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> Except it does work, for charging at least. Most phone can charge off of the base 5V/3A profile, so it works for phone. But many bigger devices don't. I thi

> Except it does work, for charging at least. Most phone can charge off of the base 5V/3A profile, so it works for phone. But many bigger devices don't. I think most laptop only charge off of 20V mode, so it won't work if the charger can only do 5V or 9V. Some tablet also only do 9V, refusing to charge on 5V.

MaKey 4y ago
> But many bigger devices don't. I think most laptop only charge off of 20V mode, so it won't work if the charger can only do 5V or 9V. I'm able to charge my ThinkPad T14 (1st Gen AMD) using my 25W PD 3.0 Samsung phone charger (EP-TA800). Does it really deliver 20V if needed?
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I was talking about phones benefiting from type-C standardization the most, as you'll always find a charger nearby. Moving to more power hungry devices like laptops is moving the goalposts. Of course they won't charge off basic 15W phone chargers when CPUs alone draw that much. But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices. maybe in an ideal world, but this is absolutely not guaranteed at all. Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between. Even apple does this sometimes, in fact. https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-of-apples-usb-c-chargers/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-... https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery now of course the usb-c crowd is probably going "well apple needs to get its shit together!" but that's not an uncommon thing at all. Chargers are still designed for the specific device and don't necessarily support intermediate standards, just like motherboard ports end up being designed for specific use-cases and don't necessarily support the thing you're trying to do with them. Maybe that should have been a requirement, but it isn't, because USB-IF is shit and doesn't care about the consumer. fully implementing the usb-c standard, to all its extremes and nuances, is expensive as fuck, and this is a cost-driven market so you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to choose to swiss-cheese the standard and their charger will be $2 cheaper so that'll be the one you buy. Or else you're paying more for Anker and Apple stuff (whoops, maybe not apple for chargers, but their cables are still the best!). and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do. Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example. Just like Apple. Just like Switch. etc etc. At some point it stops being a problem with specific vendors and starts being just a badly designed standard. USB-C is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they want to be in devices for which $1 for a port or a controller chip is a big expense, but also scale to 40V/100W charging and 80gbps full-duplex data (with a 40gbps video channel and a 40gbps pcie link) and have everything "just work", and that's not really physically possible to implement in devices where every nickel counts. Maybe there should have been some defined "mobile" and "laptop/desktop" profiles, that overlapped in some defined ways, so this wouldn't have been a problem. Your mobile standard can be cost-optimized, your laptop standard can be full-featured, both of them have some lowest-common-denomiantor requirements. Laptop 2.0 always supports everything Laptop 1.0 did, and Phone 3.0 always supports everything Phone 2.0 and 1.0 did. But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. They do it on purpose, and people still defend them and love the product regardless, it's as mindless as people constantly (including here, ctrl-f any apple thread and search ‘mindless’ or ‘fanboy’) accuse apple fandoms of being. It's a bad standard and it's really just that simple, they could and should have done better and should not retain a government monopoly going forward, or else this will only continue to get more convoluted and complicated. Like we literally just got USB 4 2.0 and all, the leopard isn't changing its spots at this point. But like, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome of the “one cable for everything” pipe dream people are pushing. Either cables/devices are expensive (thunderbolt), or each device supports some subset of the standard and end up with a confusing mess. But the “one cable for everything” fandom is insatiable. Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between Yeah we don't live in an ideal world. But this has been a low enough encounter for me (actually never so far) to not overshadow the masive advantages type-C standardization has brought into my life. The fact that my phone and gadgets can all charge from the same plug that's now obliquus everywhere in the world is a godsend that people love to overlook every time they want to shit on the type-C standard because Nintendo screwed up. >But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. Do you have a better solution? Were the older days of millions of constantly changing cables and ports from every phone and gadget manufacturer better? I feel not. And what we have today, while far from perfects is miles better that the past. Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either. >Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this. Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Yeah, extra profiles won't work if you don't have the right cable, which could be confusing for the consumer, but let's not halt technological progress in the right direction by constantly making perfect the enemy of good. I love, and I think everyone else will agree, that now we have a single cable coming into the laptop instead of a huge octopus spaghetti monster from every port that needs to be plugged and unplugged individually for every peripheral every time you want to leave your desk. I'm sure there will be people who prefer the octopus spaghetti monster, but I don't want to go back to those days, so the disadvantages of the move to type-C are massively overshadowed by the advantages.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      > Do you have a better solution? Yes, I literally said it in my post: instead of a "profile" being "20V@2A" it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities. You can always add more capabilities, if you have 3.0 data but only 2.0 charging, that's fine, but, you have to advertise that as 2.0. Desktop/laptop ports are required to carry video and pcie, mobile standards don't have to... or maybe higher versions of the standard should start requiring it. If that means motherboard makers have to start advertising that their ports only support the "mobile" connectivity levels because they didn't want to put video/pcie on the port... tough, that's information the consumers need to know. > Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either. 3.5mm headset (headphone+mic) connectors were the closest thing I've ever seen to a bulletproof connector apart from VERY niche things like low-impedence headphones that required an amp. Not sure that's a good example either. I guess there's line level, but, go to best buy and pick a random device (any device) with a headphone port and a random pair of headphones and they work 100% of the time, guaranteed, I'll bet you money on this right now at my local best buy. Ethernet? Displayport? Both of those pretty much negotiate seamlessly down to whatever capability they both support. You can't make ethernet "optional" stuff, because ethernet does exactly one thing and it either works or it doesn't. My home network just works - go to best buy and pick a random switch and a random ethernet device and it works 100% of the time, and I'll bet you money on that too. Even things like crossover ports are dead now, the only real thing that matters even to nerds is stuff like MTU size that also transparently work unless you actively fuck with the settings. It's really only USB-C that has turned into a trainwreck and it's specifically because USB-IF doesn't define meaningful profiles and just makes everything an optional feature, and since "it can do everything" that means most things don't do anything more than the bare minimum. > Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Well, if you use profiles in that manner, don't be surprised when people are confused by your connector that has 57 different profiles and nothing supports anything. Again: why can't a profile be "laptop 2.0" and my laptop supports that? Why do I have to know that my laptop needs the 40V/2.5A profile to charge and that I need X charger and Y cable? That's purely down to USB-IF mismanagement and corruption. They should not have a government monopoly, they're working for the vendors, not for you.
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MaKey 4y ago

