Having a standard plug is great, I hope we stick with it for decades and gradually the situation will improve as everyone gets used to the standard.

USB-C gets rid of all the stupid previous decisions on the physical connectors (orientation required but not obvious, fragile clips, too large, too small), the physical side of things is now set and hopefully all devices, chargers and outlets will now converge on usb-c.

Yes getting the right cable can make a difference but the situation is so much better than before, partly because phone manufacturers were forced by the EU to adopt one connector early one. I’m so glad Apple’s proprietary connector is gone.

In an alternate world, Ethernet took on the role of the universal serial bus, and we have laptops that charge via PoE, but only possible on one of their ports (the others are usable for peripherals --- with protocols running over Ethernet too, of course.) But the same confusion regarding power and speed capabilities exists.

• dale_glass

  today at 9:30 AM

  We'd have to invent a new connector first. It's too thick for modern laptops, not to speak of cell phones.

  Also, RJ45 is terribly fragile if you keep plugging and unplugging it, eventually that latch will break. And copper can barely support 10G and is terribly power hungry when it does that. And the cables get thick and inflexible.

  • somat

    today at 10:35 AM

    The 8 pin modular connector as found in most ethernet does have several sins but it has one huge redeeming feature, A feature I wish was found in every cable. It is easy to field terminate. Have fun putting a new end on nearly any other cable.

    • tlb

      today at 10:54 AM

      Field termination is necessary when the connectors are too large to pull through a conduit. But if they were USB-C sized, you could just pull fully assembled cables.

      • Someone

        today at 11:08 AM

        It also comes in very handy when you need a 8m cable, but only can buy them in lengths of 5m and 10m, or when you’re wiring an entire building, and figuring out which lengths to order up front is a major pain in the ass, certainly compared to ordering a few hundred meters of cable, a few hundred connectors and tools to put the two together. And that’s ignoring the price difference.

      • goalieca

        today at 11:07 AM

        It’s also about managing length and slack.

It would help if computers / phones had an easy way to just identify a cable when you plug it in. Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about?

• rlam2x51

  today at 10:13 AM

  I guess you need control over both cable endings. You can buy dedicated cable testers like https://treedix.com/products/treedix-usb-cable-tester-usb-c-...

• nottorp

  today at 10:33 AM

  > https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

  This was on show hn only yesterday.

  Probably can't tell you anything about the other end of the cable though.

  > Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about?

  If i believed in conspiracies i'd say the usb consortium or mafia or whatever it's called is pressuring software developers to not display that info. Otherwise they'd have "normal people" with torches and pitchforks at their door.

• dijit

  today at 10:04 AM

  it violates every products person wish to be “simple”.

  There’s a reason that Windows barely shows any errors until the system fully halts.

  • jeroenhd

    today at 10:55 AM

    Windows will throw up warnings when the disk space is nearly empty, when it detects driver instability, when RAM is full and page files can't keep up, when a specific application is draining your battery, when your files aren't backing up right, and all other kinds.

    The problem with most of those is that either users don't care until it's too late ("I need to get this done now, I'll delete files later"), third party applications are the cause and Windows can't/shouldn't interfere (did a program memory leak or is the user pushing the boundaries of what the system can handle?), or because there's not much the user can do about it ("your GPU driver crashed", well gee, my drivers are up to date, let me spend half a month's wages on a new GPU then, shall we?).

    The only "too late" errors I've seen on Windows are when something very important has crashed and the system needs to shut down for data integrity (crss.exe crashing on school computers comes to mind, though I doubt that was the fault of Microsoft), or when something unpredictable went wrong, like a file ending up corrupt because of a failing hard drive or flipped bit in memory.

    Microsoft actually created a dedicated screen to monitor errors and failures of all kinds (https://www.elevenforum.com/t/view-reliability-history-in-wi...) that's been around since Vista. It used to open up automatically if you clicked a popup after certain errors, but it appears Microsoft eventually stopped doing that. Going by how many "today I learned" posts I find when I look up the feature, I'm guessing nobody who actually understands what the screen does ever used the feature.

  • ohnei

    today at 10:34 AM

    They now have the option to silently add this kind of detail to logs and have clippy find answers to why is my computer odd/slow only when asked. For a long time I felt like companies leaving product decisions to the Occamist (or the closely related lazy programmer) was a superpower to compete against larger organizations that usually don't, but we may get a run for our money from emulated simplicity.

• nerdsniper

  today at 10:49 AM

  The cable can report what it "thinks" it is, and in fact, modern USB-C cables do this: they have "e-Marker chips" inside the plugs which communicate with whatever they're plugged into and enumerate their belief as to their capabilities. The thing is, manufacturers can set the e-Marker chips to spew lies, or a cable that used to support 80Gbps got slightly damaged after 6 months of use and now only reliably transmits 10Gbps.

