I feel like this is a temporary state of affairs that falls into the bucket of "regrettable but unavoidable". Over time I think the standard march of mass manuf

I feel like this is a temporary state of affairs that falls into the bucket of "regrettable but unavoidable". Over time I think the standard march of mass manufacture, refinement, miniaturization, and so on will result in every single USB-C plug on a general purpose device (like a notebook) doing the max of the standard. They'll all be Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 or whatever, and thus able to do everything. Cables production will also scale up and become cheaper, and at some point every single cable one would typically find will be capable of handling whatever. There aren't any fundamental scaling blockers, like some dependency on rare metals or something. But it's still costly at the start of the refinement cycle, and it's hard to bootstrap without allowing manufacturers to do cheaper cut down feature versions to get the ball rolling. It needs to provide some marginal value in the mean time and real promise, even if it means some higher overhead in the establishment phase. So for someone buying a new device in 2025 or 2030, USB-C may still exist but I think issues with what ports do what will be lessened. We already see devices like Macbook Pros where all the USB-C ports are functional, and while those are on the higher end of pricing they aren't stratospheric enterprise territory either. I suspect it won't take that many hardware generations for that sort of thing to spread downward. The question is if that's worth the immediate trouble. And at least for USB-C, I personally think it'll be worth it. It's a good connector, and the improved capabilities are valuable. We've had USB-A for a long, long time, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that USB-C will stick around similarly. There was demand for something more compact and reversible with other QoL benefits along for the ride, and I think it's worth the upfront cost to get the whole industry onboard something that can converge rather then ending up with various manufacturers going their own routes.