someone is going to plug 10 MacBooks into it and complain it doesnt work.
The best I have seen for what you want is
https://ca.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-500w-desktop-charger
but is not cheap at all or something like
https://www.amazon.ca/Powered-Aluminum-Adapter-Computer-Prin...
Macbooks aren't the absolute best example anymore, since 20W is plenty to charge ARM-based MacBooks in a few hours, so a 200W 10-port charger could do a fine job with 10 MacBooks.
But your point is still valid. As a nerd I really appreciate being able to use say, my 100W laptop charger or the car jumpstarter pack I have to charge up my earbuds or an electric toothbrush, since it reduces the number of weird little cables or chargers I have to keep track of, but it sure does baffle the non-technical majority that their toothbrush charger fits their laptop 'for some reason' but of course does nothing - plus the confusion when they realize they could physically plug the toothbrush into a pair of headphones, or plug two portable batteries together.
I've seen 1000W (or so they claim) 10 port USB-C chargers on Amazon. Not Anker, just a no name Chinese brand I am not going to trust. But they do seem to exist. Like the sibling comment says, I assume it's because people expect USB-C charging capabilities to be a lot higher.
Do you believe the 16 TB uSD cards from no name Chinese brands on Amazon as well? If so, I have a bridge to sell - limited time offer!
500W (with 1 port being true 240 W) is the highest legitimate one I've run across - and I search often for real alternatives to buy. Even bulky GaN PC PSUs selling for $500 can't exceed 700W without assisted cooling due to efficiency->heat reasons.
> Do you believe
I will just quote myself to answer that.
> or so they claim
> a no name Chinese brand I am not going to trust
Yet if seeing fakes on Amazon convinces you:
> But they do seem to exist
I still have my bridge to sell. Quoting the parts which lead to a reply isn't really a response as it's guaranteed to lead to the same place.
> Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist?
Isn't this just a USB 3.x hub?
You know of a 10-port USB-C hub that can negotiate power (old USB style, not PD) without a host device?
I'm guessing it's because people expect USB-C ports to at least handle 18w.
I had a pair of sennheiser urbanite headphones that used USB (micro :( ) for digital audio input, and you could use them while charging. Was shocked and disappointed when i eventually replaced them with Audio Technica ones that could only charge via USB but didn't do audio via USB, only bluetooth or analog.
I agree (and am sad) that it's not a ubiquitous feature, but headphones with a built-in dac do exist
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
My solution to this was to get an electric razor that doesn't use batteries. My 20-year-old no-battery electric Norelco razor was bought in a chain pharmacy. I've looked in recent years, and I don't see them any more in brick-and-mortar stores, but they're still made, and available online.
The (minor, IME) downside is that electric razors without batteries are generally on the low-end of the spectrum, rarely including the fancy (even non-battery-related) features found on the high end electric razors.
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.*
I thought the same, but that'll happen with devices that use AA batteries too.
I was using a cheap Panasonic EW-DJ10 water flosser that uses AA batteries, but the battery compartment contacts would corrode after some time.
I then switched to one of those China USB-C water flossers, but I think the built-in lithium battery's nearing the end of its life since it'll cut off randomly now. I also used to worry about charging it, since the USB-C port would need to be dried out before I plugged the charging cable in.
No idea what's a happy medium for electronics that need to work near water.
Inductive charging, like the often-mentioned-here Sonicare toothbrushes have.
Inductive charging doesn't help with non-replaceable lithium batteries that will eventually degrade past usable in maybe 1-3 years.
Right, but it solves the other problem that you mentioned - charging ports or contacts exposed to the elements.
> - You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
I've had an Oral B electric brush for around 3 years now and it hasn't skipped a beat. I'd hate to have to change batteries when I can just pop it on a inductive charging dock every night.
Just recently acquired a set from "Philips" that is an 8-pack of lithium-ion AAs with a charging-case that connects to USB-C (Note: the case itself doesn't have its own battery, like an earbuds case would -- it's just a normal charger that doubles as a case). Sounds like this would be great for your toothbrushes and such!
For what an anecdote’s worth, I have the same rechargeable Norelco razor that I’ve had going on 17 years. Same nicd battery it came with; gets recharged about once every three weeks. I think it’ll relive me.
My Sonicare worked for almost 15 years. I don't worry about the reliable brands dying on me.
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I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
Here's how the last few broke:
* Phone with typical inadequate battery + external portable battery pack plugged in, shoved in together in pocket running Google Maps navigation via bluetooth, and biking. My thigh bent the USB connector.
* USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
* USB-C plugged into phone and sat on while on car seat. Another thing any half-competent design intern would have listed on their stress test scenario list but it seems the senior designers missed
* Laptop plugged in on the edge of standing desk, USB cable got jammed in gap between adjacent desks.
I much preferred real, sturdy mechanical connections. They should just miniatureize the IEC power connectors and put straight up 19VDC through them.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
I do everything on your list. I also have young children who grab and play with things. Our household breaks 1 USB-C plug per year, if that.
I don't know if you were embellishing for effect, but anyone breaking 50 connectors a year probably isn't going to have success with anything short of a fully ruggedized connector solution, which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices.
Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
> which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices
Not true. 1990s connectors hardly ever broke for me. They were all super rugged. I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
I've destroyed lots of barrel jacks over the years. I wouldn't normally consider them that rugged.
I buy the DC barrel jacks, those I've had inordinate problems on the inside of devices as they wear out but never on the power plug itself.
VGA connectors? I've bent the shield on more than one VGA or DVI cable, and it's a nightmare to get a pin straight enough if you happen to bend one... but possible sometimes.
> Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
I put fully ruggedized connectors on several shipping products. You would not like the cost nor space requirements.
> I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
VGA and SCSI connectors are rarely exposed like a phone connector and they're in a completely different class anyway. Nobody wants a phone with a giant SCSI size connector on the bottom.
I hate to say it, but the fact that you have this many anecdotes of dropping "several-kilogram objects" on to connectors is a clue that you're an outlier in how hard you treat connectors, if breaking 50 USB connectors a year wasn't already an indicator.
Expecting consumer connectors to stand up to this outlier level of abuse is unrealistic.
I had the physical DC barrel jack port fall out the back of a monitor the other day. Granted that's not the connector per se.
This is a success! USB-C was designed so that the part most likely to fail is the inexpensive plug, not the socket.
One of the problems with USB mini-A was that the socket would fail, meaning the device had to be repaired or discarded. Combined with the short lifetime (about 300 insertions) it was a disaster which is why you almost never see it.
You’d be more unhappy of those failures had happened in your expensive device rather than your cheap cables.
Perhaps you are just not careful with things, I’ve been an early adopter and never broken one ( I probably have at least 40 different ones, some of which get plugged/unplugged multiple times a day).
My kids haven’t broken a single one either and they destroyed plenty of lightning cables.
The GP comment is one of those HN comments where I can't tell if someone is making up a ridiculously high number to tell a story online, or if there really are people out there breaking 52 USB-C plugs per year going about their normal lives.
I mean I don't know how people avoid breaking them. Prying paint cans open, rappelling from height, driving nails into roofs... don't you find them fragile for these daily operations?
I’ve definitely had them wear out and stop working, but I’ve never broken one.
Tangentially related anecdote: I used to break tons of stuff all the time (my whole family growing up did), and I just assumed that all things just have finite lifespans, until I started dating someone who's tremendously careful and called me out on it. Then for a long time I just assumed I was a clumsier than average person.
Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.
Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week.
That's a you problem. I have never done this, and neither have any of the dozen people I just asked in my office.
Is IEC really the gold standard for connectors to you? I always thought they feel terrible to plug in. There's no snap or solid bottom-out indication to when it's "connected." And it just sits in the socket from friction that doesn't feel particularly solid. It's the kind of connection where if it gets yanked a little bit and the connection fails, it's not obvious because it's half-seated in the socket.
