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> idiots thinking "if it connects, it should work" You mean thinking things will work in the reasonable way that they have for decades prior to USB-C? "If it

> idiots thinking "if it connects, it should work" You mean thinking things will work in the reasonable way that they have for decades prior to USB-C? "If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true (modulo OS compatibility, which was easy to check by users, and wasn't even an issue anyway if you had a reasonably recent Windows version). It's hard to blame the users for not understanding why things have been suddenly made much more complicated by a standard that supposedly simplifies things.

Someone 4y ago
> “If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true Have you ever worked with DB-9 or DB-25 serial cables? If you had a cable that was wired correctly for the connection you wanted to make, it should indeed work, but you still would have to figure out baud rate, number of stop bits, and parity. Detecting what kind of null-modem cable you had basically came down to getting out your multimeter. On PCs, you also had the traditional parallel port (mostly unidirectional, with IIRC two bits of information that a printer could send back: “don’t send more data; I’m busy handling the earlier data”, and “out of paper”) versus the much faster, bidirectional iteration that was used to connect such things as hard drives and CD players.
derefr 4y ago
> "If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true Gods no! There are innumerable devices with D-sub, mini-DIN, RJ-11, RCA, or TRS connectors, that put those connectors to entirely different and incompatible purposes. With entirely-incompatible electrical standards, even, such that plugging client-devices intended for one purpose into host-devices intended for a different purpose will electrically short one or both. Remember the iPod Shuffle's "USB-A to TRRS" cable? Guess what happens when you try to use that cable to, say, plug your computer into your hi-fi? Or — less absurdly — into your TI-84 calculator? The "Universal" in USB is in contrast to the DB-9 serial port, which was decidedly not universal. Yes, there were actual "serial ports" and "serial port devices" — the spec is called EIA/TIA 232, if you're curious — but there were tons of other things that used DB-9 connectors (male or female) but weren't EIA/TIA 232 devices. Plug one of those into a serial port, and poof! — there goes the magic smoke. You don't have to worry about that with USB (including USB-C); USB ports and cables all follow a single unified electrical pin-out specification, whatever they're carrying. Even USB-C devices that mis-implement features like USB-PD (e.g. the Nintendo Switch) won't ever start an electrical fire, because — whatever logic-level protocol support they might have mis-implemented — they're still "USB-standard devices" on the electrical-pinout level. Now, these are all fairly-old connectors I'm mentioning, so you'd think we'd have learned better by now; but special mention goes to the Atari joystick port (technically a type of D-sub connector), which is still to this day slapped onto arbitrary generic Shenzhen-special "TV plug-and-play consoles" — with no two devices being wired the same way, and so only actually supporting the gamepads the console comes with. When you think about it, relative to this disaster, USB-C does guarantee you that 1. plugging any two USB-C ports together with a USB-C cable won't throw your circuit breaker; and 2. as long as both devices are data devices, you'll get at least USB2 data-transfer out of the arrangement (if you're plugging in a legacy USB2 device), and much more likely USB3 speeds. Everything is actually compatible with everything, as long as you don't care about getting the fastest line-rates possible.
MereInterest 4y ago
100% agreed, and this is a royal problem with USB-C. 1. Pre-USB: Several different cords, with different shape ports to distinguish them. 2. USB-A: Several identical cords, with identical ports that function the same. 3. USB-C: Several different cords, with visually identical ports and no clear way to distinguish them. It's like the designers of USB-C saw the success of USB-A and thought it was due to minimizing the number of shapes, rather than minimizing the number of factors to be tracked. When devices come with pleas to only use the provided charger and cord, rather than any cord that meets the standard, you know that something has gone horribly wrong.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. The fact this thread exists and everyone has a pretty informed, yet divergent point of view speaks to the problem. Imagine being a consumer product marketing person trying to sell a device that meets the needs of a MacBook Pro user, a Samsung Galaxy user and a 6th grader with a Chromebook.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Egads, yeah. There's so many use cases that no standard can accomplish all of them. USB-C tries, and even it failed to cover some pretty big use cases. If I were to try to list out qualities that a USB-C port could have, I can come up with several different features. 0. Base level. No significant power draw in either direction. No significant data flow in either direction. I'll label this as the USB-A solution. 1. Significant power draw, recipient. 2. Significant power draw, provider. 4. Significant data throughput, recipient. 8. Significant data throughput, provider. Between these, there's 16 different combinations, and pretty much all of them exist. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could come up with reasonable examples for every one of them. 0. Every single USB-A device. 1. Phone charger, typical use. 2. Wall wart for a phone charger. 3. Rechargeable battery. 4. Monitor with dedicated power supply 5. Monitor without dedicated power supply 6. Charge a phone while playing video from it. 7. External tablet, currently in use streaming video from a Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi powered via the tablet. 8. Desktop graphics card. 9. External graphics card. 10. Desktop Graphics card powering a single-cord monitor. 11. External graphics card powering a single-cord monitor. 12. High-speed external storage. 13. High-speed external storage without a dedicated power supply. 14. First in a daisy-chained series of monitors, with a dedicated power supply. 15. USB-C hub Which comes back to why there are no decent USB-C hubs, because every single port would be expected to be effective at every single task. Which is ludicrous, and strikes me as why there are no good USB-C hubs, because it's a Herculean task. USB-A did a lot of things incredibly well (non-streaming data transfer, peripheral management), and a lot of things relatively poorly (device charging, video display). USB-C tried to improve on the aspects that USB-A was bad at, and made an absolute mess of the things that USB-A was good at.

