People talk about the messy USB-C standard, but I think there's another related problem that has nothing to do with any specific issue in the standard. There's

People talk about the messy USB-C standard, but I think there's another related problem that has nothing to do with any specific issue in the standard. There's just an inevitable economic trade-off with having a port that supports 40gb/s that many users also want to use for multiple cheap peripherals that only need a couple of kb/s like a mouse or keyboard, or perhaps a cheap usb 1.1 thumb drive that only needs ~10mb/s. That's 7 orders of magnitude overkill (or 3.5 orders of magnitude for the thumb drive). I do think a potentially better trade-off for Apple would be to have like 8 usb-c ports instead of 4 where half of them are slower usb 3.0 (or even 2.1) usb-c ports, and come up with some easy to understand user convention of labeling high speed usb-c and low speed usb-c. For some reason where we've landed in the last few years (and not just from Apple but from other PC brands, from usb hubs, from multi-port power bricks, etc.) is that USB-C ports are almost always much faster than corresponding USB-A ports but there are always fewer ports available. AFAIK you still can't find a usb-c hub with more than like 3 ports on it. So it never became a drop-in replacement for USB-A for cheaper devices that don't need a lot of bandwidth, even though I believe the standard does allow for slower versions like usb 2.1 over usb-c.