4 ms·

My main pain point with USB-C is all the confusion and missing specs. Often, advertising uses Thunderbolt and USB-C interchangeably. It is not. Don’t label my U

by fuzzy2 5y ago

My main pain point with USB-C is all the confusion and missing specs. Often, advertising uses Thunderbolt and USB-C interchangeably. It is not. Don’t label my USB-C + DisplayPort hub “Thunderbolt” when it isn’t. And then there’s the specs. Which DisplayPort version does my laptop support? The answer may surprise you. I have experience with Dell laptops. Rather recent devices still only support DP 1.2 over USB-C. How can this be? GPU and everything supports DP 1.4, and have been for years. Because most DisplayPort over USB-C equipment only carries two DP lanes, using DP 1.2 massively limits the possible display configurations. Adapters that forego USB SuperSpeed+ for more DP lanes are extremely rare. Finding them is next to impossible too, because who puts that in the specs? With DP 1.4 you can easily power two 1440p DP 1.4 displays using one USB-C connection and still have USB SuperSpeed+. How nice that would be. I don’t need expensive Thunderbolt devices! USB-C can do everything and it works well. However, for consumers, it’s just a big bag of incompatibility and opacity.

li2uR3ce 5y ago
> My main pain point with USB-C is all the confusion and missing specs. Worse is that, to a search engine, every USB product is exactly the same. Search engines take very specific queries and overgeneralize them to the point of uselessness. In the case of USB cables, basically every conductor fits--yes, even the god damned Romex. Some hyperbole sure, but it's hard to find a cable that can do more than charge a phone. "Smart" search engine "AI" has "learned" that SuperSpeed = USB = Wire = Romex. Auh god it's hard to put down the bitter sarcasm. Having to click hundreds of product pages to look for specifics that a search engine stripped away is hell. It's not even like it's limited to USB. Try finding memory... surprise! Just like everything is a USB.... everything is a DDR. ECC, the very specific thing you need, is DDR. It literally doesn't matter if you put ECC in your query. Because DDR = DDR. Specs don't help sell the product because search engines will take all of that spec sheet and decide it's exactly "USB." And don't get me started on bad product pages that claim to sell "SuperSpeed 480 Mbit/s charging cables" Yup, Optimized. What does a search engine learn about that product page? Some people buy it therefore: relevance +9999. "I was tricked" never makes it back to the engine. You can't even flag a product page as inaccurate anymore. I'm so exhausted that I don't want to buy anything anymore. Search engines were better when they gave you two results for some queries. At least then you knew that the engine wasn't capable of servicing the query in a useful way. You used to be able to hone your "search skill." No longer. You don't need to because now we have learning machines that... can't tell the difference between "gave up in futility" and "found what I was looking for." What a spectacular failure search is today. /rant

by fuzzy2 5y ago

li2uR3ce 5y ago

> My main pain point with USB-C is all the confusion and missing specs. Worse is that, to a search engine, every USB product is exactly the same. Search engines take very specific queries and overgeneralize them to the point of uselessness. In the case of USB cables, basically every conductor fits--yes, even the god damned Romex. Some hyperbole sure, but it's hard to find a cable that can do more than charge a phone. "Smart" search engine "AI" has "learned" that SuperSpeed = USB = Wire = Romex. Auh god it's hard to put down the bitter sarcasm. Having to click hundreds of product pages to look for specifics that a search engine stripped away is hell. It's not even like it's limited to USB. Try finding memory... surprise! Just like everything is a USB.... everything is a DDR. ECC, the very specific thing you need, is DDR. It literally doesn't matter if you put ECC in your query. Because DDR = DDR. Specs don't help sell the product because search engines will take all of that spec sheet and decide it's exactly "USB." And don't get me started on bad product pages that claim to sell "SuperSpeed 480 Mbit/s charging cables" Yup, Optimized. What does a search engine learn about that product page? Some people buy it therefore: relevance +9999. "I was tricked" never makes it back to the engine. You can't even flag a product page as inaccurate anymore. I'm so exhausted that I don't want to buy anything anymore. Search engines were better when they gave you two results for some queries. At least then you knew that the engine wasn't capable of servicing the query in a useful way. You used to be able to hone your "search skill." No longer. You don't need to because now we have learning machines that... can't tell the difference between "gave up in futility" and "found what I was looking for." What a spectacular failure search is today. /rant