> But many bigger devices don't. I think most laptop only charge off of 20V mode, so it won't work if the charger can only do 5V or 9V. I'm able to charge my ThinkPad T14 (1st Gen AMD) using my 25W PD 3.0 Samsung phone charger (EP-TA800). Does it really deliver 20V if needed?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

I was talking about phones benefiting from type-C standardization the most, as you'll always find a charger nearby. Moving to more power hungry devices like laptops is moving the goalposts. Of course they won't charge off basic 15W phone chargers when CPUs alone draw that much. But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices.

paulmd 4y ago
> But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices. maybe in an ideal world, but this is absolutely not guaranteed at all. Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between. Even apple does this sometimes, in fact. https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-of-apples-usb-c-chargers/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-... https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery now of course the usb-c crowd is probably going "well apple needs to get its shit together!" but that's not an uncommon thing at all. Chargers are still designed for the specific device and don't necessarily support intermediate standards, just like motherboard ports end up being designed for specific use-cases and don't necessarily support the thing you're trying to do with them. Maybe that should have been a requirement, but it isn't, because USB-IF is shit and doesn't care about the consumer. fully implementing the usb-c standard, to all its extremes and nuances, is expensive as fuck, and this is a cost-driven market so you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to choose to swiss-cheese the standard and their charger will be $2 cheaper so that'll be the one you buy. Or else you're paying more for Anker and Apple stuff (whoops, maybe not apple for chargers, but their cables are still the best!). and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do. Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example. Just like Apple. Just like Switch. etc etc. At some point it stops being a problem with specific vendors and starts being just a badly designed standard. USB-C is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they want to be in devices for which $1 for a port or a controller chip is a big expense, but also scale to 40V/100W charging and 80gbps full-duplex data (with a 40gbps video channel and a 40gbps pcie link) and have everything "just work", and that's not really physically possible to implement in devices where every nickel counts. Maybe there should have been some defined "mobile" and "laptop/desktop" profiles, that overlapped in some defined ways, so this wouldn't have been a problem. Your mobile standard can be cost-optimized, your laptop standard can be full-featured, both of them have some lowest-common-denomiantor requirements. Laptop 2.0 always supports everything Laptop 1.0 did, and Phone 3.0 always supports everything Phone 2.0 and 1.0 did. But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. They do it on purpose, and people still defend them and love the product regardless, it's as mindless as people constantly (including here, ctrl-f any apple thread and search ‘mindless’ or ‘fanboy’) accuse apple fandoms of being. It's a bad standard and it's really just that simple, they could and should have done better and should not retain a government monopoly going forward, or else this will only continue to get more convoluted and complicated. Like we literally just got USB 4 2.0 and all, the leopard isn't changing its spots at this point. But like, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome of the “one cable for everything” pipe dream people are pushing. Either cables/devices are expensive (thunderbolt), or each device supports some subset of the standard and end up with a confusing mess. But the “one cable for everything” fandom is insatiable. Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between Yeah we don't live in an ideal world. But this has been a low enough encounter for me (actually never so far) to not overshadow the masive advantages type-C standardization has brought into my life. The fact that my phone and gadgets can all charge from the same plug that's now obliquus everywhere in the world is a godsend that people love to overlook every time they want to shit on the type-C standard because Nintendo screwed up. >But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. Do you have a better solution? Were the older days of millions of constantly changing cables and ports from every phone and gadget manufacturer better? I feel not. And what we have today, while far from perfects is miles better that the past. Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either. >Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this. Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Yeah, extra profiles won't work if you don't have the right cable, which could be confusing for the consumer, but let's not halt technological progress in the right direction by constantly making perfect the enemy of good. I love, and I think everyone else will agree, that now we have a single cable coming into the laptop instead of a huge octopus spaghetti monster from every port that needs to be plugged and unplugged individually for every peripheral every time you want to leave your desk. I'm sure there will be people who prefer the octopus spaghetti monster, but I don't want to go back to those days, so the disadvantages of the move to type-C are massively overshadowed by the advantages.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > Do you have a better solution? Yes, I literally said it in my post: instead of a "profile" being "20V@2A" it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities. You can always add more capabilities, if you have 3.0 data but only 2.0 charging, that's fine, but, you have to advertise that as 2.0. Desktop/laptop ports are required to carry video and pcie, mobile standards don't have to... or maybe higher versions of the standard should start requiring it. If that means motherboard makers have to start advertising that their ports only support the "mobile" connectivity levels because they didn't want to put video/pcie on the port... tough, that's information the consumers need to know. > Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either. 3.5mm headset (headphone+mic) connectors were the closest thing I've ever seen to a bulletproof connector apart from VERY niche things like low-impedence headphones that required an amp. Not sure that's a good example either. I guess there's line level, but, go to best buy and pick a random device (any device) with a headphone port and a random pair of headphones and they work 100% of the time, guaranteed, I'll bet you money on this right now at my local best buy. Ethernet? Displayport? Both of those pretty much negotiate seamlessly down to whatever capability they both support. You can't make ethernet "optional" stuff, because ethernet does exactly one thing and it either works or it doesn't. My home network just works - go to best buy and pick a random switch and a random ethernet device and it works 100% of the time, and I'll bet you money on that too. Even things like crossover ports are dead now, the only real thing that matters even to nerds is stuff like MTU size that also transparently work unless you actively fuck with the settings. It's really only USB-C that has turned into a trainwreck and it's specifically because USB-IF doesn't define meaningful profiles and just makes everything an optional feature, and since "it can do everything" that means most things don't do anything more than the bare minimum. > Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Well, if you use profiles in that manner, don't be surprised when people are confused by your connector that has 57 different profiles and nothing supports anything. Again: why can't a profile be "laptop 2.0" and my laptop supports that? Why do I have to know that my laptop needs the 40V/2.5A profile to charge and that I need X charger and Y cable? That's purely down to USB-IF mismanagement and corruption. They should not have a government monopoly, they're working for the vendors, not for you.

deleted 4y ago

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