That's the price of strong backwards compatibility. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to use a USB 3 (superspeed) device on a USB 3 host port with a USB 2 cable a

That's the price of strong backwards compatibility. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to use a USB 3 (superspeed) device on a USB 3 host port with a USB 2 cable at all. And if you hate this, you should probably never look into these (illegal by the spec, but practically apparently often functional) splitters that separate the USB 2 and 3 path of a USB 3 capable A port so that you can run two devices on them without a hub ;)