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> USB 3.1 Gen 1 is the straight rebranding of USB 3.0 Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end. Allo

> USB 3.1 Gen 1 is the straight rebranding of USB 3.0 Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end. Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. At this point I myself just don't differentiate USB versions beyond 3.0. 2.0 is the slow one, 3.0 is the fast one, anything newer is "so fast I won't ever saturate this much bandwidth anyway". Thunderbolt also falls into the last category.

Gigachad 5y ago
Part of the reason I assume is they have both newer and more expensive editions. A port could be using the latest spec and features but not implanting the full feature set of the more expensive ports. Products like intel cpus have tiers like i5 and generations. This is kind of like what USB did but so much worse.
mwt 5y ago
> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. How else it could possibly play out? It's nice to think that NIST or a similar U.S. government agency could standardize everything, but outside of industries that are most government funded (defense, etc.) or deeply connected to government funding (medical research) the forces of marketing are going to take over eventually and at scale. It's not like the government can or will force consumer electronics marketing to be honest, at least in the U.S. and Europe. I was a little disappointed, for example, to learn during the HDMI 2.1a fiasco that HDMI (the organization/legal entity responsible for the standards), VESA, etc. are loosely organized groups from the companies in the industries. So if they want to rename HDMI 2.0 to 2.1a to make their old products look better, nothing's really stopping them.
speeder 5y ago
I told my wife 2.0 is where you stick mouse and 3.0 pendrive
gumby 5y ago
> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers.
- wolrah 5y ago
  > I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers. No, it's specifically to give marketers what they want, which is the ability to advertise support for the latest version of the spec without actually having to improve the product. It's not USB-IF's marketers that want this, it's the vendors who pay USB-IF whose marketers want this.
  - spankalee 5y ago
    Every backwards compatible spec would have this "problem". Either a new version of a spec says that all existing implementations are out of spec, or it add new optional features and existing implementations are that don't support them are still in spec. There's really no other option.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      This is not an explanation of why the naming is a disaster. USB 1 devices work on USB 2 devices without there needing to be some insane renaming. Ditto USB 2 devices on USB 3 devices. This naming was an entirely unforced error, and should be called out as such at every opportunity to keep it from happening again. Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on. Moving to WiFi 6 was a great idea! Which they immediately made a mess of. What version of WiFi has 6GHz support? 6e of course. How about uplink MU-MIMO? Oh that's WiFi 6 Wave 2.
  - EricE 5y ago
    Because being able to differentiate uniquely different offerings by different designations is only of value to marketers? There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.
HFguy 5y ago
Why do you think the marketers screwed this up and not technical people? Doesn't seem like the style of screw-up they usually make.
orangepurple 5y ago
Tricking people into buying new hardware while incurring zero marginal cost of development, sales, distribution? Sounds like a winner. /s
- deepsun 5y ago
  To save tech nerds who know the difference from unnecessary expenses. Let others spend more money into the economy. Win for us. /smirk
notatoad 5y ago
IIRC, USB 3.1 was an update to the spec to allow USB Type C connectors. USB 3.0 specified the old type-a connector on one end and one of the weird oversized type-b connectors on the other end. Maybe not relevant as a consumer to have a difference in the spec version for that, but if you’re a manufacturer trying to implement it, it’s worth a bump to the minor version number.
- grishka 5y ago
  I have some Android phones that have a USB-C port but only support 2.0 speeds (as per the macOS system info USB tree thing). Which version is that then? I've always assumed that the physical layer of the protocol and the connectors themselves were separate specs and you could have USB protocol running over any kind of arbitrarily shaped connector. And no protocol over a USB(-A) connector, because those are de-facto low-power DC outlets now, among other things.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Very likely the Android device doesn't advertise any particular USB spec. If anything it might have a logo for the minimum spec it supports. You can put USB controllers in a device and not worry about any USB-IF if you don't use any USB branding on the box, IIRC any licenses owed are covered in the price of the ICs. The logical connection in USB doesn't care about the physical connection. Your phone could just have some soldered leads for all the protocol cares.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Note that in my experience MacOS (M1) is pretty bad with USB devices, I have a lot of things that just don't work properly on the Mac but work on Windows and Linux (ebook reader and phones for example).
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    The USB-C connector has a dedicated legacy USB 2 pair that is always available. This is the same as an upgraded (usually blue) USB-A connector with the addition of mirrored pins.
faller 5y ago
> Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end. It's always important to get acquainted with a topic before succumbing to the desire to mindlessly criticize in ignorance. A quick search in Wikipedia shows that USB 3.1 specifies a brand new transfer rate, dubbed SuperSpeed+ transfer mode, "(...)which can transfer data at up to 10 Gbit/s over the existing USB3-type-A and USB-C connectors (1200 MB/s after encoding overhead, more than twice the rate of USB 3.0)". This is a different transfer mode than the SuperSpeed transfer rate specified in USB 3.0. To allow implementations to support both transfer speeds, the implementations that supported SuperSpeed transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen1, while the implementations that supported SuperSpeed+ transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 To me that's a very convenient, and customer-centric way of putting together a standard. So there's a minor addition to a major release. Is that left to an annex? No. Do we fork standards? No. We just release a backwards-compatible v3.1 standard that in practice deprecates v3.0 and thus allows the whole industry to avoid piling up the list of current standards that we care about.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Adding a new transfer rate seems like a reasonable place to bump the minor version number of a protocol. After reading all of that I'm even more convinced that it should have just been USB 3.2.
  - faller 5y ago
    > Adding a new transfer rate seems like a reasonable place to bump the minor version number of a protocol. After reading all of that I'm even more convinced that it should have just been USB 3.2. I'm not sure you read any of that. I mean, they bumped the standard version to 3.1 from 3.0 after adding a new transfer rate. Also, USB 3.2 was bumped up from 3.1 after adding two new data transfer modes. I also add that the naming scheme is quite obvious once you start to think about it. * USB 3.0 only supports the one SuperSpeed data transfer mode. * USB3.1 was released, and it specifies two distinct data transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 mode and the novel Gen2 mode. * USB3.2 is released, and it supports four transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 and Gen2 modes from USB3.1, and two new SuperSpeed+ modes which are 2x and 4x faster than Gen2.
spankalee 5y ago
The spec got a version bump from 3.0 to 3.1 and the new version of the spec added an additional transfer mode called "Gen 2". From that point of view it makes a lot of sense. You need to differentiate the spec version from the features talked about in the spec. From a marketing standpoint, it's terrible as most people need a simpler name and are incorrectly choosing the spec version. Marketing labels should just be "USB Gen 1" and "USB Gen 2". If you see "Gen 2" you know the spec version was at least 3.1, though that shouldn't even matter.
- esperent 5y ago
  > From that point of view it makes a lot of sense From the point of view of the millions of people who have to use the damn things and probably aren't even aware the name comes from a spec doc somewhere, or even what a spec is, it makes absolutely no sense and the fact that the people who wrote the spec didn't make some effort to account for this means they failed badly.
- grishka 5y ago
  > You need to differentiate the spec version from the features talked about in the spec. Maybe make a separate spec version for each transfer mode and require backwards compatibility. It's easy for the average person to understand "the higher the number, the newer the standard, the faster it goes". It's not as easy when there are 3 numbers, 2 of which are optional. If you have to use 3 numbers, you could at least make it look like a version number, so "3.1 Gen 2" would become simply 3.1.2. These are easy to understand too because everyone has at some point installed software updates.
dwaite 5y ago
It is a spec, not software. If usb 3.1 includes all the details on how to build and talk to devices that 3.0 did. If a device built for 3.0 suddenly wasn’t 3.1 compliant it would be a huge engineering failure on behalf of the USB-IF. You are likely thinking of named features and of conformance marks, things like Superspeed 10 Gbps and the like. People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1, and in fact should demand to not have to know.
- derefr 5y ago
  If most of the USB 3.1 spec is just USB 3.0, and you only need to refer to the USB 3.0 parts to build your device, then why not just build your device solely according to the USB 3.0 spec, and call it a USB 3.0 device? Compare/contrast: the 802.11 specification series. Each successive specification only lays out the unique new modes; with the expectation that devices support multiple specifications, where each specification lays out its own supported modes. So if you e.g. build a device that can only do 802.11n things, and not 802.11ac things, then you’ve built an 802.11n device. But 802.11ac peers — which are really “802.11ac + 802.11n” peers — will still be able to talk to it in 802.11n mode — but they do this according to the 802.11n spec that they also support; not according to the 802.11ac spec. > People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1 Why not? How else should you know whether your device can go at its full advertised speed?
  - coryrc 5y ago
    > How else should you know whether your device can go at its full advertised speed? Just say what speed it supports using which technology. SuperSpeed at X Gbps, SuperSpeed+ at Y Gbps, high speed at 480 Mbps. You can only use a speed both support.
    - derefr 5y ago
      But in this case, say that a host supports only 3.2 Gen 2(x1), and a client device supports only 3.2 Gen 1x2. Both would advertise a relatively-higher speed, but it wouldn't just be that you'd get the lower of the two speeds; rather, you'd get a speed lower than either claim. And IMHO this isn't some weird exception; standards are often like this. This is is the reason people care to know exactly which subprotocols their devices are capable of negotiating, rather than just knowing the generation of support.

