9 ms·

What's optional? That's the most important thing to know is what's optional in the spec. That could make it great or a major pain. I'm referring to how many f

What's optional? That's the most important thing to know is what's optional in the spec. That could make it great or a major pain. I'm referring to how many features the specification defines as "optional" for manufactures and that the USB organization requires for logos. This is why even USB-C is a nightmare. Consider a USB-C cable or device port. It could be charge only, data only, monitor support. There are even more permutations and sub-features. Oh, you wanted charging and found one that has it? Know how much power it enough or overkill? It could provide 15 watts, 100 watt, etc. Think you'll just google the specs page? Sure, they never miss providing any of these details or make any mistakes. Whether USB4 means one thing with nothing optional (or at least a very small number of combinations), will probably determine how much you like it or get annoyed by it. HP even made it worse with a laptop USB-C port that could technically be used for certain docking functionality but tried to fud-deny allowing it for marketing reasons.

elagost 8y ago
I very much agree with you. I've deliberately avoided USB-C for this very reason. It's not that hard - I don't buy new gear very often, and I'm still using an old 5th-gen iPod every day - but there will be a day when I don't have much of a choice anymore. Bluetooth headphones, external hard drives, game controllers, media players, phones... The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! A Google engineer for a while was testing cables and not infrequently they worked poorly, not at all, or outright fried devices. Granted this was years ago, but now with DisplayPort and Thunberbolt 3 over the same connector, the situation has become even more vague. https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/comments/3robzo/google_spreadsheet_for_usbc_cables_with_benson/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/comments/3robzo/google_spre...
- cesarb 8y ago
  > The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! The miswiring that bricked his device, swapping GND and VBUS, could also happen with older USB plugs. There's nothing specific to USB-C about it, USB plugs have a defined polarity for the power pins since the very first version of the standard.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Mitigating hardware damage is also the responsibility of the device manufacturers. Any external cable carrying power could experience a short circuit due to a fault. All USB hosts are required to limit current to deal with that. If they fail, it isn't the cable's fault.
  - Retric 8y ago
    USB-C can send significantly more power, which makes it harder to protect devices in these cases.
    - nickysielicki 8y ago
      It only happens after negotiation, so the higher potential wattage plays no role here. You'd need both a bad cable and an out-of-spec wall wart.
      - inetknght 8y ago
        Do you think that combination of circumstances is rare enough that we shouldn't wonder about it?
        nickysielicki 8y ago
        More or less. Either scenario, considered alone, is enough to ruin a downstream device. I don't think it's reasonable to worry about the combination of the two as different from either alone.
      - BeeOnRope 8y ago
        The failure can happen after negotiation, right?
        nickysielicki 8y ago
        Yeah that's true, the cable could bend and cause a short after the negotiation, but how is a specification supposed to protect against this?
- rstuart4133 8y ago
  > The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! A Google engineer for a while was testing cables and not infrequently they worked poorly, not at all, or outright fried devices. No spec is going to look good if you start blaming the spec when manufacturers sell things that don't conform to it. That is what the Google engineer found: these cables didn't conform to the spec. If you are going to do that then bricking the device is the least of your worries as USB is clearly to blame for this as well: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-27/knock-off-usb-charger-to-blame-for-womans-death/5555138 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-27/knock-off-usb-charger... The real USB 3.2 issue is different. As a way of telling the user what they are buying, the USB 3.2 2x2 scheme is so bad it's almost comical. They could have insisted every device be marked with the maximum it actually supported. I guess they thought making something like this mandatory: 20G/3A/60W+dp+tb for a device that supported 20G bit/sec, 3 amps and 30 watts with display port and thunderbolt pass through would use so much space there would be no place left for the market to earn their wages. Or something.
xenadu02 8y ago
Everything is optional. USB-IF is for manufacturers, most of whom want to do whatever the cheapest quickest thing is. The user experience absolutely comes second to manufacturing cost and marking convenience. The naming confusion exists because cheap manufacturers don't want to be branded as the "lesser" product or be offering a "lesser" computer. The confusion aids them. They can ship a slightly cheaper computer or device but market it as USB 3.2 Gen whatever, despite it basically being a USB 2 device. All features will be optional because mandating features means the chip costs $0.02 more, the cable they slap in the box would be more expensive, etc and they don't want to pay it.
- _wmd 8y ago
