Stunning and brave!

I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…

my 5680 has absolutely nothing. Checking online I found that the right one is a usb-c 3.2 and the 2 left ones are TB4. IIRC they all support DisplayPort and all support being used as the power input (165W charger), not sure for PD and fast charging a cell/tablet…

The only devices that don’t have at least Thunderbolt 3 on all ports do use the Thunderbolt logo on the ones that support it, except the short-lived 12-inch MacBook (non-Pro, non-Air). Basically, for data transfer:

• If it’s a 12-inch MacBook, the single USB-C port doesn’t support Thunderbolt, and only supports USB 3.1 Gen 1.
• In all other devices, if the ports are unmarked, they all support Thunderbolt 3 or higher
• If the ports are marked with Thunderbolt symbols, those ports support Thunderbolt but the unmarked ports on the same computer don’t.

For power delivery, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop supports at least first generation USB-PD.

For display, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop (and maybe even the desktops) supports DisplayPort alt mode.

It’s annoying but not actually that hard to remember in the wild.

Okay, the old ones that apparently have both do have the Thunderbolt symbol on the ones that are, though, so what’s the problem?

1080p at 60 Hz is 4.4 gigabit

That sounds like a dedicated charging cable. So yeah, they will (if at all) only transfer data slowly and not support any extras features like displayport.

They’re bad because manufacturers want to pass their usb 2.0 gear as “usb 3.0 compliant”, which it technically is, and their usb 3.0 gear as “usb 3.2” because 3.2 Gen 1x1 is also 5gbps.

Also the whole alternate mode is awesome, but cheap hub chips don’t bother trying to support it and the only people who do are the laptop ports so they can save $.40 on a separate hdmi port.

And don’t get me started on all the USB-c chargers that only put out 1.5a because it’s just a normal 7805 on the back end.

They come to me for advice when those other workgroups changed some names retroactively again

Can you give a specific example of this?

I’d love to believe all your ethos arguments if you could give me some logos.

There’s even some devices charged with USB C that can’t be charged with a PD charger and need an A to C cable

Phones with qualcomm chips briefly had their own proprietary fast charging standards that were not a USB standard. You are unlikely to be using those devices in 2024. But is it USB-IF’s fault manufacturers tried to create proprietary standards to collect royalties?

Additionally they renamed the USB 3.0 standard which has been established for over a decade to USB 3.1 Gen 1 which is completely unnecessary and just serves to confuse

No they didn’t?

The 5Gbps transfer rate introduced in 2008 is called “Superspeed” and it always has been.

USB X.X is not a port or a transfer speed. It’s the standard (ie a technical whitepaper). The standard is updated as time marches on and new features are added.

The standard was largely understandable with USB 3.0 generally being blue or at least a color other than black and on decently modern devices USB 2.0 would be black.

This was never a requirement, but it was nice to know which Type-A ports had 8 pins vs 4-pins.

With USB-C indication has just about gone out the window and what used to be a very simple to understand standard has now become nearly impossible to understand without having researched every device and cable you interact with.

For the most part you just plug it in and it works. If you need something specific like an external GPU connection, you can’t use your phone charging cable, sure. Is that really that big of a deal?

The problem is that there are too many separate dimensions to define the tiers.

In terms of data signaling speed and latency, you have the basic generations of USB 1.x, 2.0, 3.x, and 4, with Thunderbolt 3 essentially being the same thing as USB4, and Thunderbolt 4 adding on some more minimum requirements.

On top of that, you have USB-PD, which is its own standard for power delivery, including how the devices conduct handshakes over a certified cable.

And then you have the standards for not just raw data speed, but also what other modes are supported, for information to be seamlessly tunneled through the cable and connection in a mode that carries signals other than the data signal spec for USB. Most famously, there’s the DisplayPort Alt Mode for driving display data over a USB-C connection with a DP-compatible monitor. But there’s also an analog audio mode so that the cable and port passes along analog data to or from microphones or speakers.

Each type of cable, too, carries different physical requirements, which also causes a challenge on how long the cable can be and still work properly. That’s why a lot of the cables that support the latest and greatest data and power standards tend to be short. A longer cable might be useful, but could come at the sacrifice of not supporting certain types of functions. I personally have a long cable that supports USB-PD but can’t carry thunderbolt data speeds or certain types of signals, but I like it because it’s good for plugging in a charger when I’m not that close to an outlet. But I also know it’s not a good cable for connecting my external SSD, which would be bottlenecked at USB 2.0 speeds.

So the tiers themselves aren’t going to be well defined.

It has to be optional to remain a “Universal” spec.

If it had more requirements, it would be more cumbersome to implement and device manufacturers would come up with completely different, completely incompatible cables and ports (a la Apple’s lightning) that would cause you even more headaches.

People do not want to be limited to 1m long cords or only have thick and stiff Thunderbolt3 cords with 20 different conductors for a wired mouse.

Minimum specs like you are proposing just make the standard less useful and would lead to more competing specs that aren’t compatible at all (a la lightning cables).

To be a truly “universal” spec, flexibility is king.

Firewire was phenomenal for external hard drives. The speed was almost as fast as the drives so you were rarely limited by the port.

Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn’t require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don’t notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.

Yeah, the ZIP drive was just starting to take off when the Internet killed needing a sneaker net (at least of that size). Add in CD-ROM drives which you needed anyway. And good night.

I had a FireWire hard drive! I remember I bought specifically the enclosure that supported both standards since my motherboard had a FireWire port and on paper it was faster than usb! Too bad the HDD was as slow as molasses

Nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#"China_Export"

stop

stop

Behind the scenes, here’s what those labels correspond to:

• USB 5Gbps: USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1

• USB 10Gbps: USB 3.1 Gen 2, 3.2 Gen 2×1, and 3.2 Gen 1×2

• USB 20Gbps: USB 3.2 Gen 2×2

• USB 40Gbps: USB4’s initial version as currently shipping

That’s cool. But even though it finally adds simplicity, it’s still yet another renaming of the same things.

Here’s a snippet from an article from 2019:

The upcoming 20 Gb/s USB 3.2 connection, which offers twice the speeds of the previous iteration, will be known as ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2x2’. Its predecessor, ‘USB 3.1’ will be rebranded to ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2’, while ‘USB 3.0’, which ran at 5 Gb/s speeds, will be termed ‘USB 3.2 Gen 1’.

Reading that I want to shoot myself, and even the latest change, which probably is a good one, drives me slightly mad due to the history of renaming everything so many times.

clear text labels

The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know it.

The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there’s more push for using symbols, which…can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.

Maybe “STOP” or “ON” and “OFF” or something aren’t that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. “ON”, “OFF”, “STOP”, “YES”, “NO”, “CANCEL”, “POWER”, “ERROR”, “RESET”, “UP”, “DOWN”, maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has “CERTIFIED”, hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?

Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that’d be for the US market. Okay, it’s easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can’t recognize a single Chinese character.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I speak English. I’d rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don’t feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.

I’d also add that while I have rarely had problems with it – only came up with one USB-powered analog audio mixer that had less-than-amazing power circuitry and bled noise from dirty power being provided by USB through into the audio signal, and where I put it on a dedicated charger – USB power can be stupendously dirty. I was watching some guy with an oscilloscope investigate various devices, and all those sensitive devices are accepting all kinds of craziness in terms of power. I’m surprised that USB power sources aren’t required to provide some hard guarantees on what they can do in terms of load and response.