Gigachad 5y ago

Part of the reason I assume is they have both newer and more expensive editions. A port could be using the latest spec and features but not implanting the full feature set of the more expensive ports. Products like intel cpus have tiers like i5 and generations. This is kind of like what USB did but so much worse.

mwt 5y ago

> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. How else it could possibly play out? It's nice to think that NIST or a similar U.S. government agency could standardize everything, but outside of industries that are most government funded (defense, etc.) or deeply connected to government funding (medical research) the forces of marketing are going to take over eventually and at scale. It's not like the government can or will force consumer electronics marketing to be honest, at least in the U.S. and Europe. I was a little disappointed, for example, to learn during the HDMI 2.1a fiasco that HDMI (the organization/legal entity responsible for the standards), VESA, etc. are loosely organized groups from the companies in the industries. So if they want to rename HDMI 2.0 to 2.1a to make their old products look better, nothing's really stopping them.

speeder 5y ago

I told my wife 2.0 is where you stick mouse and 3.0 pendrive

gumby 5y ago

> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers.

wolrah 5y ago
> I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers. No, it's specifically to give marketers what they want, which is the ability to advertise support for the latest version of the spec without actually having to improve the product. It's not USB-IF's marketers that want this, it's the vendors who pay USB-IF whose marketers want this.
- spankalee 5y ago
  Every backwards compatible spec would have this "problem". Either a new version of a spec says that all existing implementations are out of spec, or it add new optional features and existing implementations are that don't support them are still in spec. There's really no other option.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    This is not an explanation of why the naming is a disaster. USB 1 devices work on USB 2 devices without there needing to be some insane renaming. Ditto USB 2 devices on USB 3 devices. This naming was an entirely unforced error, and should be called out as such at every opportunity to keep it from happening again. Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on. Moving to WiFi 6 was a great idea! Which they immediately made a mess of. What version of WiFi has 6GHz support? 6e of course. How about uplink MU-MIMO? Oh that's WiFi 6 Wave 2.
- EricE 5y ago
  Because being able to differentiate uniquely different offerings by different designations is only of value to marketers? There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

HFguy 5y ago

Why do you think the marketers screwed this up and not technical people? Doesn't seem like the style of screw-up they usually make.

orangepurple 5y ago

Tricking people into buying new hardware while incurring zero marginal cost of development, sales, distribution? Sounds like a winner. /s

deepsun 5y ago
To save tech nerds who know the difference from unnecessary expenses. Let others spend more money into the economy. Win for us. /smirk

notatoad 5y ago

IIRC, USB 3.1 was an update to the spec to allow USB Type C connectors. USB 3.0 specified the old type-a connector on one end and one of the weird oversized type-b connectors on the other end. Maybe not relevant as a consumer to have a difference in the spec version for that, but if you’re a manufacturer trying to implement it, it’s worth a bump to the minor version number.

grishka 5y ago
I have some Android phones that have a USB-C port but only support 2.0 speeds (as per the macOS system info USB tree thing). Which version is that then? I've always assumed that the physical layer of the protocol and the connectors themselves were separate specs and you could have USB protocol running over any kind of arbitrarily shaped connector. And no protocol over a USB(-A) connector, because those are de-facto low-power DC outlets now, among other things.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Very likely the Android device doesn't advertise any particular USB spec. If anything it might have a logo for the minimum spec it supports. You can put USB controllers in a device and not worry about any USB-IF if you don't use any USB branding on the box, IIRC any licenses owed are covered in the price of the ICs. The logical connection in USB doesn't care about the physical connection. Your phone could just have some soldered leads for all the protocol cares.
- ta988 5y ago
  Note that in my experience MacOS (M1) is pretty bad with USB devices, I have a lot of things that just don't work properly on the Mac but work on Windows and Linux (ebook reader and phones for example).
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  The USB-C connector has a dedicated legacy USB 2 pair that is always available. This is the same as an upgraded (usually blue) USB-A connector with the addition of mirrored pins.