IEC isn’t great, hence you get a cage around them to hold them in for critical use.
That cage is for stress relief, and should be federally mandated on all external connectors of all devices.
Stress relief is a thing, people in the 2020s have somehow forgetten about it.
good luck miniaturizing that! :D
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week
I don’t believe you.
I haven’t broken a plug yet and I’ve used usb c on all my devices for years now
I'm not sure this is the brag you think it is... You should be happy you're breaking the plug.
Also "phone with typical inadequate battery". Just get a battery replacement and make sure you only use it between 60% and 80%. If you don't do that you're degrading the battery.
You might think "but now I only have 1/5 of the capacity" yeah and it will now last much longer than if you degraded the battery.
That’s impressive, I have managed to break a lot of micro connectors (not even from proper stress, just from prolonged normal use) but I have never managed to break a USB-C cable or connector!
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week.
Wild. How often do you break the phone itself?
> shoved in together in pocket
MagSafe/Qi2 is ideal for this.
I can't think of any connector that would work well shoved in a pocket moving around. Had to re-solder too many headphone jacks back in the day, and anything that screws in would cause way too much leverage, probably ruining the small slim device.
There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side). Those are pretty robust, get the cable out of the way more reliably, and provide a much smaller lever for physical forces on the connector. They aren't the solution for everything, but they solve a lot of issues
For everything else there are magnetic USB-C connectors
You can also get ones that swivel
> There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side)
This should be federal law and written into the constitution
> They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
> USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
Seems like you managed to break one even though it was in the environment that you're saying they're designed for. Maybe you're the problem and USB-C, the technology that billions of people manage to use just fine without breaking on a daily basis, is perfectly fine.
I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside. Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge, but all the cables look the same, and you don't tend to know in advance.
If switching to a type-A charger fixes it, it’s probably the device manufacturer’s fault, not the cable. Many manufacturers that need the 5v standard you’d normally get from an old type-A charger screw this up.
For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…
I know of something expensive that omits it too! My insulin pump controller is a junkpile android phone (a NUU Mobile N5004L for the curious) whose only purpose in life is to run a singular android app.
The device charges via usb-c, but refuses to do so if the charger is any relatively modern usb-c based brick. Only usb-a!
Ugh, that’s infuriating to read, if not at all surprising. This sounds at once totally over-engineered (in the modern day, negative sense of the word) while being simultaneously under-engineered (in the traditional sense).
I don't think it's cost reasons these are being omitted. The customer refunds would easily exceed the savings. It's most likely designers just swapping a micro usb port with a usb c one in an old design while making no other changes and seeing it works with the A to C cable they have.
I share your theory about micro usb, yeah. I know it’s not cost savings, it’s just lazy/ignorant. If they’re changing the footprint on the board for a type-c port, they can add some smd resistors.
This is really only a problem if you buy cheap cables. Pick the baseline spec you want your USB cables to meet, and throw out all the ones that don’t. Problem solved.
It’s still a minor frustration if you have to borrow a cable, but that’s solved by packing a cable, and by encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables.
Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.
Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".
I do electronics professionally. This is likely because in order to save a bit on BOM costs, the device itself doesn't have the necessary pulldown resistors to signal to turn on VBUS.
USB-A has always-on VBUS while USB-C doesn't. Because the spec allows for always-on VBUS in a USB-A to USB-C cable, some devices just assume that they're always being powered by one of those cables.
I doubt it’s even saving cost, it’s just incompetence. It works with the USB A to C cable, so job done. They’ve probably never plugged it into a PD charger, and probably just copied the schematic from the last (defective) product and will copy and paste it into the next one too.
That is likely the case; cost savings, simplicity, etc. but the end result is USB-C does not "just work" for most consumers.
It's because they are straight up defective. The USB-C spec is pretty clear in that the power pins have 0v until you signal for a voltage. This isn't a failure of USB-C, you should just return defective devices to the OEM.
Thankfully this defect is becoming less common outside of temu junk.
That's because they didn't implement USB C correctly. Maybe it was to save less than a penny on the BOM, maybe it was arrogance ("it works for me! send it!"), or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, they didn't do it right.
By standard, USB C provides no power at all unless the device being powered follows the rules. They're easy rules to follow. The minimum viable way of doing it right requires just two tiny resistors inside of the device.
It is not ideal, but you can buy C-to-C adapters with the resistors to force the charger to supply 5V.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012247371267.html
I have a water pump like that, the reason: they have omitted the 5.1k resistors…
you'll never guess what solution i'd suggest for that specific problem...
Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.
If you want to cover all use cases your only option are the 240 W, 40 Gbps cables, and they are not cheap (https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Supports-Display-Transfer-Charg...).
amazon hides some prices because i'm viewing the page from canada, but it looks like that says the cable you linked is $15?
that's what i've been paying for cables, and it seems reasonable to me.
It's a cable, it should cost $2 at most.
40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2. That said, outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor, you don't need a 40gbps cable.
> 40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2.
I dunno, Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap. DOCSIS 4.0 does 10Gbps on some really ancient cables. I'm sure Cat9 will do even better, at least the cat people and the doc people are trying harder than the USB people.
Unifi even has a PoE-over-coax solution. Add some Anker GaN shit and I'm sure it can be miniaturized.
> outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor
As soon as I need a "special" cable to connect a laptop to a monitor, we're effectively back to the 1990s-2000s when I needed a special monitor cable. There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
The whole point of this thread was "one type of cable for everything" and "grab any USB-C cable from your personal stash and they all work for every use case".
99% of user use cases for USB are charging batteries and copying a word document on a flash drive. For those cases literally every port and cable works. For video, in every office and home, the thunderbolt cable just sits in the monitor at all times with just the USB end free. Meaning there is no confusion around which cable is the video one because the video one only ever sits connected to the monitor.
While I now no longer have to carry around a bag of chargers when I travel or fish through a bucket of black DC adapters for the right one.
There's tons of confusion when I have new usb-c devices like a portable usb-c monitor or a VR headset or some other gadget. I have cables that seem beefy because they do power, but they don't do data, and I end up having to go through a pile of USB-c cables to find one that does data. It's frustrating!
> Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap
Is it really though? People are selling cables, but 40Gbase-T hardware does not exist, and 10Gbase-T hardware is already crazy power hungry and the SFP+s heat up much you burn yourself if you touch them. Meanwhile USB-C 10 Gbps works on an iPhone.
Meanwhile, Coax is huge and stiff. Good high-speed USB-C cables actually have mini coax inside.
You can trade-off cable shielding for electronics power and corresponding heat to encode/decode stuff.
Ethernet is notoriously power hungry, but I bet you can use a phone cable and still get tens of Gb over a very short range.
> There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
I completely disagree.
When the only difference between cables is max speed, that's still a huge improvement over a nest of different cable types, half of which are custom. And it's easy to get into a position where all your USB-C cables differ only by max speed.
Which is worse because they all look sort of the same, but they are not the same.
It's even worse for non-techies, who don't understand what a gbps or a watt is, and who will leave a 1-star review, or worse, trash their cable, because their cable was "slow" but was meant for 240W PD but only supported USB 2.0. They purchased it initially because it had 5 stars.
Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
The situation in the early 2000s is I could spot the cable I needed from a mile away.
Just about every data cable standard has different speed capabilities on a per-cable basis. Ethernet, HDMI, and displayport have the same issue and usually with even worse labeling.
> Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
That requires they never increase the speed again. Seems like a bad starting point.
And most people will accept the tradeoff of different cable speeds when it means long charging cables can be 10x cheaper. The problem is when manufacturers choose to use bad labels.
And if you push people off USB they're going to use 27 different kinds of cable and you won't be able to spot which generic black wire you need from across the room.
