It's been a joy to not need to bring 3 chargers along when I travel.
I think the only thing we're missing to make the USB-C experience perfect is cable labelling. It's unreasonable to make every cable perform to the max spec, but if we could standardise on some labelling or colours for cables that are charging-only, 480 mbit (usb 2 speed), 5 Gbit (usb 3 speed), 10 GB (usb 3.1 speed), 20 GB (usb 3.2 speed), plus whatever higher speeds (and I guess Thunderbolt too), then we'd be golden.
I like the cables I have, and by know I know what cables do what, but it ain't obvious without testing.
I scan the emarker on every USB C that comes into the house and add a p-touch label. I chuck out power-only and ultra baseline (60 W/USB 2 cables) with no marker or resistors.
Power-only cables could be handy when traveling as they are essentially a condom, but they can only charge slowly and I always have a better cable with me. I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Some cheaper devices I have (e.g. rechargeable LED light strip) _only_ charge via power-only cables. Was maddening when I realized I had thrown out all but one of the cables that can charge it.
HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
Even purchasing them is a nightmare these days because everything says ultra super duper fast supreme and then the fine print says it's actually just 3.0 (or doesn't say at all sometimes on online storefronts). Multiple time's I've found myself in the store flipping around the box like a rubics cube trying to find the little fine print that tells me if the cable is more expensive because it's gold plated snake oil or actually matches the higher spec I need.
Even then, I've had success with older HDMI and DP cables up to fairly high bandwidths. It's only on a longer cable and a 4K screen, as well as one 1440p screen that was just really picky for some reason, that I've had issues.
Meanwhile, the instant I want to transfer a non-trivial amount of bytes, USB 2 speeds come and make my life worse than it needs to be (or at least it did before I sat down, found decent speedy cables, bought them, and then put them in their dedicated spot for me to find the next time I need to transfer files).
Agreed on the purchase experience though. It was a pain to find decent cables, but at least it's possible to end up in a happy place.
A huge problem for me, the only displayport 2.1a cable I’ve found that works for my RTX 5090 + 240hz uncompressed HDR 4K monitor came with the monitor. It’s amazing that it’s pushing around 80gbps through that wire and it’s an incredible visual experience.
I went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.
Anything braided is almost always junk.
I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.
Someone shared this with me the other day. Haven't used it much yet but it seems like it will easily beat my previous strategy of plugging things in randomly and getting aggravated: https://www.whatcable.uk
USB A cables and ports have the inner plastic piece color coded. White for USB 1, black for USB 2, blue for USB 3 (5 Gbit/s), teal for 3.1 (10 Gbit/s). Red or yellow for always-on
Blue is the only one that's actually endorsed by USB-IF. For the most part USB-IF would prefer if everyone just used their little icons. Luckily manufacturers have a bit more sense and all follow the same color scheme (apart from the occasional black sheep)
Cost, really? A 2m USB4 cable from Belkin is $20 (eg INZ004bt2MBK). You don't save much going to 4 ft, sadly.
I find their cables to be pretty good (the TB5/USB4). They're certainly cheaper than Apple's. They have a soft rubber coating (not quite silicone) and a good bend radius. Compare to the super-stiff (but good) cables that Dell provide with their monitors.
The last part is a bigger issue for me. I can use my usb to charge most of my tech but when it comes to the exact cable that my interface needs to use I now have like 30 cables I have to try before I know which one was the correct one.
I too am a USB-C maximalist, but with a handful of differences from OP:
- You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
- I don't think I could live off just one charging port, but would rather just ditch USB-A entirely.
- I'm using wired earbuds, with a standard headphone jack, but with the number of full-sized cans that are using USB-C in some way it baffles me that there aren't more or them (or any, that I've been able to find) that also support using it for audio input, so you you can play them while charging.
But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
> But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
That has less to do with the battery being integrated and more to do with different battery chemistries having different voltage curves.
Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries. The problem is all these devices are tuned to an Alkaline battery voltage curve which is much more slanted than NiMH. NiMH has a nearly flat curve with a sudden drop off while Alkaline have a pretty steady decent (with a sudden drop off).