  Power capacity is relatively easy to measure ad-hoc via voltage drop from one end to the other...USB-PD controllers already do this and can even fine-tune the voltage to make sure that if the device receiving (sinking) power needs 20V they'll send 20.4V or 20.9V to compensate for voltage drop so that the charging device gets 20V on its end.

  But actual maximum data throughput is hard to know. The only way to really "know" how much data can flow through a cable is with an expensive oscilloscope or cable tester. Because 80Gbps cables run at ~13GHz so, at minimum you need a 26GHz scope (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem) or more practically a 52GHz scope. And it turns out it's really expensive to measure electrical signals 52 billion times per second. The necessary devices start at $15,000 (cable signal integrity tester) [0] on the very low end and only work for max 10Gbps USB 3.2 cables, or past $270,000 for 80Gbps USB4 cables (proper 60GHz oscilloscope) [1].

  On the high end, each signal integrity test device can actually cost $1-2 million [2] where the base unit starts at $670,000 plus then spending additional money for hardware-accelerated analysis, specialized active probes, and the specific PAM-3 / USB4 compliance software packages.

  0: https://www.totalphase.com/products/advanced-cable-tester-v2...

  1: https://www.edn.com/12-bit-oscilloscope-operates-up-to-65-gh...

  2: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/uxr1104a-infiniium-ux...

  • alex43578

    today at 10:56 AM

    I get that to properly test a cable, you need that level of accuracy, but for home use, couldn’t you get away with a source and a receiver that are far cheaper?

    If a USB4 device can output a USB4 stream and the receiver can check that stream for errors, isn’t that sufficient?

    • nerdsniper

      today at 11:11 AM

      At some point you end up testing the peripheral and/or host rather than the cable. For example, cables often state that they can handle up to 240W ... but no 240W USB-PD chip has ever gone into production -- you won't even find one at the hottest USB-PD trade shows[0] in China.

      It could be reasonable for computers to be allowed to trigger a data throughput test and the peripheral would state "I support up to 40Gbps of receiving/sending", and then send a simple pattern that can be generated on the fly. But a lot of devices can't receive/send that 80Gbps of data for long enough to perform a decent test - the storage, RAM, buffers, etc get depleted or act as bottlenecks.

      If you know enough to accurately interpret the measurements you get from that, you know enough to write your own computer program to try to send 80Gbps from one computer to another and use DMA to process it in real-time without hitting storage (which a lot of peripherals likely don't have the CPU to accomplish).

      If you don't know enough to write those test applications, you probably don't know enough to interpret the results of a built-in test function and the measurements would confuse and frustrate a lot of well-meaning, nerdy, but under-educated consumers who make assumptions about why they're not actually getting the rated speed.

      Idk, my opinion doesn't go one way or the other here. Perhaps I myself don't quite know enough to be a good judge of that concept.

      0: https://asiachargingexpo.com

Feels like the appropriate place to put this link: https://www.lttstore.com/products/ltt-truespec-cable-usb-typ...

[delayed]

Yup. I have a work laptop that is meant to charge via USB ... But only one of the two ports will charge ... They are right beside each other! An evil trick at the office is to move someone's USB cable from one port to the other.

• PunchyHamster

  today at 11:12 AM

  Mine work at both but connecting dock to different port re-names every monitor output

• benj111

  today at 9:23 AM

  Of course there's also the issue of whether your cable is suitable and your charger suitable too.

  We appear to have taken a good idea and made it shit very quickly.

  • jeroenhd

    today at 11:01 AM

    A suitable USB cable for all features is ten times the price of a normal cable. That's why many smartphones come with USB-C cables and not actually rated Thunderbolt cables.

    If the USB forum enforced their specifications, everyone would be complaining that their cables are now ten times the price, and people would still buy knock-off cables.

    Same goes with chargers: I bought a 100W charger that stops delivering 100W after it overheats about half an hour into a session. I could spend twice as much on a charger that sustains the charge, but I probably wouldn't have bought that charger at all for that price.

    USB-C would either be branded a bullshit expensive standard (like Apple's Thunderbolt cables are generally regarded) or an incomplete standard that gives manufacturers too much leeway.

    I, for one, am quite happy that I can just buy a USB C charger now rather than spend 180 euros on an OEM replacement, even if I ocassionally need to throw a cable into the "garbage that came with an accessoire" bin.

  • nottorp

    today at 10:34 AM

    > made it shit very quickly

    What? The USB mafia has been at it since usb 1.1 or at best 2.0...

• i_am_a_peasant

  today at 9:21 AM

  thinkpad?

And on top of that, Apple has that thing where only some devices can charge from their adapters. I have a special adapter just for non-Apple things because the white bricks (despite the usb-c) sometimes just refuse to give power to things. So frustrating.

• ahlCVA

  today at 11:21 AM

  Apple implements the USB-C/USB PD specs to a t and is unforgiving if you don't do either.

  At work, our quick test for if a device implements USB PD correctly is to plug it into an Apple power supply (optionally with a PD protocol sniffer in line). If it doesn't work (either no/intermittent VBUS or the wrong VBUS), it's always been the case that the device is doing something wrong.

