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I was SURE they had learned their lesson after the clusterfuck that was 3.1/3.2 but no, right back at the same shit again. It's hard to see this as anything bu
by joshstrange 4y ago
I was SURE they had learned their lesson after the clusterfuck that was 3.1/3.2 but no, right back at the same shit again.
It's hard to see this as anything but purpose-built to make it harder to tell what a cable is capable of (a huge boon to scammers, aka: 90% of cable sellers). If the USB-IF had half a brain between them all (clearly they don't) they would require the data/charging/etc specs to be printed on the cable. Instead they spend their time coming up with confusing standards that are indecipherable to the average person which lead to a shitty world where everyone needs a cable tester to know what a cable is capable of, or they have constant bad experiences with a cable that fits the port but underperforms if it works at all.
I've heard some people say this is because it's all marketing-driven vs engineering-driven, if that's the case the fire the whole department because they suck at marketing. It's gotten to the point the only cables I can trust are from Anker and even those suffer from lack of labeling on them.
- bravura 4y agoCan you recommend a reliable cable tester?
- joshstrange 4y agoI wish, I've looked a little but part of the problem is the new specs. I doubt many testers can be "forward compatible" to be able to test new specs before they exist. I have an old USB-A tester I used but it's obviously useless for USB-C and all it's specs. Even then, the old tester I have just tells you the speed/wattage, not the max, it's more for monitoring than testing. At some point I'll just have to bite the bullet and get whatever is on the market and hope there aren't new specs right around the corner.
- edude03 4y agoI believe Totalphase tests signal integrity instead of specifically what kind of cable it is - which solves the forward compatibility problem but their stuff is very expensive for the home user
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoYou can get little USB power meters but they only tell you voltage and current, not transfer capability. Actual cable testers cost thousands.
- charcircuit 4y ago>Actual cable testers cost thousands. Why? Surely there could be some SBC or something for like $100 which you could connect to your computer. The testing software can measure how long it takes to transfer a file. Then it could try charging itself from the computer requesting a higher and higher wattage. I don't see how a device like that could be so expensive.
- mikewhy 4y agoSo that measures transfer speeds, but what about the rest of the things USB carries? Here's an example of the data that cable testers can give you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFbJD6RE4EY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFbJD6RE4EY
- charcircuit 4y agoThe goal is to determine the type of cable. Testing the signal quality is an entirely different thing.
- sdenton4 4y agoIt would be helpful if the connectors for the different cables had different shapes, so it would be immediately obvious what kind of cable it is and mostly prevent plugging incompatible cables into the wrong places. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
- jimmydorry 4y agoThanks to "helpful" legislation, everything must use the same port. Expect this to only make the situation worse in the coming years.
- gumby 4y agoReal cable testers are specialized high speed scopes with all sorts of protocol support and cost thousands. But what you need is a device that simply queries the cable and asks it what it thinks it can do. I haven’t seen one for sale and am too busy to make one, but it shouldn’t be that hard. Apple’s system info ought to tell you this but doesn’t.
- userbinator 4y agoThousands? You're about 1-2 orders of magnitude low...
- input_sh 4y agoThousands sounds about right to me. For example the only one I've played with is $15k (Advanced Cable Tester by Total Phase).
- voltagex_ 4y agoWhat do you want to test? Another reply has mentioned the 15K USD TotalPhase device, which I'd love to use one day. For "home" testing, I've used a USB C -> NVMe enclosure (UGreen is my favourite) with a half decent NVMe drive in it. Does the drive reach 1 gigabyte / second sustained read/write? Congrats, the cable supports 10 gigabit.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoAFAICT they are learning some lessons. Its not supposed to be called USB4 V2. It's USB 80Gbps. But whether vendors get with the program...
- plasticchris 4y agoMy personal favorite was a usb-c gpu dock that I had actually shorted out and smoked when used with any other cable.