I'm aware of why it happens, but the net effect is the same. No device powered by AA/AAA is in practice going to be able to detect battery charge level correctly. Combine that with the annoyance of separate chargers versus integrated USB-C, and the result is that I never want to use non-integrated rechargeable batteries. (In practice, I also prefer to avoid devices that use AA/AAA/etc at all, for some of the same reasons.)
I'm aware these aren't mutually exclusive. To me, the bigger benefit of not integrating them is that I can just rotate in freshly charged batteries anytime they die, and don't have to care about being within proximity of a charger.
(I also find this important for gamepads, to the extent that I don't just opt to play wired.)
I do wish more devices supported hot-swappable rechargeable battery packs. My headset does that.
But in the absence of that, I'll take USB-C and the ability to charge while actively using. I find that useful even for wireless gamepads, because then I can attach them to a generic charger on one side of the room, and not run a cable across the room to the console/TV area, because the communication is still wireless and only the power isn't.
I use these USB-C rechargeable batteries in my travel kit, too. I love the flexibility of being able to pickup some AA/AAAs, charge the ones that just died, or swap in the 2 spares I travel with.
An electric toothbrush can never break: it can only become a toothbrush. You should never see an “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Out of Order” sign, just “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Manual.” Sorry for the exercise.
I find Philips Sonicare toothbrushes break after about a year, long before the battery gives up. Which i guess is another reason not having integrated batteries would be nice. But then they might not make as much money whenever I buy a new one so they probably wouldn't do that
I've never experienced them breaking that quickly, but it's worth pointing out that the cheap models are far inferior. The motors are weaker and they even come with a worse charger that doesn't come with a normal wall outlet plug.
I don't like USB-C for toothbrushes to charge because there's water in the bathroom. The proprietary inductive charger/stand that comes with Sonicare/Oral-B electric toothbrushes are ideal.
Sucks that they are proprietary but they have been trivially easy to clone by third party manufacturers. $7 on Amazon.
Re. toothbrush, I have to take the opportunity to give Philips credit for the Sonicare electric toothbrushes they made ~15 years ago. That thing just keeps trucking, it’s incredible. I go on 2 week trips and don’t even bring the charger, and have no worries about it dying.
It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.
They are good! Although my wife manages to kill hers every few years, I don't think I've ever actually had one die myself. I also have my original UV sanitizing charger unit that I purchased new circa 2009!
I've found that one can buy just new handles on ebay though, without the head and chargers, for only like half the super high retail prices or less, even for the "higher end" models, so I do that every 5-8 years or so if one gets too bad.
Part of the reason is that they used NiMH for the batteries in those (I have 3 that are 20-30 years old some predating the Phillips logo). All of mine still work. The NiMH is good for 1000s of deep cycles. The one from the mid 90s is only good for about 15x 2min brushings. Luckily, you can still get new heads for them!
Yeah I was going to say, I'm at 20 years on a Sonicare (pushing 25 now that I remember it is 2026, damn...) and it still works fine. Holds a charge long enough that I've never run out on vacation.
My first Sonicare eventually died of a battery failure 20 years ago. My second would not die and I was stuck buying the old style heads that were hard to clean. I finally gave in and replaced it just recently. Modern lithium cells last forever in low drain, low duty cycle applications like a toothbrush.
I got a no-name USB adapter for mine and it hasn't killed it in the couple of years I've had it, that's the one I take for travel. You can search for "USB QP2520" to find one.
Counterpoint, mine died after a few years to the point where it would only go a few days between charges. Maybe the BMS wasn't good, because this started happening after it completely died on me on a trip once.
I bought a cheap electric toothbrush from a no-name Chinese company. The battery lasts 6 months on one charge with daily use. It cost about $20. I wouldn't be surprised if it's manufactured by the same factories that make Philips' toothbrushes.
Ha I thought mine was on the verge of dying after a good few years of use (amazon reviews were all like, yeah it only lasted a two years), so I ordered a new one, but the old one keeps going so I keep the new one in reserve looming over it menacingly, and it just refuses to kick it lol.
> - You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
I've had an Oral B electric brush for around 3 years now and it hasn't skipped a beat. I'd hate to have to change batteries when I can just pop it on a inductive charging dock every night.
You're probably missing out on the feeling of really, really clean teeth. Regular brushing never gave me the feeling of ALL biofilm getting stripped from the enamels.