Someone 4y ago

> “If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true Have you ever worked with DB-9 or DB-25 serial cables? If you had a cable that was wired correctly for the connection you wanted to make, it should indeed work, but you still would have to figure out baud rate, number of stop bits, and parity. Detecting what kind of null-modem cable you had basically came down to getting out your multimeter. On PCs, you also had the traditional parallel port (mostly unidirectional, with IIRC two bits of information that a printer could send back: “don’t send more data; I’m busy handling the earlier data”, and “out of paper”) versus the much faster, bidirectional iteration that was used to connect such things as hard drives and CD players.

derefr 4y ago

> "If it connects, it should work" used to be largely true Gods no! There are innumerable devices with D-sub, mini-DIN, RJ-11, RCA, or TRS connectors, that put those connectors to entirely different and incompatible purposes. With entirely-incompatible electrical standards, even, such that plugging client-devices intended for one purpose into host-devices intended for a different purpose will electrically short one or both. Remember the iPod Shuffle's "USB-A to TRRS" cable? Guess what happens when you try to use that cable to, say, plug your computer into your hi-fi? Or — less absurdly — into your TI-84 calculator? The "Universal" in USB is in contrast to the DB-9 serial port, which was decidedly not universal. Yes, there were actual "serial ports" and "serial port devices" — the spec is called EIA/TIA 232, if you're curious — but there were tons of other things that used DB-9 connectors (male or female) but weren't EIA/TIA 232 devices. Plug one of those into a serial port, and poof! — there goes the magic smoke. You don't have to worry about that with USB (including USB-C); USB ports and cables all follow a single unified electrical pin-out specification, whatever they're carrying. Even USB-C devices that mis-implement features like USB-PD (e.g. the Nintendo Switch) won't ever start an electrical fire, because — whatever logic-level protocol support they might have mis-implemented — they're still "USB-standard devices" on the electrical-pinout level. Now, these are all fairly-old connectors I'm mentioning, so you'd think we'd have learned better by now; but special mention goes to the Atari joystick port (technically a type of D-sub connector), which is still to this day slapped onto arbitrary generic Shenzhen-special "TV plug-and-play consoles" — with no two devices being wired the same way, and so only actually supporting the gamepads the console comes with. When you think about it, relative to this disaster, USB-C does guarantee you that 1. plugging any two USB-C ports together with a USB-C cable won't throw your circuit breaker; and 2. as long as both devices are data devices, you'll get at least USB2 data-transfer out of the arrangement (if you're plugging in a legacy USB2 device), and much more likely USB3 speeds. Everything is actually compatible with everything, as long as you don't care about getting the fastest line-rates possible.

MereInterest 4y ago

100% agreed, and this is a royal problem with USB-C. 1. Pre-USB: Several different cords, with different shape ports to distinguish them. 2. USB-A: Several identical cords, with identical ports that function the same. 3. USB-C: Several different cords, with visually identical ports and no clear way to distinguish them. It's like the designers of USB-C saw the success of USB-A and thought it was due to minimizing the number of shapes, rather than minimizing the number of factors to be tracked. When devices come with pleas to only use the provided charger and cord, rather than any cord that meets the standard, you know that something has gone horribly wrong.

Spooky23 4y ago
Exactly. The fact this thread exists and everyone has a pretty informed, yet divergent point of view speaks to the problem. Imagine being a consumer product marketing person trying to sell a device that meets the needs of a MacBook Pro user, a Samsung Galaxy user and a 6th grader with a Chromebook.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Egads, yeah. There's so many use cases that no standard can accomplish all of them. USB-C tries, and even it failed to cover some pretty big use cases. If I were to try to list out qualities that a USB-C port could have, I can come up with several different features. 0. Base level. No significant power draw in either direction. No significant data flow in either direction. I'll label this as the USB-A solution. 1. Significant power draw, recipient. 2. Significant power draw, provider. 4. Significant data throughput, recipient. 8. Significant data throughput, provider. Between these, there's 16 different combinations, and pretty much all of them exist. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could come up with reasonable examples for every one of them. 0. Every single USB-A device. 1. Phone charger, typical use. 2. Wall wart for a phone charger. 3. Rechargeable battery. 4. Monitor with dedicated power supply 5. Monitor without dedicated power supply 6. Charge a phone while playing video from it. 7. External tablet, currently in use streaming video from a Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi powered via the tablet. 8. Desktop graphics card. 9. External graphics card. 10. Desktop Graphics card powering a single-cord monitor. 11. External graphics card powering a single-cord monitor. 12. High-speed external storage. 13. High-speed external storage without a dedicated power supply. 14. First in a daisy-chained series of monitors, with a dedicated power supply. 15. USB-C hub Which comes back to why there are no decent USB-C hubs, because every single port would be expected to be effective at every single task. Which is ludicrous, and strikes me as why there are no good USB-C hubs, because it's a Herculean task. USB-A did a lot of things incredibly well (non-streaming data transfer, peripheral management), and a lot of things relatively poorly (device charging, video display). USB-C tried to improve on the aspects that USB-A was bad at, and made an absolute mess of the things that USB-A was good at.