Also, if we pretend they set the max speed in stone in 2013, it's easy to get yourself a full set of 240W 10Gbps-per-lane do-everything cables in every length from 0 to 2.5 meters. $25 isn't an amazing price but sticking with passive cables keeps you out of the real nasty prices.
USB 2.0 cables can be thinner, more flexible, longer, and cheaper. You could decide to only ever use thunderbolt cables for everything, but you'd be paying $40-$100 for a cable as thick as a mains power cord and doesn't offer any benefit at all to charging your phone.
We need better labeling rather than making every single USB cable a 40gbit thunderbolt cable.
I have some Thunderbolt cables that are like $80 apiece because they're like 3 meters long. I have like five or six of them because each one only carries one video signal.
(I used Thunderbolt so that touch and pen inputs could go over the one cable. These days though I just use a MacBook Pro, and hook up a capture card when I need to access the Windows)
The apple usb c charging cable is like $30, it is well worth the money of you are into software defined radio I can report. Not sure what magic they pulled of, but all the tricks in the book it seems!
okay, i mean, that's exactly what my original comment said: this is only a problem if you buy cheap cables.
If some of your devices require a $30 cable and you use the same cables for everything, then you use a $30 cable for your mouse.
If you're buying a cable for a specific device in a specific circumstance than by all means get the cable that meets that. Then it's not a problem about "what is its functional support", it doesn't matter, that's your mouse cable that you use for your mouse on that desk. That's the monitor cable you use to plug things into that monitor. That's the dock cable you use to plug things into the dock.
For all the cables that are your flex carrying around places where you don't know how it'll be used tomorrow, get a good cable and you won't have any issues.
Yeah? I use a $15 cable for my mouse. And then when my mouse is done charging I put the cable back in the bag with my portable monitor, which the same cable also works for.
It's also only a problem if they overcomplicate power delivery design such that you need expensive cables.
They could have made it just DC +19V and GND over 14 gauge wire with a nice, outdoor-recreation-grade connector and called it a day.
USB power delivery doesn't need expensive cables. Basic 240W cables cost $3-4.
> throw out all the ones that don’t
> encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables
One of the main advantages of a single standardized plug is reducing e-waste. This just sounds irresponsible. Having a single tool that covers every possible use case is rarely a good solution.
Device makers need to stop including these garbage 4 cm A to C cables. I have enough USB cables and bricks to last my whole life. I don't need to collect a million more spec violating ones in a drawer I will never use.
Things are shifting though. Ikea ships their USB-C stuff without cables now.
> This just sounds irresponsible.
The irresponsibility lies with the companies making the non-compliant trash in the first place.
I have two different fast charging cables, for two different devices that charge fast with those cables, on those cables, but not if you swap them around. Thankfully they have different colors, so there's some hope of keeping track of which cable to use for which device.
There's no way to know if it's a "cheap cable", not even by price.
Sure there is. Buy reputable brands from reputable marketplaces that clearly state the specs, and if you get products from them that don't comply stop buying from them.
I'd call that trial and error.
I've been doing this strategy for years and never had an issue of buying a junk cable.
on 0401 5k resistor is fractions of a penny. its just silly at this point. My belief is that they all used some crappy reference schematic which omitted it once upon a time, and that's proliferated amongst all the cheapo designs.
> Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge
You can fix that by buying USB-C to USB-C adapters with 5.1 kiloohm resistors.
It should have taken the manufacturer less than one cent to include the resistors, but as a consumer product they will unfortunately cost at least a dollar each.
Buy yourself a handful of good cable for charging. (I quite like the silicone anker 643) And throw everything else away in a box.
For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.
Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.
> I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside.
Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.
USB-IF actually does have pretty clear labeling and standards that address most of the issues being posted in this thread. But most USB devices and cables are not certified and not compliant with the specs.
Short of making USB proprietary and behind a licensing and certification scheme there is no way to solve this. People need to stop buying cheap junk.
I read about this so often, yet it's a problem I just never encountered. If I need super high bandwidth like connecting a display, I pick one of those annoyingly unlflexible fat cables. Easy. They even tend to feature the TB4 flash icon. Surely I would not expect any of the light and nimble ones to do that trick. When I need strong PD, it's also either one of those or one of the far more flexible but still quite thick braided ones. Often they have some hinge gimmick connector to prevent any hope for bandwidth one might be tempted to have. All other cables, I expect nothing but legacy USB. Yeah, and some of those won't do data at all (curiosly those are never the lightest cables in my stable, the lightest ones tend to do the legacy USB "gear not, some bits will eventually get through!" just fine)
I wish there are easy ways to figure out the maximum current and wattage supported by a cable. So many cables don't label themselves except on the box!
Note there is a link at the end of the article to a device which can test cables and determine exactly that! But it's a sign of the problem that you need that thing.
With USB-C cables I tend to throw them out unless they are premium cables that cost upwards of $20, I mean I could keep the cheap ones around to charge this or that but cheap cables have this way of going bad, like they are supposed to work if you plug them in either way except they don't, you plug your cheap device in overnight to charge and it doesn't really charge, etc. No way I could trust my wife to handle it.
Personally I think USB got worse in a lot of ways in the 3.0 generation, like at 1.0 they designed a bus architecture that could enumerate 127 devices on a root hub. USB 3.0 doesn't promise anything and ff you start plugging in hubs to your laptop you will hit undocumented limits and find devices start dropping out randomly when you've plugged in several devices and it gives me the heebie jeebies because a mass storage device could drop out. I know mainstream filesytems today are pretty durable but still...
Even the simplest 3-wire cable with nothing but wires in it will handle 45W charging already, which is enough to power my laptop. It needs to be physically broken to not work. If it doesn't, it's usually the device's fault. There are many cheap devices out there that are just USB-C-shaped and don't actually implement the spec, working with some kinds of cables and not working with others.
Personally I have stopped buying cables that do not disclose this information. There are pretty fine alternatives that do, so I see no reason to take gambles.
My only issues so far come from charging protocols rather than cables anyway.
Moreover, stuff like how many watts a cable supports are issues that happen regardless connector type.
You're welcome: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DYJL5Z67
This device let me categorize all my loose cables (and throw out the truly terrible ones). It was worth every penny.
Not saying this device is not cool, but one can also get this info easily in a computer, if you find out what to look for. One had presented a utility here some time ago with a menu bar icon showing this information
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972511
If I remember correctly, that application/your computer is simply reading what the device _claims_ it can do whereas this device tests it.
That app is probably a good place to start but I wouldn't trust it fully.
These PD testers are cool (I thought about buying one), but honestly, for the price of a tester, one can buy 2, maybe even 3 good quality cables and just throw away the rest.
Fair point, I just have oodles of cables (literally 10-20+ per combo of micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C <-> micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C each) and I like having them all organized by capability so that when I need one I can grab from right bin.
Before getting the tester I just kept buying new "known good" cables whenever I needed one since my cable drawer was just a huge unknown.
> Reads eMarker chip parameters in Type-C cables, providing detailed performance information (e.g., maximum current, voltage, data transfer rates) to help users fully understand cable capabilities and ensure safe, efficient device usage.
Good thing nobody lies.
This is an acceptable failure mode. I'd be nice if there was a standardized LED flash or color that you could get so if your relative said something isn't working, you could ask, "Is it flashing three times?" or whatever.
The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
> The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
I remember my parents had a D-Link ADSL modem and a D-Link router. They even stacked onto of each other with rubber feet! They had identical-looking power bricks, with the same barrel plug.
They were different voltages!
And then you go someplace, realize you left your charger at home, and find out despite your friend having dozens of barrel type power connector power adapters not a single one match the size/voltage/amperage/polarity of your device.
Or you just borrow their USB-C adapter and don't have any worries.
The thickness / durability of the cable is a pretty good indicator, if it's thin and flexible it'll only do basic charging if it's thick and durable it's because it's packing enough wiring to do power delivery, video etc, everything except probably Thunderbolt.