- ClassyJacket 4y agoMy old workplace had laptops with USBC docks that would only accept the cable flipped in one orientation. 50% chance you'd get it wrong every time.
- Dalewyn 4y ago>indecipherable to the average person Average person? This shit is indecipherable even for hardcore computer nerds.
- pvorb 4y agoNow I'm imagining a team of archaeologists in 2000 years who are struggling to decipher USB cable packaging in an abandoned electronics warehouse.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoThey have successfully reverse engineered our computer architectures, found abundant documentation on TCP/IP et al, one team had a major breakthrough and international recognition when they recovered large parts of the network infrastructure of an old obscure company called Google, which uncovered a platform for hosting audio-visual content, giving researchers abundant material to reconstruct how past societies worked. But that one thing they just can't crack is those weird cables with different plugs and colors and names, misleading and contradicting instructions, documentation and specifications. They'll never find out what secrets these plastic-encased HDDs hold.
- snovv_crash 4y agoThe most probably cause for the civilizational downfall, argue the archeologists, is that after a software update everyone's devices stopped being able to communicate with each other. They found references to a prophecy of this in old books, and refer to it as the "Babble" event.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- causality0 4y agoI don't understand why they can't use trademark law or something to keep companies from violating the spec all over the place. Even the Nintendo Switch's implementation has a list of violations a full page long.
- bsimpson 4y agoI don't think the Switch is sold as USB-C in the US. (You can charge with one, but I think they tell you to use the Nintendo Power Adaptor and make no mention of USB-C.)
- jeroenhd 4y agoThe USB versioning makes total sense. People just misunderstand versioning, in a similar way to how some people thing version 1.2 is higher than version 1.11 because versioning sucks. For the general consumer, there are three labels. SuperSpeed USB 5Gbit/s, SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s, and SuperSpeed USB 20Gbit/s. More Gbit/s is more better. Easy and understandable. SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s used to be called SuperSpeed+ but that was a mistake that was soon corrected. All the gen-X-Y-by-Z stuff is for people who read data sheets for fun. You don't need to care and you shouldn't. The Gen 3.2 2x2 label is juar not for general consumers. It's a technical spec written in a similar way to how law works: the spec has revisions. Take food for a comparison. There have been big lawsuits around whether something is a biscuit or a cake for weird tax reasons. For this analogy I'm going to assume cakes are just better biscuits, swap them around in your head if you disagree. Now, if I sell a biscuit, I'll say "1 biscuit". This is similar to 1x1 in USB terms. Then I come up with my improved biscuit, or a cake, and I'll also sell cakes; I'll put "1 cake", or 2x1 in USB terms. The generation is just how good the food is or how fast the lane is. Through the magic of engineering I also find a way to pack multiple foodstuffs into a single box! I now sell boxes of "2 biscuits" (1x2) and "2 cakes" (2x2). In practice, nobody needs boxes of 2 biscuits, but it's a technical possibility. However, suppose the law changes this year. Some biscuits are now cakes, some cakes are now biscuits. If my target audience is the general public, I'll put "2 cakes" and "2 biscuits" on the right boxes with updated packaging or ingredients. This is similar to the USB logo with a little 10 or "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbit/s". Because nobody buys my boxes of two biscuits, I don't even bother designing a logo for them. If my target audience demand technical specs on my food, I'm in trouble now, though. How do they know if my definitions are based on the new law or the old law? Will their dietary compliance officer let them buy from me? The solution is simple: add the spec you're following to the ingredient list on the back! Now I'm selling "two biscuits (food law of 2021)", or in USB terms "USB 1x2 Gen 3.2", and "two cakes (food law of 2022)", "USB 2x2 Gen 3.2" in USB terms. Cakes can be cakes in both 2021 and 2022 law, but I don't think anyone will be confused if you write down according to what law they're considered cakes. Similarly, people shouldn't get confused by what spec the USB description works. Look at the consumer name for comparison of actual products, look up the provided spec the conversation table that came with your copy of the latest USB spec if you want to get a pedantic view. This versioning problem is everywhere. Are two PCIe Gen 4 lanes faster or slower than four PCIe Gen 3 lanes? How does a PCIe Gen 5 lane compare? What about memory, is DDR5-3200 faster or slower than DDR4-3200? Is an Intel Core i7 12700 faster than an Intel Core i9 11900K? What about a Ryzen 7300 versus a Ryzen 3950X? The label "USB4v2" should probably be changed to "USB4 Gen 2" for consistency, but this random Chinese hardware manufacturer might just have used the wrong name here. This isn't part of the official USB spec, it's just a name some person found on some machine.
