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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 id

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.
derefr 4y ago
The advantage of USB-C, if you don't realize it, is that there are many devices that want to be clients sometimes, and hosts other times. You know, like being able to plug your phone into your computer, or your gamepad into your phone. Previous to USB-C, USB ports were either "host ports" or "client ports" (thus all the different shapes); and devices were required to assume that if something was plugged into a client port of theirs, it was a host; and if something was plugged into a host port of theirs, it was a client. No dynamic host/client negotiation — there wasn't even a protocol for it. Instead, there was "USB On The Go" (USB-OTG), which would signal a "USB-OTG" compatible device on its normally-a-client port, to switch that port+USB controller into host mode, based on the physical wiring of the host side of the special "client but actually a host" connector on a special USB-OTG cable. And, of course, users would never consider this problem ahead of time — why would they? — so there was no demand for host/client hybrid devices to ship with USB-OTG cables; instead, they were something you'd realize you'd need only too late, once you already had the problem; and now you're running to an electronics store at 8PM so you can plug your Android tablet into a scanner. With USB-C, all that is gone. USB-C devices are required to signal whether they're a host, client, or hybrid device, so that hybrid devices can auto-discover whether it's a host, client, or another hybrid device on the other end of the line, and do the sensible thing in each case. No need for special "override" cables. And no need for discrete host-side vs. client-side connectors. Host-ness vs. client-ness is now a logical part of the USB protocol, rather than an electrical part of the protocol. This also means that if you have, say, a laptop, you only need to bring one (good, beefy) USB-C cable with you — probably the one that came with your laptop's USB-C AC adapter; and this cable will both charge your laptop from the wall, and allow you to plug in any USB-C devices you might need to connect to. Or, in the case of a display or hub with power-delivery — both! (IMHO the point of the original Macbook's single-port USB-C design was to serve as a forcing function to make people realize that the combination of battery life + USB-C "switch-around-ability" means they can — in most casual use-cases — just alternate between charging and connectivity through a single port+cable, rather than needing both at once and thus needing two ports + two cables.)

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.

derefr 4y ago

The advantage of USB-C, if you don't realize it, is that there are many devices that want to be clients sometimes, and hosts other times. You know, like being able to plug your phone into your computer, or your gamepad into your phone. Previous to USB-C, USB ports were either "host ports" or "client ports" (thus all the different shapes); and devices were required to assume that if something was plugged into a client port of theirs, it was a host; and if something was plugged into a host port of theirs, it was a client. No dynamic host/client negotiation — there wasn't even a protocol for it. Instead, there was "USB On The Go" (USB-OTG), which would signal a "USB-OTG" compatible device on its normally-a-client port, to switch that port+USB controller into host mode, based on the physical wiring of the host side of the special "client but actually a host" connector on a special USB-OTG cable. And, of course, users would never consider this problem ahead of time — why would they? — so there was no demand for host/client hybrid devices to ship with USB-OTG cables; instead, they were something you'd realize you'd need only too late, once you already had the problem; and now you're running to an electronics store at 8PM so you can plug your Android tablet into a scanner. With USB-C, all that is gone. USB-C devices are required to signal whether they're a host, client, or hybrid device, so that hybrid devices can auto-discover whether it's a host, client, or another hybrid device on the other end of the line, and do the sensible thing in each case. No need for special "override" cables. And no need for discrete host-side vs. client-side connectors. Host-ness vs. client-ness is now a logical part of the USB protocol, rather than an electrical part of the protocol. This also means that if you have, say, a laptop, you only need to bring one (good, beefy) USB-C cable with you — probably the one that came with your laptop's USB-C AC adapter; and this cable will both charge your laptop from the wall, and allow you to plug in any USB-C devices you might need to connect to. Or, in the case of a display or hub with power-delivery — both! (IMHO the point of the original Macbook's single-port USB-C design was to serve as a forcing function to make people realize that the combination of battery life + USB-C "switch-around-ability" means they can — in most casual use-cases — just alternate between charging and connectivity through a single port+cable, rather than needing both at once and thus needing two ports + two cables.)