All standards-adherent cables that are adorned with USB C connectors at each end can supply at least 60W of power.
This has nothing to do with feels.
Usually they won't charge because they're not actually USB-C devices but are just broken and only pretend to be one (mostly due to missing resistors on CC lines, but there are other ways a device can be non-compliant too).
Yeah I have some devices that expect the manufacturer charger (I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something) and I'm not even sure what was the point in giving it a USB C connector.
I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expecting 5V, there's a healthy chance it'll .. stop expecting 5V.
We blame usb-c for all this, but it does feel like some mffrs are going out of their way to screw it up.
Imagine if all USB-C cables had a patent owned by the consortium and an identification chip made by the consortium. The spec could require that devices would not use the cable at all unless the chip is cryptographically verified, and bad cable manufacturers could be sued into oblivion for breaking the patent.
The more I age, and the more I expect my devices to justwork™, the more I appreciate Apple’s pro consumer monopolistic moves.
>I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something
This kind of defect is extremely rare since this would basically be a USB killer frying every other device you plug it in to. 99% of the time it's the device is missing some resistors on the cc pins which signal to the charger to send 5v. Since usb-c it defaults to 0v until you request something. But USB-A has no CC pins so it just puts 5v out at all times.
Yeah maybe USB-D will get it right. But probably not. I had such high hopes for USB-C. Now I keep a couple USB-C to USB-A adapters lying around to force the charger (which is just a normal home outlet with a couple built-in USB-C ports) to speak old school USB-A charging instead of trying to negotiate PD with a shitty device that did not implement USB-C correctly.
Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.
It's not a flexible specification, its straight up bad engineering. The specification literally says if you do not want negotiation, you must add the resistor.
Unfortunately the EU has written USB-C into law, so there will never be a USB-D. I guess we should be glad they didn’t do this 30 years ago, or we’d still be using PS/2 connectors.
Law is not immutable. It will be changed if/when there is a need to.
I use USB to teach students about European Union regulatory policies, because this is one obvious standard they all can connect to. (Pun intended).
Throughout the years they were cautious when it was introduced, thankful after it was established, and now they are too young to know any other world.
And yes, USB as main connection standard was driven by Apple. But USB as main charging standard was set by the EU.
> And yes, USB as main connection standard was driven by Apple. But USB as main charging standard was set by the EU.
Hard disagree. Yes, they were quick to say that if you want to connect a device to their computers, you'd better be prepared for it to be USB. But their computer market share simply wasn't there to drive anything. More of a "lead by example" deal.
With phones OTOH, they COULD have driven it, but in the end they had to be whipped by Brussels to adopt standard USB(c).
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Your chance is 100% because the charger for GBC is 2 AA batteries ;)
Yeah, the GBA SP would have been a much better example. What an odd connector. I really need to get around to modding a USB-C port on to mine.
I still prefer to buy things that use AA batteries than in built rechargeable ones. Li batteries are almost always the first thing to go.
Yeah, or you can just get a cheap retro handheld with similar stylings that will charge via -- you guessed it -- USB-C.
I would like the USB-C connector was more durable. I've literally never killed a USB-A connector, but enough lateral force and USB-C just breaks. I suppose it was made so small due to mobile devices, which is understandable, but came with tradeoffs.
Try the relatively recent Anker Prime cables, the ones that are both braided and soft. I haven't managed to break one yet, despite breaking several past Anker cables that also claimed to be durable.
I don't have a problem with USB C cables, and even if I did it wouldn't be a big deal. The cables are cheap compared to the devices they charge. It is broken USB-C ports that frustrate me about them, or ones with worn out clips.
What way are you breaking them? The two failure modes I've seen are the port getting full of pocket lint for phones (easy to fix) and the port ripping off the PCB. The second one is a design issue where some ports are entirely surface mount rather than having the grounding pins go through the pcb to anchor it on.
I have had a few failures and I can only assume it's the second one? I have one on a thinkpad that only works if you hold it in the right position
I completely misunderstood your post, because I have the opposite problem, I've never broken a charge port but I've broken several cables.
Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)
Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.
I agree. Lightning is such a better connector and one of the main reasons I still haven't replaced my phone. If lightning could've just been updated for higher bitrates it would have been so much better.
I went through lightning cables fast. Unsure why, maybe I sweat a lot, or keep my phone in humid places.
But every so many months I had to replace the cable because the 4th pin would be burned.
I don't have that issue with USB-C. But I do feel that the lightning receiver is less fragile over the USB-C one. Removing lint from a USB-C receiver is harder.
There was also a separate issue. Apple until recently had always used this type of plastic that easily degrades and certain peoples skin oil (mine included) causes the plastic to just dissolve. Turns yellow then brittle and then just comes apart. But that's not really related to lightning.
Micro usb was by far the worst cable I've ever had to use. USB-C reliability seems to be improved on top of that, despite having.... 15 more pins?
I've had the opposite experience. Lightning was been far more fragile than USB-C.
Lightning is just better overall.
I would happily be a USB-C enjoyer if manufactures stopped forgetting the stupid CC resistors meaning that you device will not charge with a C-to-C cable.
It should be considered a defective design and recalled, I have been burned several times by this.
I used to think of myself as one as well but that's changing as of late.
Looking back 15 years or so, I remember the old ThinkPad and Dell Latitude/Precision docking stations functioned reliably for as long as I can remember.
Today I have a variety of USB-C and thunderbolt 3/4 docking stations, all of which have been affected by various issues. The the manufacturers of these things don't care.
The latest casualty is a Pluggable TBT4-UDZ, which randomly decided one day that I should only have one working monitor instead of two. Doesn't matter if I use Windows, Mac or Linux. Meanwhile, the same monitors & cables work fine with my desktop.
I appreciate USB-C as a means to charge my stuff, but from now on, I'm going to try and use other ports and cables for everything else. Every laptop's settings will assume only the main screen will ever be used. I've no time to get used to a nice multi-monitor setup just to have it taken away when the USB-C dock starts acting up.
The USB-C and Thunderbolt docks are annoying! It basically boils down to the fact that they come in two variants, with and without Displaylink.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on your port configuration, number of monitors and OS (the Displaylink docks require drive installation).
FWIW, on Linux, the best choice for me was a non-Displaylink one from Lenovo.
I've always been a thinkpad fan but their docks were clunky huge uncomfortable things for me.
I had a hp nc2400 that had a very nice little dock where you'd set the laptop on top of two guide poles an then slide the dock connector in from the side. A very compact design.
The thinkpad docks just always used so much space on my desk.
I've done a decent amount of traveling - honestly the most important thing has always just been to have stuff that works. Charging things has rarely been an issue. A few extra cables in the luggage is not a big deal.
Terrence's issue here is that he is over complicating things:
- Toothbrush - Just take a non-battery toothbrush, it's perfectly fine and will not break down or need charging.
- Tracker - I'm doubtful you will get it back in most countries. Always keep the essentials such as phone, wallet and passport on your physical person where possible.
- Bug Bite Zapper - Do as the locals do, they too don't want to be swamped with insects.
+1 on the toothbrush. It's how I use up all the non-electric toothbrushes I get at the dentist (who always tells me to use an electric toothbrush).
The only thing that perpetually annoys me for charging is the Apple Watch, which requires the dumb little puck charger and doesn't have enough battery life to make it even one extra day without being charged. I wish it had gotten the inelegant "flip it over a shove a cable in" like the Magic Mouse did.
I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max and I don’t want to get rid of it or anything, but I am kind of looking forward to the glorious day that it breaks. Once it breaks, any phone I get (iPhone or Android) will have USB-C, along with my laptop, with One Adapter To Rule Them All when I travel.
That’s the dream, anyway. Life rarely works out quite that cleanly for me.
I’m a cold-dead-hands 13 Mini owner, but even I’ll admit to the temptation of replacing the last device I have that doesn’t use USB-C with something that does.