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.*
I thought the same, but that'll happen with devices that use AA batteries too.
I was using a cheap Panasonic EW-DJ10 water flosser that uses AA batteries, but the battery compartment contacts would corrode after some time.
I then switched to one of those China USB-C water flossers, but I think the built-in lithium battery's nearing the end of its life since it'll cut off randomly now. I also used to worry about charging it, since the USB-C port would need to be dried out before I plugged the charging cable in.
No idea what's a happy medium for electronics that need to work near water.
I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
Here's how the last few broke:
* Phone with typical inadequate battery + external portable battery pack plugged in, shoved in together in pocket running Google Maps navigation via bluetooth, and biking. My thigh bent the USB connector.
* USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
* USB-C plugged into phone and sat on while on car seat. Another thing any half-competent design intern would have listed on their stress test scenario list but it seems the senior designers missed
* Laptop plugged in on the edge of standing desk, USB cable got jammed in gap between adjacent desks.
I much preferred real, sturdy mechanical connections. They should just miniatureize the IEC power connectors and put straight up 19VDC through them.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
I do everything on your list. I also have young children who grab and play with things. Our household breaks 1 USB-C plug per year, if that.
I don't know if you were embellishing for effect, but anyone breaking 50 connectors a year probably isn't going to have success with anything short of a fully ruggedized connector solution, which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices.
Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
> which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices
Not true. 1990s connectors hardly ever broke for me. They were all super rugged. I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
I buy the DC barrel jacks, those I've had inordinate problems on the inside of devices as they wear out but never on the power plug itself.
VGA connectors? I've bent the shield on more than one VGA or DVI cable, and it's a nightmare to get a pin straight enough if you happen to bend one... but possible sometimes.
This is a success! USB-C was designed so that the part most likely to fail is the inexpensive plug, not the socket.
One of the problems with USB mini-A was that the socket would fail, meaning the device had to be repaired or discarded. Combined with the short lifetime (about 300 insertions) it was a disaster which is why you almost never see it.
You’d be more unhappy of those failures had happened in your expensive device rather than your cheap cables.
Perhaps you are just not careful with things, I’ve been an early adopter and never broken one ( I probably have at least 40 different ones, some of which get plugged/unplugged multiple times a day).
My kids haven’t broken a single one either and they destroyed plenty of lightning cables.
Is IEC really the gold standard for connectors to you? I always thought they feel terrible to plug in. There's no snap or solid bottom-out indication to when it's "connected." And it just sits in the socket from friction that doesn't feel particularly solid. It's the kind of connection where if it gets yanked a little bit and the connection fails, it's not obvious because it's half-seated in the socket.
There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side). Those are pretty robust, get the cable out of the way more reliably, and provide a much smaller lever for physical forces on the connector. They aren't the solution for everything, but they solve a lot of issues
For everything else there are magnetic USB-C connectors
> They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
> USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
Seems like you managed to break one even though it was in the environment that you're saying they're designed for. Maybe you're the problem and USB-C, the technology that billions of people manage to use just fine without breaking on a daily basis, is perfectly fine.
Why haven't phones just moved to have two USB ports?
A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...
I've needed 2 USB-C ports on one-port devices (phone, Steam Deck) a few times so I got this tiny 2-port hub with micro SD card reader (also has option for 3.5mm audio port instead of card reader): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKV7JSHC?th=1 "Satechi USB C Mobile Hub, 4-in-1 USB C Multiport Adapter, 4K HDMI, 100W Pass-Through Charging, 10Gbps Data"
Because the use case and demand versus the cost of engineering and manufacturing isn’t there. The market for USB headphones is minuscule compared to Bluetooth headphones.
Because space inside a phone is at an extreme premium. And this problem is solved by either using magsafe to charge or using an external hub for more ports.
See, I agree with this too. You wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about the random little things that are specific to just one device or another (IR blasters, the DAC on old LG phones, etc) if you could just plug in a second USB peripheral.
But what I'm more getting at is the other way around: that wireless headphones will already have USB-C for charging anyway. And that, particularly for larger ones (that have that port directly on the device, and not in a separate charging cradle), it really seems like a waste that more of them don't leverage that -- so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
There are still wired options, though, right? I don't really miss them, the nostalgia is not strong enough to forget how often the damn cable would catch on something and try to rip the headphones off my head. Or the cord noise. I get that people do not like having to eventually replace a battery, but high quality wireless headphones are a nice upgrade IMO.