- eternityforest 4y agoAn average person doesn't need mods than USB 2.0 speeds. Anything past microSD speeds is fine. Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? 120Gbps is way beyond anything an average person needs. The only issue is that hopefully it will replace HDMI and some cables might not handle that. But even then, it's solved by buying a few Ankers and marking them with tape. Yeah, it's all super confusing, and could be better, but in practice it works really well.
- Dalewyn 4y ago>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? M.2 can do anywhere from 0.5GB/s to 14GB/s depending on the protocol used.
- throwaway09223 4y agoNo, it really doesn't work well. Have you ever used a USB protocol analyzer or written a USB device driver? Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling. Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings. USB is an absolute nightmare right now.
- eternityforest 4y agoI don't think average consumers use $80 webcams. If you're not a 45k+ a year type, you might very well be doing remote work on phones, assuming you're WFH at all. Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high. Even if you are, webcams could very well run in 480Mbps if they had to, if in camera encoding was still the norm, which it would be if high speed cables weren't (theoretically) widespread. I agree that the situation might not be ideal for people doing stuff beyond average consumer level, but even that could be mostly worked around with a controller firmware update(Count the bit error rate, inform the user if they are using a trash cable). No amount of standardization and marking of the cables will eliminate scammers without killing cheap uncertified stuff totally, so I would think software and documentation fixes would be best. Most stuff already comes with a suitable USB cable. Just pop up a reminder to fish out the good one if the one you're using is bad.
- faster 4y agoI think standards in general are confusing to the average person. The average person doesn't care about standards, they care about completing a task: can I use this cable to connect my Mac to a 4k Monitor? Can it pass all the power that my device needs from my charger? Will this cable be a bottleneck if I connect it to my external SSD storage? None of my computers support USB4 today, but I'm buying USB4 cables so I don't have to waste so much time looking for a cable that will do a particular job. I want to say that I will only buy cables that are labeled clearly with capabilities and bandwidth but I'm not sure that is a promise I can keep.
- easygenes 4y agoWorth noting: the USB cables I have which reliably work at 20Gbps currently are considerably bulkier than other cables. Thicker wire AWG and more shielding. They're not always the most practical and they're considerably more costly. Also, I had to test quite a few cables which were sold as supporting 20Gbps before finding ones that actually worked, so pre-buying ones which supposedly work at a certain rate when you cannot test that may not be the most prudent approach.
- chx 4y agoThey did learn their lesson. The marketing name for USB4 cables are simply USB4® 20Gbps and USB4® 40Gbps https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb4_language_product_and_packaging_guidelines_final__0.pdf https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb4_language_produc... These version numbers are internal. Products will be called USB4® 80Gbps.
- vinay_ys 4y agoLittle good it did with USB-C. They have a similar language guidelines for USB-C – https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_language_product_and_packaging_guidelines_final.pdf https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_language_...
- bsimpson 4y agoYou know what's handy about a Thunderbolt 3 cable? It has a thunderbolt and the number 3 silkscreened onto the plugs.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoThe target market for thunderbolt and USB cables are very different though. Most USB cables are bought by people who just want to charge their iphone and don't want to spend a cent too much. Thunderbolt cables are bought by people who want to send data between very specific and expensive devices.