When my wife finally upgraded her iphone to one that uses the usb-c, finally the last non-usb-c device in the house was gone. It has drastically simplified our lives. Each car only has a single usb-c cable now and that's enough for long road trips even. We got a set of Anker cables ~5 years ago and they still haven't worn out yet
My Kindle Oasis might be the last micro usb device I own. I always said I’d buy the usb-c version the day they released one. Instead they discontinued it :(
This is how I feel with my Airpods. Just break already!
I suppose we shouldn’t criticize companies for being “too reliable”…
So many kids toys use custom brick chargers, especially remote control cars. I refuse to buy anything that isn't USB-C, I'm not keeping track of all of those.
With a soldering iron and USB-CD PD trigger boards, I've successfully converted a few of this kind of thing.
There are barrel jack USB-C adaptors now that you can just glue in place. Very useful for homelabbers.
I love them, useful for super clean desk setups .
I use a 140w USBC charger -> USBC to Barrel Jack -> LG Ergo screen -> USBC -> Laptop. One AC plug powers the display & laptop.
The step I've taken is just purchasing USB-C to barrel in various voltages and labeling them appropriately.
I think that's changing too, my son got some cheap radio controlled boat a few weeks ago, the remote uses AA and the boat has USB-C as input (interestingly enough, it has a weird USB-C cable with a built in light to signal when charging is done).
I recently bought a very cheap RC car for my kids, and it was USB-C rechargeable but instead of having a port it just has a USB-C cable that comes out of it and plugs into a power brick. I love that.
Wait till you enter the world of more advanced RC stuff, that's when the Cambrian explosion of connector types really happens.
The USB-C idea is great, but the port design is not. If you search with the keyword "USB-C" and "tugged", you'll find a lot of horror stories ranging from bent socket/connectors to fried systems.
A few samples:
I really like the idea of single port all capable, but the current design of USB-C port is just not up for the task. At least you need a port design that is fail-safe, not fail-dead, to do this job.> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Fairly high. Nitpick time: The Gameboy Color[0] took a standard-size battery that you can still buy today. It did not need to be charged, but you did have to turn the system off to swap batteries unless you had a barrel-jack adapter.
Barrel-jack DC wasn't quite standard, but you might be able to find something compatible if you went to an electronics supply store and paid careful attention to the listed input voltage and polarity on the device. Regardless, most people didn't bother tethering their Gameboy and just fed it batteries since it ran forever on them.
The real proprietary hellhole started with the Gameboy Advance SP, and didn't end until the Switch used Type-C. Hell, the SP is basically a modern smartphone:
1. Proprietary form-fitting battery pack
2. Custom power input connector
3. No separate headphone output
Bonus points: the headphone adapter Nintendo sold for the SP didn't have a power pass-through, so you had to choose between headphones or charging. Though there are third-party ones now that do both headphone output and USB-C power input.
[0] No "u", not even in the UK
To add insult to the injury, the charging port of Nintendo DS Lite was almost mini-USB, but not quite - with enough force and some metal bending it was apparently possible to make it work with regular mini-USB cable. Absolutely idiotic design, especially since that port was just 5V input anyway, anyone with soldering iron could tweak USB-A cable to work with the proprietary charging connector.
This is a rather stupid to rave about, but I was in amsterdam several months ago, and I forgot to bring my NA to EU plug adapter. I was a bit miffed having to buy a new travel charger, but it's become the best one I own. (Only because all the other chargers I own were spawned into existence around me/came with some device)
65watts isn't even that much, but its enough that I don't need:
- the mac charger that's always connected to the magsafe cable I can't use with anything else,
- the dinky iPhone brick with the cable that needs USB-C on both ends,
- and the slightly less dinky pocketbook e-reader charger with the cable that needs USB-A on the brick-end and micro USB on the business-end.
2x 65 watt USB-C ports and 1x USB-A running at whatever anemic power USB-A is capable of pitfully spitting at my ancient e-reader without drawing the ire of UL or something (5v/500ma still?), perfection.
You should go purpose-buy a charging brick, anything is better than the freebie ones you get with stuff.
I'm the same. Though I still think they could have made USB much neater as a protocol, USB-C now does everything I need for goto-connectivity.
I recently looked at the connector and reflected on how insanely small it is. It's no wonder it took decades to get to this point, and it's a very neat physical design at a great price. 16 pins and 10A in that little thing. Amazing.
It took that long because nothing it does now was ever a requirement. It was created as serial/parallel port replacement (fun fact - max speed parallel port is faster than USB 1.1, at ~2.5MB/s).
If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.
> instead I purchased a cheap USB-C rechargeable fan
I really don't get that. Why not a handheld fan? It's cheap, doesn't require a battery, and doesn't need electronics.
I see more electronic fans than handheld fans, and I just don't get it. People like buying brittle plastic future e-waste?
Because I can put it next to my bed at night and have it cool me. Not all of us travel with a punkah-wallah.
TFineA mentions a USB cable tester. I know very little about testing or all the standards involved in USB. And I would like a way to test cables.
Is there a good reason we can't hook one (or both?) end(s) of a cable to a computer and use a program to tell what it does?
Sort of. USB-C cables have an emarker chip inside them which reports the capabilities of the cable. The USB controller on your laptop reads this chip and makes use of the info, but as of today there is no standardized way for the controller chip to pass this info up to the OS. I assume most of them don't even provide an interface at all for the OS to request it.
I vaguely recall someone from Google working on this issue for Chromebooks. I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this since they control the OS and hardware. For now you can buy tester devices which read the emarker info and show it on a small display. There's also more advanced testers which test the actual signal integrity and error rates, but these are very expensive and made for the cable manufacturers.
Thank you for the clarification!
Well, when someone figures out a "standardized way for the controller chip to pass this info up" I hope they do it better than S.M.A.R.T. for disks.
There's also the issue that most USB cables are cheap junk that either is non compliant, or actively lying about it's capabilities. Which is hard to solve since anyone can sell USB cables without needing to pass testing.
I have made my peace with the fact that, unless I'm willing to replace otherwise perfectly functional items just to change the port, USB-C nirvana is a long way away at our house.
The Lightning holdouts:
* My wife and I both still have Lightning phones with plenty of life left in them. My 14Pro was actually replaced under AppleCare not quite a year ago, so it's nearly new!
* I have two sets of headphones that are Lightning: Airpods Pro and Max. Both still have great battery life despite years of use. If either failed tomorrow, I'd buy a new example, but I'm not spending that money without good reason.
* I have a full suite of Apple desktop peripherals (trackpad, mouse, and keyboard) that I swap in from time to time for variety. Like most Apple kit, they're all very well made and will last a long time -- and all charge by Lightning.
MicroUSB holds on, too:
* The battery charger for my bicycle's derailleurs is MicroUSB -- and SRAM still isn't selling a USB-C version, which is crazy. I could by an aftermarket one, but why?
* Likewise, the charger for my camera batteries is Micro.
* My bicycle headlight and taillight are both Micro.
* We have two Kindles that are both Micro.
All these things work just fine. The MicroUSB stuff is less annoying, since most of those things don't need to travel, but the Lightning holdouts are the ironic downside to Apple's generally high level of hardware quality.
I'm reminded of one my favorite south park bits, where Cartman freezes himself to wake up in a future that has a nintendo wii, only to discover the technology of that time doesn't support the plug-in format for the wii.
> My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe.
Yes, USB-C is very common in Europe, and indeed worldwide. And this is partly as a result of European policy:
> One common charging solution for all
> USB-C is the common port.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/electrica...
I agree with using a single ubiquitous power standard for small electronics and electrics. That’s almost what USB-C is these days. We need better labelling of cable capacities when there are 20w and 120w cables that at a glance look the same.