My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc.
There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave").
I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars.
Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon.
Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit.
Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm, as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact.
People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to.
____
¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
I had a pair of sennheiser urbanite headphones that used USB (micro :( ) for digital audio input, and you could use them while charging. Was shocked and disappointed when i eventually replaced them with Audio Technica ones that could only charge via USB but didn't do audio via USB, only bluetooth or analog.
I agree (and am sad) that it's not a ubiquitous feature, but headphones with a built-in dac do exist
Just recently acquired a set from "Philips" that is an 8-pack of lithium-ion AAs with a charging-case that connects to USB-C (Note: the case itself doesn't have its own battery, like an earbuds case would -- it's just a normal charger that doubles as a case). Sounds like this would be great for your toothbrushes and such!
For the vast majority of things I need to power or charge, dumb USB charging is fine, and I have a 10-port Anker “IQ” charger that works great for most of those things. Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist? I don’t need 65W on each port. I just needs lots of ports for gadgets that can trickle charge for hours at night (4 kids, lots of devices). I mostly want to standardize on USB-C host cables, but no one makes a cheap device for doing that more than a decade after USB-C became a thing.
The reason is because while you want to use the low end the general public does not understand that USB-C is the connector only and that various levels of power and data depend on the cable and the device at both ends.
If you sell a 10 port USB-C charged someone is going to plug 10 MacBooks into it and complain it doesnt work.
Macbooks aren't the absolute best example anymore, since 20W is plenty to charge ARM-based MacBooks in a few hours, so a 200W 10-port charger could do a fine job with 10 MacBooks.
But your point is still valid. As a nerd I really appreciate being able to use say, my 100W laptop charger or the car jumpstarter pack I have to charge up my earbuds or an electric toothbrush, since it reduces the number of weird little cables or chargers I have to keep track of, but it sure does baffle the non-technical majority that their toothbrush charger fits their laptop 'for some reason' but of course does nothing - plus the confusion when they realize they could physically plug the toothbrush into a pair of headphones, or plug two portable batteries together.
I've seen 1000W (or so they claim) 10 port USB-C chargers on Amazon. Not Anker, just a no name Chinese brand I am not going to trust. But they do seem to exist. Like the sibling comment says, I assume it's because people expect USB-C charging capabilities to be a lot higher.
Sort of. USB-C cables have an emarker chip inside them which reports the capabilities of the cable. The USB controller on your laptop reads this chip and makes use of the info, but as of today there is no standardized way for the controller chip to pass this info up to the OS. I assume most of them don't even provide an interface at all for the OS to request it.
I vaguely recall someone from Google working on this issue for Chromebooks. I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this since they control the OS and hardware. For now you can buy tester devices which read the emarker info and show it on a small display. There's also more advanced testers which test the actual signal integrity and error rates, but these are very expensive and made for the cable manufacturers.
I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside. Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge, but all the cables look the same, and you don't tend to know in advance.
This is really only a problem if you buy cheap cables. Pick the baseline spec you want your USB cables to meet, and throw out all the ones that don’t. Problem solved.
It’s still a minor frustration if you have to borrow a cable, but that’s solved by packing a cable, and by encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables.
Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.
Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".
I do electronics professionally. This is likely because in order to save a bit on BOM costs, the device itself doesn't have the necessary pulldown resistors to signal to turn on VBUS.
USB-A has always-on VBUS while USB-C doesn't. Because the spec allows for always-on VBUS in a USB-A to USB-C cable, some devices just assume that they're always being powered by one of those cables.
It's because they are straight up defective. The USB-C spec is pretty clear in that the power pins have 0v until you signal for a voltage. This isn't a failure of USB-C, you should just return defective devices to the OEM.
Thankfully this defect is becoming less common outside of temu junk.
That's because they didn't implement USB C correctly. Maybe it was to save less than a penny on the BOM, maybe it was arrogance ("it works for me! send it!"), or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, they didn't do it right.
By standard, USB C provides no power at all unless the device being powered follows the rules. They're easy rules to follow. The minimum viable way of doing it right requires just two tiny resistors inside of the device.
Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.
40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2. That said, outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor, you don't need a 40gbps cable.
> 40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2.
I dunno, Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap. DOCSIS 4.0 does 10Gbps on some really ancient cables. I'm sure Cat9 will do even better, at least the cat people and the doc people are trying harder than the USB people.
Unifi even has a PoE-over-coax solution. Add some Anker GaN shit and I'm sure it can be miniaturized.
> outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor
As soon as I need a "special" cable to connect a laptop to a monitor, we're effectively back to the 1990s-2000s when I needed a special monitor cable. There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
The whole point of this thread was "one type of cable for everything" and "grab any USB-C cable from your personal stash and they all work for every use case".
99% of user use cases for USB are charging batteries and copying a word document on a flash drive. For those cases literally every port and cable works. For video, in every office and home, the thunderbolt cable just sits in the monitor at all times with just the USB end free. Meaning there is no confusion around which cable is the video one because the video one only ever sits connected to the monitor.
While I now no longer have to carry around a bag of chargers when I travel or fish through a bucket of black DC adapters for the right one.
> There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
I completely disagree.
When the only difference between cables is max speed, that's still a huge improvement over a nest of different cable types, half of which are custom. And it's easy to get into a position where all your USB-C cables differ only by max speed.
Which is worse because they all look sort of the same, but they are not the same.
It's even worse for non-techies, who don't understand what a gbps or a watt is, and who will leave a 1-star review, or worse, trash their cable, because their cable was "slow" but was meant for 240W PD but only supported USB 2.0. They purchased it initially because it had 5 stars.
Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
The situation in the early 2000s is I could spot the cable I needed from a mile away.
Just about every data cable standard has different speed capabilities on a per-cable basis. Ethernet, HDMI, and displayport have the same issue and usually with even worse labeling.
> Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
That requires they never increase the speed again. Seems like a bad starting point.
And most people will accept the tradeoff of different cable speeds when it means long charging cables can be 10x cheaper. The problem is when manufacturers choose to use bad labels.
And if you push people off USB they're going to use 27 different kinds of cable and you won't be able to spot which generic black wire you need from across the room.
Also, if we pretend they set the max speed in stone in 2013, it's easy to get yourself a full set of 240W 10Gbps-per-lane do-everything cables in every length from 0 to 2.5 meters. $25 isn't an amazing price but sticking with passive cables keeps you out of the real nasty prices.
USB 2.0 cables can be thinner, more flexible, longer, and cheaper. You could decide to only ever use thunderbolt cables for everything, but you'd be paying $40-$100 for a cable as thick as a mains power cord and doesn't offer any benefit at all to charging your phone.
We need better labeling rather than making every single USB cable a 40gbit thunderbolt cable.
The apple usb c charging cable is like $30, it is well worth the money of you are into software defined radio I can report. Not sure what magic they pulled of, but all the tricks in the book it seems!
If you're buying a cable for a specific device in a specific circumstance than by all means get the cable that meets that. Then it's not a problem about "what is its functional support", it doesn't matter, that's your mouse cable that you use for your mouse on that desk. That's the monitor cable you use to plug things into that monitor. That's the dock cable you use to plug things into the dock.
For all the cables that are your flex carrying around places where you don't know how it'll be used tomorrow, get a good cable and you won't have any issues.
I have some Thunderbolt cables that are like $80 apiece because they're like 3 meters long. I have like five or six of them because each one only carries one video signal.
(I used Thunderbolt so that touch and pen inputs could go over the one cable. These days though I just use a MacBook Pro, and hook up a capture card when I need to access the Windows)
> encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables
One of the main advantages of a single standardized plug is reducing e-waste. This just sounds irresponsible. Having a single tool that covers every possible use case is rarely a good solution.
Device makers need to stop including these garbage 4 cm A to C cables. I have enough USB cables and bricks to last my whole life. I don't need to collect a million more spec violating ones in a drawer I will never use.
Things are shifting though. Ikea ships their USB-C stuff without cables now.
Sure there is. Buy reputable brands from reputable marketplaces that clearly state the specs, and if you get products from them that don't comply stop buying from them.
