I won't say that USB4 is confusing, because I admit I don't understand it, because I haven't really bothered to try, aside from noticing some motherboards adver

I won't say that USB4 is confusing, because I admit I don't understand it, because I haven't really bothered to try, aside from noticing some motherboards advertising "support for special USB4 module socket, coming soon." The USB forum has completely lost any sort of messaging muscle it once had. USB3 was somewhat exciting in its original 5Gbps form-- it made it feasible to put things like spinning rust external HDDs on there with no compromises, and in effect strangled eSATA and the last places you'd see external SCSI ports. Since then, all they've been able to deliver is an alphabet soup. First, nothing was special because everything keeps getting upgraded-- that "3.0" device I was going to buy became "3.2" without having any actual changes made. There's an ever growing set of laundry-label style icons for power supply and DisplayPort compatibility, precision-engineered to be either ignored or misused by lowest-bid vendors. USB 4.0 could really have benefitted from a strong message-- something like "Here's ONE big and obvious 4.0 badge and it means any cable with it will support ALL the features promised in this slide deck."