I was afraid this article was going to say one connector for everything when it said maximalist. If it had said to kill eSATA, SPF+, RJ-45, DisplayPort, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and a bunch of other ports it would have been far more controversial. I’ve seen people saying we don’t need card formats anymore because everything can just be an external USB-C flash drive. I’m glad this article wasn’t that maximalist.
For many things, though, a barrel jack is sufficient and doesn’t require the additional cost and complexity of USB-C. Barrel jacks have their own problems (is it inner positive or negative, what current is required, what’s the diameter of the inner and outer rings), but after that it’s as simple as it gets, both electrically and mechanically.
Diameter, length, voltage...
The USB spec does have labeling standards that are pretty clear. But uncertified temu junk obviously doesn't use them. There shouldn't even be such a thing as a 20w cable, the minimum with no emarker chip is 60w.
Any USB-C cable that isn't defective can handle enough power for anything up to a light duty laptop.
I think my only big complaint with USB C these days is that the sockets wear out quickly.
The charging port on my motorola phone got so loose that I frequently end up with an uncharged phone after a full night of "charging", just because the cable's own weight keeps yanking it out of the phone. The phone is not even 3 years old.
It would be nice to get a user replaceable USB port. Meanwhile, I'm not sure if those magnetic USB cables help this situation any bit or they further damage the port.
Have you checked the port for lint? I have found those disposable flossing sticks are an excellently sized, non-conductive edge of plastic you can use to dig in there and remove the bits preventing the cable from getting a good connection.
Are you sure it's not the cable? Theoretically, USB-C is designed in a way to prevent this exact thing from happening, where the springs that help retain the cable are in the _cable_, not the device.
(This is a frequently toted-out argument about USB-C superiority over Lightning.)
It's definitely the port too. I changed the cable and the connection is still loose. Not as bad as the previous cable, but still bad..
I recently ran into a problem with a device I bought online. It was refusing to charge and I thought it was dead. I contacted the manufacturer and they suggested the charging brick I was using was too powerful and to use a weaker one. Sure enough, a weaker one worked just fine.
So if you only bring a single power bank on a trip, make sure it can power all of your devices, especially if some of them are by third-party unknown manufacturers.
> But the benefits far outweigh the glitches. Using my USB-C cable tester, I can be sure all the cables I have can deliver the amount of power my devices need.
You can't be saying the first with a straight face if you then type the second about a specialized hardware testing device that no average consumer will ever use
Sure you can, the fancy tester is just geekery at this point. Any cheap Amazon Basics cable from the last few years will do 100w PD just fine.
The average consumer is never going to find most of the weird configurations that cause problems with USB-C cables (i.e. shit like wanting DP-altmode at 4K120hz over the same cable you are running 100w PD)
If you're so out of touch with the average consumer experience, read comments to this post (e.g. a charger turned out to be too powerful for the device/cable, wasn't there supposed to be negotiation baked in?) or any other popular post about usb-c
I don't know what to tell you man, I manage (and/or help manage) hundreds of USB-C devices, across work, family and friends, all using cheap cables and a random mix of cheap charger bricks and MacBook chargers. Apart from one charger brick that caught fire randomly, I haven't seen an issue in years.
You don't need to tell me anything, just look around beyond your "I", other "I"s have seen the issues and reported them for you to see
I am a USB-C maximalist too. Until I find a cable that doesn't do what it looks like it is supposed to do. Then I suffer from USB-C depression.
Yes, but some cheap USB-C devices only charge when the other end is USB-A.
This is not to spec, and to my knowledge this was a cost-cutting measure done by Chinese companies to cheapen manufacturing costs.
So for that reason I CANNOT simply rely on USB-C, I also have to have a USB-C-to-A converter and a USB-A-to-C cable, which is of course ridiculous. Thanks, China.
The "cost" they're cutting of course being 2 simple resistors, that cost absolutely nothing. So less of a executive decision and more a case of whoever designed the board didn't do a quick google search to figure out how the connector works.
Resistor cost is irrelevant. It's way more likely the device was updated from micro-usb to usb-c by the most junior person and it was missed. Then, any change carries some cost so that design is not changed later.
My Belkin power bank has that defect. Didn't believe it when I brought it home and discovered it
This year I grudgingly switched from an iPhone 13 Mini to a Pixel 10, largely to get the full integrated Pebble experience, but having USB-C has been a surprising and delightful upgrade to my home/travel experience.
For sources, I basically have an INUI battery bank and a 100W wall adapter, then everything is a USB-C sink: Lenovo X1, Pixel 10, Nintendo Switch, Sennheiser headphones
Had it not been Braun insisting not making a USB-C shaver I wouldn't have brought a Panasonic Lamdash Pro. But also thanks to that I discover Panasonic being better shaver overall.
The next phase I wish hotels all around the world provide USB-C Port by default with a few high power port of 60W Plus.
5 years ago it was really hard to find usb-c shaver. I could only find cheap ones; I got an Enchen boost for about $10 and it has served me well.
Braun is the Boeing of appliances. A once great company that's now been hollowed out by beancounters.
I love USB-C.
My ONLY problem with it is it's just a bit too small. That creates mechanical problems within the plug which are annoying. Plug it in and pull it out 1 too many times and eventually you get a loose connector cable that needs to be replaced.
Generally that's fine as all my chargers have replaceable cables, it's just an annoyance.
I get trouble with the female ports too
I have had a failed port on my laptop - fortunately the laptop can charge on two of its ports but it sucks to have lost one.
I have had a failed port on an iPad, and on my phone. Again I was fortunate to have a fairphone, so I just replaced the port.
I also find that I'm constantly stressed that the plug is going to snap.
That being said, in ten plus years of using USB-c.. this has never happened to me or anyone that I know.
It's actually kind of impressive, all things considered.
> A Pixel 8 Pro (running GrapheneOS)
> Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?
[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/review-pebblebee-clip-unive...
[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4079
I wish USB power strips were common and well made.
Like AC power strips, with a long cable and a body maybe 12" long with spaced out USB-C and a few USB-A ports.
I'd also like a version that sits on top of a desk and is angled towards you.
They make things like this for AC, but not USB.
(actually there are a few out there by no-name brands, but not many)
> actually there are a few out there
Because the usecase of charging many (think 5 or more) devices at the same time for hours is pretty rare.
There is already a robust market for chargers with a few connectors.
But I would like having a table with a plethora of sockets and cables available.
Lots of times, I come in and want to charge a bunch of things. Charge a few drone batteries + the controller. laptop, camera + camera batteries. charge things for a long drive, or a longer trip.
As to cables, sometimes I need USB-C, but there are lots of things that require other connectors like micro-usb, or a garmin watch. And sometimes cables go to other devices like wireless chargers.
> "What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?"
I usb-c modded my DSi a little while back and it's awesome. No worries about trying to find an out of date charger, just smash it in the same one my phone uses and it's fine. I used this one https://github.com/giltesa/Nintendo-DSi-USB-C-Mod and while the reassembly of the DSi was a nightmare, it works fine apart from that. Needed a bit of case modding with some side cutters though
Please, please, please: we NEED a magsafe version of USB C
Yes, you can buy adapters, but you end up w/device warts that don't work w/normal USB-C cords and my understanding that they are for the most part pretty dangerously out of spec
Magnetic coupling is an incredibly underutilized user experience tool
As much as it still pisses me off reading the Surface product head's comment that if you love USB-C then you love dongles -- while shipping a Mini DisplayPort connector -- I also think it's a waste that they didn't contribute their magnetic docking to the upstream spec.
We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")
I cannot recommend enough https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable to know what power and data capabilities your cables support.
> What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
Likely not, at least police won't care about location info. Theft is painful for many reasons, especially because most countries don't consider it "serious". And trying to find thieves yourself is a bad idea either.
Best advice is to be aware of your belongings at all times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42464753
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Someone's trying to talk about stuff they never used, experienced or googled ever.