If switching to a type-A charger fixes it, it’s probably the device manufacturer’s fault, not the cable. Many manufacturers that need the 5v standard you’d normally get from an old type-A charger screw this up.
For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…
I don't think it's cost reasons these are being omitted. The customer refunds would easily exceed the savings. It's most likely designers just swapping a micro usb port with a usb c one in an old design while making no other changes and seeing it works with the A to C cable they have.
I share your theory about micro usb, yeah. I know it’s not cost savings, it’s just lazy/ignorant. If they’re changing the footprint on the board for a type-c port, they can add some smd resistors.
> Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge
You can fix that by buying USB-C to USB-C adapters with 5.1 kiloohm resistors.
It should have taken the manufacturer less than one cent to include the resistors, but as a consumer product they will unfortunately cost at least a dollar each.
Buy yourself a handful of good cable for charging. (I quite like the silicone anker 643) And throw everything else away in a box.
For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.
Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.
I read about this so often, yet it's a problem I just never encountered. If I need super high bandwidth like connecting a display, I pick one of those annoyingly unlflexible fat cables. Easy. They even tend to feature the TB4 flash icon. Surely I would not expect any of the light and nimble ones to do that trick. When I need strong PD, it's also either one of those or one of the far more flexible but still quite thick braided ones. Often they have some hinge gimmick connector to prevent any hope for bandwidth one might be tempted to have. All other cables, I expect nothing but legacy USB. Yeah, and some of those won't do data at all (curiosly those are never the lightest cables in my stable, the lightest ones tend to do the legacy USB "gear not, some bits will eventually get through!" just fine)
> I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside.
Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.
USB-IF actually does have pretty clear labeling and standards that address most of the issues being posted in this thread. But most USB devices and cables are not certified and not compliant with the specs.
Short of making USB proprietary and behind a licensing and certification scheme there is no way to solve this. People need to stop buying cheap junk.
This is an acceptable failure mode. I'd be nice if there was a standardized LED flash or color that you could get so if your relative said something isn't working, you could ask, "Is it flashing three times?" or whatever.
The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
And then you go someplace, realize you left your charger at home, and find out despite your friend having dozens of barrel type power connector power adapters not a single one match the size/voltage/amperage/polarity of your device.
Or you just borrow their USB-C adapter and don't have any worries.
The thickness / durability of the cable is a pretty good indicator, if it's thin and flexible it'll only do basic charging if it's thick and durable it's because it's packing enough wiring to do power delivery, video etc, everything except probably Thunderbolt.
Yeah I have some devices that expect the manufacturer charger (I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something) and I'm not even sure what was the point in giving it a USB C connector.
This kind of defect is extremely rare since this would basically be a USB killer frying every other device you plug it in to. 99% of the time it's the device is missing some resistors on the cc pins which signal to the charger to send 5v. Since usb-c it defaults to 0v until you request something. But USB-A has no CC pins so it just puts 5v out at all times.
I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expecting 5V, there's a healthy chance it'll .. stop expecting 5V.
We blame usb-c for all this, but it does feel like some mffrs are going out of their way to screw it up.
Yeah maybe USB-D will get it right. But probably not. I had such high hopes for USB-C. Now I keep a couple USB-C to USB-A adapters lying around to force the charger (which is just a normal home outlet with a couple built-in USB-C ports) to speak old school USB-A charging instead of trying to negotiate PD with a shitty device that did not implement USB-C correctly.
Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.
Unfortunately the EU has written USB-C into law, so there will never be a USB-D. I guess we should be glad they didn’t do this 30 years ago, or we’d still be using PS/2 connectors.
It's not a flexible specification, its straight up bad engineering. The specification literally says if you do not want negotiation, you must add the resistor.
Usually they won't charge because they're not actually USB-C devices but are just broken and only pretend to be one (mostly due to missing resistors on CC lines, but there are other ways a device can be non-compliant too).
I wish there are easy ways to figure out the maximum current and wattage supported by a cable. So many cables don't label themselves except on the box!
Note there is a link at the end of the article to a device which can test cables and determine exactly that! But it's a sign of the problem that you need that thing.
With USB-C cables I tend to throw them out unless they are premium cables that cost upwards of $20, I mean I could keep the cheap ones around to charge this or that but cheap cables have this way of going bad, like they are supposed to work if you plug them in either way except they don't, you plug your cheap device in overnight to charge and it doesn't really charge, etc. No way I could trust my wife to handle it.