faller 5y ago

> Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end. It's always important to get acquainted with a topic before succumbing to the desire to mindlessly criticize in ignorance. A quick search in Wikipedia shows that USB 3.1 specifies a brand new transfer rate, dubbed SuperSpeed+ transfer mode, "(...)which can transfer data at up to 10 Gbit/s over the existing USB3-type-A and USB-C connectors (1200 MB/s after encoding overhead, more than twice the rate of USB 3.0)". This is a different transfer mode than the SuperSpeed transfer rate specified in USB 3.0. To allow implementations to support both transfer speeds, the implementations that supported SuperSpeed transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen1, while the implementations that supported SuperSpeed+ transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 To me that's a very convenient, and customer-centric way of putting together a standard. So there's a minor addition to a major release. Is that left to an annex? No. Do we fork standards? No. We just release a backwards-compatible v3.1 standard that in practice deprecates v3.0 and thus allows the whole industry to avoid piling up the list of current standards that we care about.

jandrese 5y ago
Adding a new transfer rate seems like a reasonable place to bump the minor version number of a protocol. After reading all of that I'm even more convinced that it should have just been USB 3.2.
- faller 5y ago
  > Adding a new transfer rate seems like a reasonable place to bump the minor version number of a protocol. After reading all of that I'm even more convinced that it should have just been USB 3.2. I'm not sure you read any of that. I mean, they bumped the standard version to 3.1 from 3.0 after adding a new transfer rate. Also, USB 3.2 was bumped up from 3.1 after adding two new data transfer modes. I also add that the naming scheme is quite obvious once you start to think about it. * USB 3.0 only supports the one SuperSpeed data transfer mode. * USB3.1 was released, and it specifies two distinct data transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 mode and the novel Gen2 mode. * USB3.2 is released, and it supports four transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 and Gen2 modes from USB3.1, and two new SuperSpeed+ modes which are 2x and 4x faster than Gen2.

spankalee 5y ago

The spec got a version bump from 3.0 to 3.1 and the new version of the spec added an additional transfer mode called "Gen 2". From that point of view it makes a lot of sense. You need to differentiate the spec version from the features talked about in the spec. From a marketing standpoint, it's terrible as most people need a simpler name and are incorrectly choosing the spec version. Marketing labels should just be "USB Gen 1" and "USB Gen 2". If you see "Gen 2" you know the spec version was at least 3.1, though that shouldn't even matter.

esperent 5y ago
> From that point of view it makes a lot of sense From the point of view of the millions of people who have to use the damn things and probably aren't even aware the name comes from a spec doc somewhere, or even what a spec is, it makes absolutely no sense and the fact that the people who wrote the spec didn't make some effort to account for this means they failed badly.
grishka 5y ago
> You need to differentiate the spec version from the features talked about in the spec. Maybe make a separate spec version for each transfer mode and require backwards compatibility. It's easy for the average person to understand "the higher the number, the newer the standard, the faster it goes". It's not as easy when there are 3 numbers, 2 of which are optional. If you have to use 3 numbers, you could at least make it look like a version number, so "3.1 Gen 2" would become simply 3.1.2. These are easy to understand too because everyone has at some point installed software updates.

dwaite 5y ago

It is a spec, not software. If usb 3.1 includes all the details on how to build and talk to devices that 3.0 did. If a device built for 3.0 suddenly wasn’t 3.1 compliant it would be a huge engineering failure on behalf of the USB-IF. You are likely thinking of named features and of conformance marks, things like Superspeed 10 Gbps and the like. People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1, and in fact should demand to not have to know.

derefr 5y ago
If most of the USB 3.1 spec is just USB 3.0, and you only need to refer to the USB 3.0 parts to build your device, then why not just build your device solely according to the USB 3.0 spec, and call it a USB 3.0 device? Compare/contrast: the 802.11 specification series. Each successive specification only lays out the unique new modes; with the expectation that devices support multiple specifications, where each specification lays out its own supported modes. So if you e.g. build a device that can only do 802.11n things, and not 802.11ac things, then you’ve built an 802.11n device. But 802.11ac peers — which are really “802.11ac + 802.11n” peers — will still be able to talk to it in 802.11n mode — but they do this according to the 802.11n spec that they also support; not according to the 802.11ac spec. > People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1 Why not? How else should you know whether your device can go at its full advertised speed?
- coryrc 5y ago
  > How else should you know whether your device can go at its full advertised speed? Just say what speed it supports using which technology. SuperSpeed at X Gbps, SuperSpeed+ at Y Gbps, high speed at 480 Mbps. You can only use a speed both support.
  - derefr 5y ago
    But in this case, say that a host supports only 3.2 Gen 2(x1), and a client device supports only 3.2 Gen 1x2. Both would advertise a relatively-higher speed, but it wouldn't just be that you'd get the lower of the two speeds; rather, you'd get a speed lower than either claim. And IMHO this isn't some weird exception; standards are often like this. This is is the reason people care to know exactly which subprotocols their devices are capable of negotiating, rather than just knowing the generation of support.