But yeah game boy advance cable is $2.5 one day delivery here in Poland
Or you can insert a cheap USB-C adapter that converts the game boy socket to USB-C: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005008985278704.html
Yeah, but you need to know where to buy it, how to get it delivered etc. Getting a Gameboy Advance cable in Denmark is $18.5 and delivery might take a week or so.
Anyway, the exact charger for a GameBoy Colour doesn't exist as the GBC takes AA batteries and can't charge them even if you connect the power brick to it.
I think one thing that we have come to think as electronic consumers, or just consumers in general, is to expect the absolute best modern version of everything (plug, AI model, car...). I think it is pure conditioning and we forgot the simplicity and convenience of things just working even with apparent downsides relative to acme version. Could USB-C be better? Probably. Is just settling on a standard so you don't have to think about it preferable? I think so. Consider USB-C standardization as an expression of a specific system of values.
I love traveling with this Anker 160W charger, which has 3 USB-C ports.[0] I just found out about GaN technology last year and I can't believe it isn't more widespread. This one can charge two MacBook Pros and an iPhone at full speed.
[0] https://www.anker.com/products/a2687-anker-prime-charger-160...
I recently got the Anker 140W. I bought a MacBook, and apparently they come without a charger these days. So instead of buying an expensive Mac charger, I figured the widely recommended Anker 140W offers a lot more functionality for less money.
Gan chargers also die really fast.
It's because they try to market the power density claims. So they're smaller, which compromises the cooling, which makes them run hotter.
Yep, I gave up on them for now. One of my older laptops also needs a charger that has the third ground pin, lest the trackpad become laggy due to electrical joise. I couldn't find a compact gan charger with a three pin plug and the third actually being connected to ground.
I draw the line at cheap unbranded rechargeable toothbrush. I’d be too worried about fires with cheap cells. I’m happy to pay the premium for top brands for anything with lithium-ion batteries.
I go to Europe enough that I ditch the universal adapter and get a European ubs-c wall plug. A little more maximalist at home to store but more minimalist while traveling.
This USB-C toothbrush is something I've been looking for so I don't need to bring a special charger.
What would be even better is an electric toothbrush that doesn't contain a battery that would work with USB-PD plugged in. Why? Because I like putting my electric toothbrush in my checked bag because it's not essential, and technically you're not supposed to put lithium batteries in checked bags.
I too jumped on board with USB-C right away. Only downside is some hardware manufacturers use sloppy fitting USB ports. This was a major issue on my Touchbar Macbook Pro. Just slightly bumping the cable would lose sync with my dock.
I imagine whatever replaces USB-C in the future should fix this issue and make a more solid connection like USB-A. However USB-C could be the last wired interface as everything in the future will move to wireless.
Try a different cable and make sure the ports aren't full of rubbish. A good cable and clean port makes a fairly good connection with a solid click. Lot of time I've used a sewing needle to fish incredible amounts of pocket lint out of peoples phone ports and cables connect so much better.
I too love USB-C, though sadly my laptop only has two of those ports, and only one of them can do power delivery and display, so my only choices are between having a powered laptop with only the built-in display, or on battery with external display, or carrying an extra power brick..
My son plugged a cheap Switch controller into a cheap Switch charging block/dock to charge the controller. I don’t know who shot first but they’re all dead.
I love USB-C and I guess the device(s) weren’t to spec, but if it plugs, it ought to be safe. Kind of a surprising miss to be honest. Usually the cheap Amazon crap isn’t this bad.
What solution are you proposing though? As long as people can buy USB-C connectors on the open market, they're going to be able to create devices that horribly deviate from the spec in terrible ways. But it's better that they are available for people who do follow the spec in their designs, instead of, say, trying to tightly control parts availability.
A compliant device has quite a lot of protection against all sorts of faults (short to VBUS etc.) but if the device was non-compliant then all bets are off.
Who knows, the charger might have been so non-compliant that it could have somehow got mains onto the connector, which is potentially deadly so probably good if it's stopped working...
But at the end of the day you shouldn't judge a standard by dodgy and possibly dangerous electronics that completely fail to comply to that specification!
I thought Nintendo had designed a non-compliant USBC port on the Switch. The conspiracy theory was this was deliberate to strangle the third party accessory market.
The problem is just if you don't want to replace stuff that is not broken.
My BT in-ears charge with Micro USB, my 2 bike lights do, my flashlight does. The only downside of my Suunto watch is the proprietary charger cable (USB A on the other end)
And yeah, adapters exist of course, but still.
Same. Other devices I'm powering with USB-C:
- Vacuum, $???, Xiaomi, okay (hard to clean filter): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-vacuum-cleaner-p30/ (gift from friends)
- Beard trimmer, $90, Manscaped, great (but I just got it): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H
- Shaver, $20, Xiaomi, great: https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20... (purchased at Xiaomi store in Manila)
- Front door palm reader lock, $299, Eufy, good (slow charge speed mitigated by second built-in battery): https://www.amazon.com/eufy-FamiLock-Smart-Lock-Recognition/...
- Lighter, 10 for $66 after negotiating, Shenzhen Vasipor Technology Co, good but needs USB-A-to-USB-C cable: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-Powered-Recharge...
How funny, I also have the Xiaomi shaver, also bought while in BGC Manila. It's great, but does have a tendency to turn itself on in a packed bag
I agree. I'm looking at replacing my braun series 7 shaver, and I'd love if the replacement product had usb-c.
what really gets me though is products that support usb-c and then don't support PD, so you end up charging at a glacial pace. The most upsetting incidence of this I've seen is a powerbank charging via usb-c but not supporting PD. So slow!
Nothing worse then a product in 2026 with anything othat than Usb-C; it is a product failure and a no go if u ship anything like micro USB lol
I wish my Xbox Series S would work on USB-C. Some guy modded his with a buck convertor[0] and I wish there was an easier way in 2026.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Z1U3AYo1I
Well, the issue is USB-PD:
- 12 V × 5 A = 60 W
- 20 V × 5 A = 100 W
- 28 V × 5 A = 140 W
Meanwhile, that Xbox roughly needs 12 V at 7.5 A (let's say 90 W, but the internal supply is 165W) . So there is just no easy way to do it with USB-PD. Technically, you can make/buy some sort of USB-PD bench power supply to do this, but I'm unaware of anything on the market right now. One that I use (DPS-150) is limited to 5A output.
You're better off buying some chunky power bank (like Anker Solix) that has your regular wall plug outlets.
USB-PD 3.1 supports 240W, which is 48V. It does seem like there's not many chargers that support this, but they do exist.
It's such a rare beast that I didn't include it. Here is what one of these looks like: https://frame.work/products/power-adapter-240w at that point you might as well just take an Xbox power supply. Also, still going to have the problem that Xbox takes 12V and USB-PD just does not provide more than 5A at any voltage.
Doesn't help that many market their power adapters as such, but when you look deeper, it's something like 2x75W + 3x50W + 4x10W.
Recently bought a guitar amp which came with a cursed USB-C cable:
http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/IMG_20260709_123740.jpg
I'm curious, what amp is this? Is it for charging something? The end is TRRS, is there a DAC/ADC molded in the plug for audio interface purposes?
The amp is this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B098JTSJTH
As far as I could tell the cable is dumb. If you plug the cable into a regular USB-C socket (which I do not recommend) then the tip is +5V and the rest is ground.
In fact it's designed to plug into the plug marked "mobile" on the amp and the 3.5mm end goes into the line out of something else, providing AUX input, which is mixed straight through to the output of the amp (which is thankfully a regular 3.5mm headphone jack).
I guess they over-ordered USB-C sockets and decided to yolo it, or else for some reason only USB-C footprints fit into the space on the PCB. (But they still had to manufacture or were able to obtain these cursed cables ... it doesn't make a lot of sense.)