  If only it were just about cost, comprehensiveness might be a better way to look at it. I really don't want my laptop's keyboard and trackpad to require clocks to drive my clicks and keystrokes at 40Gbps, that's just going to murder batteries and bank accounts for no reason whatsoever. So you're left with a choice in this wonderful alternative non-optional world: some expensive temperature controlled oscillator with accompanying nuclear power plant integrated into every mouse, with a dual core processor just in case the host wishes to speak mouse-over-Thunderbolt, with a 240V connector on the mouse just in case the host wants to charge from it, or mice living on a separate low throughput bus where such requirements don't exist. We had that already, it was called the 1970s-1990s, it was an even bigger mess than what we have now, and is exactly what USB's mandate is to avoid It's not like this is a new problem to USB, it's been a tri-modal specification from the outset to cope with completely different requirements of the peripherals that were to be unified, these horrible recent complexity outcomes are just a natural extension from the early days. It wasn't so long ago that every budget peripheral manufacturer outside of e.g. printers and mice were forced to bundle expansion cards to implement custom busses just so you could talk to their e.g. scanner. This was still the reality of things as late as 1995 or so. Here we didn't just have custom connectors on the back of the machine, but custom cards that had to be installed to implement those connectors. In the 24 years since 1995, outside of display interfaces I count only 2 major new busses to date -- Firewire and USB. That sounds like a success to me
  - 8y ago
microcolonel 8y ago
I think there needs to be some brand for the full-fat port with everything connected to a certain standard.
userbinator 8y ago
The only way you can make a specification like USB "universal" is for parts of it to be optional. No one is going to build a USB mouse with a 40Gbit link speed, for example.
- p1mrx 8y ago
  What if it's a high DPI gaming mouse?
  - tempestn 8y ago
    Even if there were some hypothetical mouse that needed that kind of speed (there isn't[1]), it's irrelevant to your parent's actual point. [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/193866/are-there-any-benefits-from-plugging-your-mouse-into-a-usb-3.0-port/ https://www.howtogeek.com/193866/are-there-any-benefits-from...
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Back-of-the-envelope calculation: if you send a 100 byte status update 100,000 times per second, that's just 80 Mbits/s. To saturate a 40Gbit/s link you could send a 1kB update every 200 nanoseconds (that's 5MHz), assuming perfect efficiency.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Even then it could make do with much much much slower rates -- those are monitor rates, and we're talking about a mouse here (hi dpi or not).
- michaelt 8y ago
  Right, but if it weren't for the USB forum's BS, that mouse would use a 12 Mbit/s link and be labelled "USB 1" But no, thanks to their long-established BS you slap a USB C connector on that 12Mbit/s connection and congrats, you've got a USB 4 mouse.
  - cesarb 8y ago
    AFAIK, a 12 Mbit/s link on a USB-C connector is still called "USB 2.0 low speed". It won't surprise me if that keeps being the case even after the USB 4 standard.
xorfish 8y ago
USB-A can be 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 Gen 1, 3.1 Gen 2. Same for USB-C. It is just a standardized connector with a defined pinout. If you force the standard to always provide 15 watt, then how will you do that on phones or a raspberry pi or other low power devices? If you force SuperSpeed or SuperSpeed+ over the connector then you won't see it on budget or midrange phones. It makes perfect sense to differentiate between the supported protocols and the connector itself. Otherwise you would need a ton of different connectors that you may never need on your device.
majewsky 8y ago
Market opportunity: A USB-stick-shaped device that, when you plug it into a USB-C port, probes the port and lights up LEDs to show the port's capabilities. [x] 5 Gbps [x] 10 Gbps [ ] 20 Gbps [ ] Power Delivery [x] DisplayPort Alternate Mode And so on.
- asafira 8y ago
  Even better if it is actually a usb stick, too.
- mnx 8y ago
  Yeah until the spec changes/expands and you now need another device to tell you whether that stick is up-to-date on the spec :D
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    As long as the actual port remains identical the widget could be made up to date with a software upgrade.
    - raducu 8y ago
      You cannot add a led with a software update :)
      - egwynn 8y ago
        Not with that attitude you can’t!
      - Kihashi 8y ago
        Sure, but you could work around that. Even with a fixed amount of LEDs, you have on, off, blinking, and color to work with.
      - Yetanfou 8y ago
        You can add another word or symbol on an OLED screen though, which is what I'd assume a widget like this would use.
coldtea 8y ago
>This is why even USB-C is a nightmare. Consider a USB-C cable or device port. It could be charge only, data only, monitor support. There are even more permutations and sub-features. Oh, you wanted charging and found one that has it? Know how much power it enough or overkill? It could provide 15 watts, 100 watt, etc. Think you'll just google the specs page? Sure, they never miss providing any of these details or make any mistakes. They should be pressured (by law) to include all these details in a simple form (akin to nutritional labels in foods), either on the cable itself or on a sticker attached to it. Ideally there should also be a few profiles, so that you know if you want a cable for your monitor, you get e.g. a "USB4 / profile 1" (and the cable could mark the profile it belongs to on top).
- fendy3002 8y ago
  Or like the good ol rca cables: color, or . Add some stripes in the head of usb or similar and add some stripes with meaningful color.
Mirioron 8y ago
Why is USB-C like that? Is it because all smartphones require USB chargers in the EU and so everything that manufacturers might want has to be in the one cable spec?