Personally I think USB got worse in a lot of ways in the 3.0 generation, like at 1.0 they designed a bus architecture that could enumerate 127 devices on a root hub. USB 3.0 doesn't promise anything and ff you start plugging in hubs to your laptop you will hit undocumented limits and find devices start dropping out randomly when you've plugged in several devices and it gives me the heebie jeebies because a mass storage device could drop out. I know mainstream filesytems today are pretty durable but still...
Even the simplest 3-wire cable with nothing but wires in it will handle 45W charging already, which is enough to power my laptop. It needs to be physically broken to not work. If it doesn't, it's usually the device's fault. There are many cheap devices out there that are just USB-C-shaped and don't actually implement the spec, working with some kinds of cables and not working with others.
Personally I have stopped buying cables that do not disclose this information. There are pretty fine alternatives that do, so I see no reason to take gambles.
My only issues so far come from charging protocols rather than cables anyway.
Moreover, stuff like how many watts a cable supports are issues that happen regardless connector type.
Not saying this device is not cool, but one can also get this info easily in a computer, if you find out what to look for. One had presented a utility here some time ago with a menu bar icon showing this information
These PD testers are cool (I thought about buying one), but honestly, for the price of a tester, one can buy 2, maybe even 3 good quality cables and just throw away the rest.
Fair point, I just have oodles of cables (literally 10-20+ per combo of micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C <-> micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C each) and I like having them all organized by capability so that when I need one I can grab from right bin.
Before getting the tester I just kept buying new "known good" cables whenever I needed one since my cable drawer was just a huge unknown.
> Reads eMarker chip parameters in Type-C cables, providing detailed performance information (e.g., maximum current, voltage, data transfer rates) to help users fully understand cable capabilities and ensure safe, efficient device usage.
This is a rather stupid to rave about, but I was in amsterdam several months ago, and I forgot to bring my NA to EU plug adapter. I was a bit miffed having to buy a new travel charger, but it's become the best one I own. (Only because all the other chargers I own were spawned into existence around me/came with some device)
65watts isn't even that much, but its enough that I don't need:
- the mac charger that's always connected to the magsafe cable I can't use with anything else,
- the dinky iPhone brick with the cable that needs USB-C on both ends,
- and the slightly less dinky pocketbook e-reader charger with the cable that needs USB-A on the brick-end and micro USB on the business-end.
2x 65 watt USB-C ports and 1x USB-A running at whatever anemic power USB-A is capable of pitfully spitting at my ancient e-reader without drawing the ire of UL or something (5v/500ma still?), perfection.
You should go purpose-buy a charging brick, anything is better than the freebie ones you get with stuff.
I used to think of myself as one as well but that's changing as of late.
Looking back 15 years or so, I remember the old ThinkPad and Dell Latitude/Precision docking stations functioned reliably for as long as I can remember.
Today I have a variety of USB-C and thunderbolt 3/4 docking stations, all of which have been affected by various issues. The the manufacturers of these things don't care.
The latest casualty is a Pluggable TBT4-UDZ, which randomly decided one day that I should only have one working monitor instead of two. Doesn't matter if I use Windows, Mac or Linux. Meanwhile, the same monitors & cables work fine with my desktop.
I appreciate USB-C as a means to charge my stuff, but from now on, I'm going to try and use other ports and cables for everything else. Every laptop's settings will assume only the main screen will ever be used. I've no time to get used to a nice multi-monitor setup just to have it taken away when the USB-C dock starts acting up.
I've always been a thinkpad fan but their docks were clunky huge uncomfortable things for me.
I had a hp nc2400 that had a very nice little dock where you'd set the laptop on top of two guide poles an then slide the dock connector in from the side. A very compact design.
The thinkpad docks just always used so much space on my desk.
I would like the USB-C connector was more durable. I've literally never killed a USB-A connector, but enough lateral force and USB-C just breaks. I suppose it was made so small due to mobile devices, which is understandable, but came with tradeoffs.
Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)
Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.
I agree. Lightning is such a better connector and one of the main reasons I still haven't replaced my phone. If lightning could've just been updated for higher bitrates it would have been so much better.