• Filligree

  today at 9:25 AM

  Mostly, that's non-compliant devices. Doesn't make it work any better, but I wouldn't assume Apple is doing it wrong here.

  USB-C ports aren't allowed to provide power until after configuration, but a lot of USB-C chargers provide 5V regardless. This is wrong, but it does mean you can use a dumb C-to-micro cable which doesn't include the necessary electronics. (A pull-down resistor at least.)

  And of course there's no way to tell by the looks of the cable.

  • jeroenhd

    today at 11:13 AM

    Not necessarily, Apple only implemented the latest and greatest USB charging spec in some of their devices (AVS). Their chargers speak the new protocols so their devices and their chargers will work, but a charger from a few years back can easily deliver 100W following the spec (PPS, other PD standards) but be unable to deliver high power charging on some Apple hardware.

    Neither side is wrong per se, though it's quite annoying that Apple didn't implement PPS. Then again, if you're buying Apple, you should probably expect these kinds of shenannigans and be ready to need to buy dedicated peripherals.

  • josephg

    today at 10:04 AM

    Yeah this is right. I bought a cheap wireless mouse, with a USB-C port for charging. None of the USB-C chargers in my house would charge it, so after awhile it inevitably went flat and I took it back to the shop - since it was faulty.

    The guy in the shop plugged it in to a USB-A port via a cheap A-to-C cable, and the mouse immediately came to life. Of course. I felt like an idiot.

    I didn't get a faulty unit. Whoever designed the mouse was treating the USB-C plug like a newer micro-usb port. The mouse just expected 5V over the port. They clearly didn't bother testing it with a proper USB-C charger.

    I returned it anyway and got a mouse that wasn't broken.

    • jeroenhd

      today at 11:15 AM

      Something I've also see some shitty peripherals do is only hook up one side of the USB-C connectors. To get it charging, you'd need to orient the cable right.

      Absolutely baffling, but it only happened to me for brands where I should've figured.

    • javawizard

      today at 10:24 AM

      It annoys me so much when new electronics do this because the fix is both well known by now and only requires 2 dirt cheap components on the circuit board (5.1k resistors to ground on the CC lines).

      As a hardware engineer among other things, that was one of the first things I learned about interfacing with USB C. How do so many consumer devices keep getting this wrong in the year of our lord 2026?

  • isodev

    today at 10:16 AM

    > This is wrong

    I understand the technical reasons behind it, but in this case - the actual expectation is to be able to use usb-c to charge other gadgets.

• dijit

  today at 10:08 AM

  Whaaaaaaaaat?!

  Apple, somewhat famously, build their power adapters incredibly well.

  If they’re not charging something my default assumption will be: that thing doesn’t support PD.

  https://youtu.be/SUlNKYI07SY?is=sJ2ICaXwxCsBJiXA

  https://youtu.be/rwEh4jsVew0?is=NeRD7hAk-6KABAyc

  • SyneRyder

    today at 10:18 AM

    I've run into problems with Apple chargers not charging my Lenovo laptop. (I used to be an Apple fanboy, but after a MacBook Pro that required 6 repairs, I switched to Lenovo).

    I've been much happier since switching to Anker chargers, works much better with my Lenovo and drastically more portable than the Apple ones. It's better able to fit certain situations where the Apple brick won't fit into sockets that are close to the ground / desk, at least not without a bulky extension cable.

    A bit of snark, but don't forget the Apple charger recall:

    https://support.apple.com/ac-wallplug-adapter

    (That said, I do think Apple's chargers were designed far better than most, and I loved that they put so much design thought into the world travel kit. Anker doesn't have the interchangeable heads, but it turns out their chargers are multi-region and a simple adapter head does the job just as well, in a smaller form factor than the Apple bricks. I still somewhat miss Magsafe as well, Magsafe 1 was excellent.)

  • isodev

    today at 10:16 AM

    Your blind trust in Apple is misplaced :)

• zombot

  today at 10:42 AM

  It's even worse. The same USB-A-to-USB-C cable will either charge or not charge my iPhone, depending on where I plug in the USB-A part. But the port that won't charge my phone will happily charge my headset, using the very same cable. That kind of excludes the cable as the source of the suckage, and puts the blame on either the (supposed) power source or the phone. I've observed the same effect with other devices I wanted to charge, too. Some devices just won't accept certain USB power sources while others are more promiscuous.

Just switch to a different brand then.

• josephg

  today at 10:05 AM

  Are other brands any better?

  • PunchyHamster

    today at 11:12 AM

    no

> The USB situation.

> The lie.

> The gap.

> The names.

> The age.

> The trap.

> The buy.

> The truth.

> The chain.

> The lunacy.

> The cheat sheet.

Fucking LLMs have literally ruined the word "the" for me.

• zombot

  today at 10:51 AM

  It's not ruined, it's corrupted.

• cindyllm

  today at 10:28 AM

  [dead]