elagost 8y ago

I very much agree with you. I've deliberately avoided USB-C for this very reason. It's not that hard - I don't buy new gear very often, and I'm still using an old 5th-gen iPod every day - but there will be a day when I don't have much of a choice anymore. Bluetooth headphones, external hard drives, game controllers, media players, phones... The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! A Google engineer for a while was testing cables and not infrequently they worked poorly, not at all, or outright fried devices. Granted this was years ago, but now with DisplayPort and Thunberbolt 3 over the same connector, the situation has become even more vague. https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/comments/3robzo/google_spreadsheet_for_usbc_cables_with_benson/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/comments/3robzo/google_spre...

cesarb 8y ago
> The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! The miswiring that bricked his device, swapping GND and VBUS, could also happen with older USB plugs. There's nothing specific to USB-C about it, USB plugs have a defined polarity for the power pins since the very first version of the standard.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Mitigating hardware damage is also the responsibility of the device manufacturers. Any external cable carrying power could experience a short circuit due to a fault. All USB hosts are required to limit current to deal with that. If they fail, it isn't the cable's fault.
- Retric 8y ago
  USB-C can send significantly more power, which makes it harder to protect devices in these cases.
  - nickysielicki 8y ago
    It only happens after negotiation, so the higher potential wattage plays no role here. You'd need both a bad cable and an out-of-spec wall wart.
    - inetknght 8y ago
      Do you think that combination of circumstances is rare enough that we shouldn't wonder about it?
      - nickysielicki 8y ago
        More or less. Either scenario, considered alone, is enough to ruin a downstream device. I don't think it's reasonable to worry about the combination of the two as different from either alone.
    - BeeOnRope 8y ago
      The failure can happen after negotiation, right?
      - nickysielicki 8y ago
        Yeah that's true, the cable could bend and cause a short after the negotiation, but how is a specification supposed to protect against this?
rstuart4133 8y ago
> The worst part about USB-C is that it can be implemented so wrong it bricks your device! A Google engineer for a while was testing cables and not infrequently they worked poorly, not at all, or outright fried devices. No spec is going to look good if you start blaming the spec when manufacturers sell things that don't conform to it. That is what the Google engineer found: these cables didn't conform to the spec. If you are going to do that then bricking the device is the least of your worries as USB is clearly to blame for this as well: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-27/knock-off-usb-charger-to-blame-for-womans-death/5555138 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-27/knock-off-usb-charger... The real USB 3.2 issue is different. As a way of telling the user what they are buying, the USB 3.2 2x2 scheme is so bad it's almost comical. They could have insisted every device be marked with the maximum it actually supported. I guess they thought making something like this mandatory: 20G/3A/60W+dp+tb for a device that supported 20G bit/sec, 3 amps and 30 watts with display port and thunderbolt pass through would use so much space there would be no place left for the market to earn their wages. Or something.

xenadu02 8y ago

Everything is optional. USB-IF is for manufacturers, most of whom want to do whatever the cheapest quickest thing is. The user experience absolutely comes second to manufacturing cost and marking convenience. The naming confusion exists because cheap manufacturers don't want to be branded as the "lesser" product or be offering a "lesser" computer. The confusion aids them. They can ship a slightly cheaper computer or device but market it as USB 3.2 Gen whatever, despite it basically being a USB 2 device. All features will be optional because mandating features means the chip costs $0.02 more, the cable they slap in the box would be more expensive, etc and they don't want to pay it.

_wmd 8y ago
If only it were just about cost, comprehensiveness might be a better way to look at it. I really don't want my laptop's keyboard and trackpad to require clocks to drive my clicks and keystrokes at 40Gbps, that's just going to murder batteries and bank accounts for no reason whatsoever. So you're left with a choice in this wonderful alternative non-optional world: some expensive temperature controlled oscillator with accompanying nuclear power plant integrated into every mouse, with a dual core processor just in case the host wishes to speak mouse-over-Thunderbolt, with a 240V connector on the mouse just in case the host wants to charge from it, or mice living on a separate low throughput bus where such requirements don't exist. We had that already, it was called the 1970s-1990s, it was an even bigger mess than what we have now, and is exactly what USB's mandate is to avoid It's not like this is a new problem to USB, it's been a tri-modal specification from the outset to cope with completely different requirements of the peripherals that were to be unified, these horrible recent complexity outcomes are just a natural extension from the early days. It wasn't so long ago that every budget peripheral manufacturer outside of e.g. printers and mice were forced to bundle expansion cards to implement custom busses just so you could talk to their e.g. scanner. This was still the reality of things as late as 1995 or so. Here we didn't just have custom connectors on the back of the machine, but custom cards that had to be installed to implement those connectors. In the 24 years since 1995, outside of display interfaces I count only 2 major new busses to date -- Firewire and USB. That sounds like a success to me
- 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago

I think there needs to be some brand for the full-fat port with everything connected to a certain standard.

userbinator 8y ago

The only way you can make a specification like USB "universal" is for parts of it to be optional. No one is going to build a USB mouse with a 40Gbit link speed, for example.

p1mrx 8y ago
What if it's a high DPI gaming mouse?
- tempestn 8y ago
  Even if there were some hypothetical mouse that needed that kind of speed (there isn't[1]), it's irrelevant to your parent's actual point. [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/193866/are-there-any-benefits-from-plugging-your-mouse-into-a-usb-3.0-port/ https://www.howtogeek.com/193866/are-there-any-benefits-from...
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Back-of-the-envelope calculation: if you send a 100 byte status update 100,000 times per second, that's just 80 Mbits/s. To saturate a 40Gbit/s link you could send a 1kB update every 200 nanoseconds (that's 5MHz), assuming perfect efficiency.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Even then it could make do with much much much slower rates -- those are monitor rates, and we're talking about a mouse here (hi dpi or not).
michaelt 8y ago
Right, but if it weren't for the USB forum's BS, that mouse would use a 12 Mbit/s link and be labelled "USB 1" But no, thanks to their long-established BS you slap a USB C connector on that 12Mbit/s connection and congrats, you've got a USB 4 mouse.
- cesarb 8y ago
  AFAIK, a 12 Mbit/s link on a USB-C connector is still called "USB 2.0 low speed". It won't surprise me if that keeps being the case even after the USB 4 standard.

xorfish 8y ago

USB-A can be 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 Gen 1, 3.1 Gen 2. Same for USB-C. It is just a standardized connector with a defined pinout. If you force the standard to always provide 15 watt, then how will you do that on phones or a raspberry pi or other low power devices? If you force SuperSpeed or SuperSpeed+ over the connector then you won't see it on budget or midrange phones. It makes perfect sense to differentiate between the supported protocols and the connector itself. Otherwise you would need a ton of different connectors that you may never need on your device.

majewsky 8y ago

Market opportunity: A USB-stick-shaped device that, when you plug it into a USB-C port, probes the port and lights up LEDs to show the port's capabilities. [x] 5 Gbps [x] 10 Gbps [ ] 20 Gbps [ ] Power Delivery [x] DisplayPort Alternate Mode And so on.

asafira 8y ago
Even better if it is actually a usb stick, too.
mnx 8y ago
Yeah until the spec changes/expands and you now need another device to tell you whether that stick is up-to-date on the spec :D
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  As long as the actual port remains identical the widget could be made up to date with a software upgrade.
  - raducu 8y ago
    You cannot add a led with a software update :)
    - egwynn 8y ago
      Not with that attitude you can’t!
    - Kihashi 8y ago
      Sure, but you could work around that. Even with a fixed amount of LEDs, you have on, off, blinking, and color to work with.
    - Yetanfou 8y ago
      You can add another word or symbol on an OLED screen though, which is what I'd assume a widget like this would use.

coldtea 8y ago

>This is why even USB-C is a nightmare. Consider a USB-C cable or device port. It could be charge only, data only, monitor support. There are even more permutations and sub-features. Oh, you wanted charging and found one that has it? Know how much power it enough or overkill? It could provide 15 watts, 100 watt, etc. Think you'll just google the specs page? Sure, they never miss providing any of these details or make any mistakes. They should be pressured (by law) to include all these details in a simple form (akin to nutritional labels in foods), either on the cable itself or on a sticker attached to it. Ideally there should also be a few profiles, so that you know if you want a cable for your monitor, you get e.g. a "USB4 / profile 1" (and the cable could mark the profile it belongs to on top).

fendy3002 8y ago
Or like the good ol rca cables: color, or . Add some stripes in the head of usb or similar and add some stripes with meaningful color.

Mirioron 8y ago

Why is USB-C like that? Is it because all smartphones require USB chargers in the EU and so everything that manufacturers might want has to be in the one cable spec?