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Honestly, the USB-IF guidance is pretty sane here. The "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1" or whatever simply should not appear anywhere in the consumer space. Everyth
by zokier 8y ago
Honestly, the USB-IF guidance is pretty sane here. The "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1" or whatever simply should not appear anywhere in the consumer space. Everything should be labeled and using "SuperSpeed USB X Gbps".
I'd go as far to say that articles like this exactly help keep the confusion up because the way they keep bringing up the term "USB 3.2" etc as something that consumers should care about, when it is something that should be avoided.
> What this branding meant is that many manufacturers say that a device supports "USB 3.1" even if it's only a "USB 3.1 Gen 1" device running at 5Gb/s. Meanwhile, other manufacturers do the sensible thing: they use "USB 3.0" to denote 5Gb/s devices and reserve "USB 3.1" for 10Gb/s parts.
Both manufacturers are doing the wrong thing: referring to the USB standard version at all. Devices should not say that they support "USB 3.0" or "USB 3.1 gen 1". They should say they support "Superspeed USB" or "Superspeed USB 10 Gbps".
Superspeed might be a silly name, but the branding there is almost perfectly unambiguous, and nicely explicit about the data rate in a way that "USB 3.2 gen 2x2" is not.
What is the most surprising is that USB-IF isn't able to keep the vendors in line despite being industry consortium and owning all the relevant trademarks and other IP. They really should start enforcing their policies more aggressively.
- zokier 8y agoI just want to add that this is something anyone can help with to make the situation clearer. Just drop "USB 3" in all it's different forms from your verbiage, and start using "SuperSpeed USB" instead. I bet if everyone on HN would switch then that would already make a difference in the tech community and eventually trickle to the general populace.
- vatueil 8y agoThat's really no excuse for USB-IF's terrible versioning scheme. "SuperSpeed" is useless in terms of branding because even technical users, much less your average consumer, have no idea what that means. Is "SuperSpeed" faster than "High Speed" or "Full Speed"? (Answer: "Full Speed" < "High Speed" < "SuperSpeed".) "20 Gbps USB" is better than "USB 3.2 Gen 2x2", sure, but that's not exactly a high bar. It just means USB has failed so badly with version numbers that people would rather just quote a spec figure. Wishing for everyone to switch over to "SuperSpeed" and "SuperSpeed+" will not make it so. Fact is, both users and manufacturers are accustomed to "USB 3.0", "USB 3.1", etc. And it's not hard to see why people prefer simple version numbers as opposed to meaningless labels. USB-IF should have simply released USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 without this ridiculous business of retroactively renaming older versions.
- zokier 8y agoThe USB versioning makes perfect sense when you think it as the version of the standard, literally the document itself, which encompasses all the modes. And it does make sense to have single standard instead of having the information scattered across dozen historical standards that have been partially superceded. I would point out that this is not a new thing. The situation was exactly the same with USB 2.0, technically it was perfectly correct to call compliant full speed device "USB 2.0", because 2.0 did indeed include full speed mode (as does presumably all the USB 3.x standards)