I have one of those cursed cables but then a 3.5 female socket! I have already lost it as well :/
This is cursed as hell. Thanks for sharing.
The tracking of your bag is great. But when it comes time for you to go retrieve it from the thief… how is that going to go? Are you going to wrestle with them?
Yay EU!
User replaceable batteries next: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098687 .
> Bug Bite Zapper
That's a problem that people need a solution for? To the point of packing an additional device for it when "traveling lightly"?
Id check for transient suppress on the charger. I had a expensive powerbank that was charging be damaged ( as in no longer worked) by a power transient.
Wtf they carry around the equipment a fairly well stocked electronics market would be proud of and see themselves as traveling lightly xS
Why is no one mentioning the masterpiece of the website!
Why do you need to verify my request, USB-C maximalist?
We typically use a universal plug brick and an extension cord with your native sockets. Voilà - you can plug in all your devices np.
Looks great. What are it's input ports and output ports? What's the brand and where did you get it from?
I have had so many laptops and other devices with unrepairable flaky loose ports that I am no longer a fan of the standard
USB-C standard sucks.
Supposedly would unify things, but can't find two cables that have same specs.
I'm still driven absolutely mad by how many devices are being released in 2026 that refuse to charge if they're connected to a port that negotiates USB Power Delivery. They don't fall back to 5V, they just don't charge at all.
Devices like this usually come with an A-to-C cable in the box and that's a warning sign, but an even more twisted version of this is when they come with a C-to-C cable and a Type C charger that does not support PD. That's the only combination they tested, and that's your problem now.
I now carry enough adapter cables that I can deliberately take PD out of the equation just to work around these devices.
The USB-C "hate" for the "one cable, much protocols and transports" you read on HN are just in the power-users bubble. For the rest of humanity, USB-C is a blessing with very few drawbacks, especially considering that the biggest usage by far is as a power cable. Data transport is a secondary usage that some people would probably never use in their lives.
The problem with many cheap USB-C devices is that they lack a required resistor on the USB-C pins, which means they won't charge from a compliant USB-C PD charger, only through a USB-A to USB-C cable.
It's idiotic that companies don't even test this properly and never read the specs, but here we are. Many cheap Chinese devices like toothbrushes will have this problem.
I've been using retractable USB-C cables with as many compact "connector-size" dongles as I can get my hands on.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FC1HSS9X/ for RJ45/Ethernet - these are super small and deliver full gigabit speed, for instance.
Similar things for video (tiny HDMI male adapter), and even my walkie-talkie (the Chinese market has come up with Motorola programming cable adapters that are just little dongles - https://www.ebay.com/itm/800104798120 - I can reprogram and even reload AES256 keys into my radio!).
PD triggers let my travel CPAP run off of battery (using a Transcend Micro - it only needs a 19V PD trigger and a solid 100W).
And of course... an Ecoflow solar hat and a battery I can shove in my back pocket for when I'm wandering around in the open air.
... and I just realized I can hook my Sony Reon Pocket cooler up to the solar hat...
Any recommendation for electric shavers that are USB-c ?
Keep in mind that you can buy cables that are USB-C on one end and whatever on the other end. I have multiple USB-C to 12V barrel jack cables for this reason specifically. No idea because you still need a special cable, but better than nothing.
https://www.meridiangrooming.com/collections/trimmers
more of a trimmer but this had an alright replaceable blade set up and has USB c. if you need the rotating heads I haven't seen one just yet though
Xiaomi has a few; I got their teensy travel one but more models: https://www.mi.com/global/product-list/personal-care/shaver/
Trimmer: I purchased this from Amazon USA for $70 on sale, now listed at $96. I am happy with it, but haven't had it long enough to comment on durability: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H "Manscaped Beard Hedger Men's Premium Beard Trimmer, 20 Length Adjustable Blade Wheel, Stainless Steel T-Blade for Precision Facial Hair Trimming, Cordless Waterproof Wet/Dry Clipper"
Shaver: I purchased this in-person at a Xiaomi store in Manila, very happy with it especially for the price ($20-ish): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20...; Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Skin-Touch-Waterproof... "Xiaomi Electric Shaver S200"
I personally hate USB-C as it's a poorly designed connector. It's flimsy and can easily broken yet at the same time difficult to insert.
I've had a couple be broken by getting "squashed" because there's no mechanical support because of the rounded edges so the metal easily pancakes.
They also seem to be easily damaged such they stop connecting through a failure mechanism I haven't quite figured out (my macbook air no longer reliably connects to them).
Finally, the ports don't have reliable insertion and they're sharp, so they scratch up whatever device they're on as people repeatedly miss the insertion position resulting in surface scuffing. Phones especially should not be using them because of this issue and should be using something like lightning that did not have any sharp edges which avoided most scratching.
USB-C is great for charging, which is what most of these are. Especially if it's replacing Lightning which is the worst port of all time.
USB-C is not so great for PC peripherals because of how hard/pricey it is to get more of those ports and how unclear the capabilities are. That's why so many peripherals are still USB-A. Some keyboards even have USB-C input but come with an adapter to -A because they know that's how you're plugging it into your PC. Also have never had a reliable video dongle, so either the display has USB-C or it's gonna be annoying. So uh yeah HDMI is great on my MBP, please add a USB-A port too now.
I like the fact that we're aligning on one connector but it's hard for me to praise USB-C in and of itself. The connector feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not, and especially on lower-end devices.
The charging standards, voltages, and data rates, are frustrating because they're almost never labeled. This is especially true on low end, cables, and device devices. The worst offenders will only charge with a USB-A to C cable with low voltage, which is not what I hope for when I see a USB-C port on a device.
>feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not
No end to the official Apple lighting cables that died on me over the years, and across iphones and ipads.
We'll we ever see usbc in TVs?
For video input or power supply? I doubt we would ever see it for power supply.
For video input it seems almost deliberate since the TV brands all benefit from licensing out HDMI and forcing it to be the only way to connect to a TV.
> No. One charger. One cable. One standard.
USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.
There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:
To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.
Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.
usb maxxing
> Using my USB-C cable tester, I can be sure all the cables I have can deliver the amount of power my devices need.
Wait until they discover off brand usb cable with incorrect e-marker.
> No. One charger. One cable. One standard.
Except this isn't true. Different power delivery capabilities, different standards. Some can transfer data, some can transfer 4K, some support quick charge, others don't. I love USB C but different cable standards all looking identical is infuriating sometimes
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I recently discovered you can get a usb-C travel bidet, in case you're looking for a way to be even more maximal. Recommended.
USB-C connectors are so flimsy compared to USB-A, it feels like a real step backward. It barely takes any pressure on the cable to make my charging cable fall out, or to rotate it just enough that it loses connection.
Not to be that guy, but the USB-C specification requires an extraction force of 8–20 N for a new connector, measured on the sixth unplugging cycle after five conditioning cycles. After 10,000 insertion/removal cycles, the permitted range is 6–20 N.
Equivalent hanging mass:
So the problem you have is likely one of your manufacturer not producing equipment suitable to pass the USB-C spec.As an aside, the specified extraction force for USB A is:
So pretty much the same, in some cases even less.I don't have problems with USB-C connectors per se. I think HDMI is worse in terms of durability.
Well it's a common manufacturer problem then, because USB-C connections are universally floppy and loose.
Are they? I can easily dangle my Phone of my USB-C cable. Maybe this is a regional problem. Within the EU I rarely ever had any mechanical problem with USB-C, where applied reasonably.
It's because your port or cable are filled with pocket lint. Get a sewing needle and fish it out and it will connect again.
No, it's because USB-C is physically smaller and shallower. You can visually compare them and see that
The cable will not just fall out. On my clean iphone I can hang the phone from the cable and lightly swing it around without it disconnecting. If it's just falling out it's because something is mechanically wrong or it's full of gunk.