I went through lightning cables fast. Unsure why, maybe I sweat a lot, or keep my phone in humid places.
But every so many months I had to replace the cable because the 4th pin would be burned.
I don't have that issue with USB-C. But I do feel that the lightning receiver is less fragile over the USB-C one. Removing lint from a USB-C receiver is harder.
Try the relatively recent Anker Prime cables, the ones that are both braided and soft. I haven't managed to break one yet, despite breaking several past Anker cables that also claimed to be durable.
I don't have a problem with USB C cables, and even if I did it wouldn't be a big deal. The cables are cheap compared to the devices they charge. It is broken USB-C ports that frustrate me about them, or ones with worn out clips.
What way are you breaking them? The two failure modes I've seen are the port getting full of pocket lint for phones (easy to fix) and the port ripping off the PCB. The second one is a design issue where some ports are entirely surface mount rather than having the grounding pins go through the pcb to anchor it on.
I would happily be a USB-C enjoyer if manufactures stopped forgetting the stupid CC resistors meaning that you device will not charge with a C-to-C cable.
It should be considered a defective design and recalled, I have been burned several times by this.
I'm reminded of one my favorite south park bits, where Cartman freezes himself to wake up in a future that has a nintendo wii, only to discover the technology of that time doesn't support the plug-in format for the wii.
My ONLY problem with it is it's just a bit too small. That creates mechanical problems within the plug which are annoying. Plug it in and pull it out 1 too many times and eventually you get a loose connector cable that needs to be replaced.
Generally that's fine as all my chargers have replaceable cables, it's just an annoyance.
I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max and I don’t want to get rid of it or anything, but I am kind of looking forward to the glorious day that it breaks. Once it breaks, any phone I get (iPhone or Android) will have USB-C, along with my laptop, with One Adapter To Rule Them All when I travel.
That’s the dream, anyway. Life rarely works out quite that cleanly for me.
I’m a cold-dead-hands 13 Mini owner, but even I’ll admit to the temptation of replacing the last device I have that doesn’t use USB-C with something that does.
So many kids toys use custom brick chargers, especially remote control cars. I refuse to buy anything that isn't USB-C, I'm not keeping track of all of those.
I think that's changing too, my son got some cheap radio controlled boat a few weeks ago, the remote uses AA and the boat has USB-C as input (interestingly enough, it has a weird USB-C cable with a built in light to signal when charging is done).
I recently bought a very cheap RC car for my kids, and it was USB-C rechargeable but instead of having a port it just has a USB-C cable that comes out of it and plugs into a power brick. I love that.
I'm the same. Though I still think they could have made USB much neater as a protocol, USB-C now does everything I need for goto-connectivity.
I recently looked at the connector and reflected on how insanely small it is. It's no wonder it took decades to get to this point, and it's a very neat physical design at a great price. 16 pins and 10A in that little thing. Amazing.
It took that long because nothing it does now was ever a requirement. It was created as serial/parallel port replacement (fun fact - max speed parallel port is faster than USB 1.1, at ~2.5MB/s).
If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.
I agree with using a single ubiquitous power standard for small electronics and electrics. That’s almost what USB-C is these days. We need better labelling of cable capacities when there are 20w and 120w cables that at a glance look the same.
I was afraid this article was going to say one connector for everything when it said maximalist. If it had said to kill eSATA, SPF+, RJ-45, DisplayPort, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and a bunch of other ports it would have been far more controversial. I’ve seen people saying we don’t need card formats anymore because everything can just be an external USB-C flash drive. I’m glad this article wasn’t that maximalist.
The USB spec does have labeling standards that are pretty clear. But uncertified temu junk obviously doesn't use them. There shouldn't even be such a thing as a 20w cable, the minimum with no emarker chip is 60w.
For many things, though, a barrel jack is sufficient and doesn’t require the additional cost and complexity of USB-C. Barrel jacks have their own problems (is it inner positive or negative, what current is required, what’s the diameter of the inner and outer rings), but after that it’s as simple as it gets, both electrically and mechanically.
I go to Europe enough that I ditch the universal adapter and get a European ubs-c wall plug. A little more maximalist at home to store but more minimalist while traveling.
This USB-C toothbrush is something I've been looking for so I don't need to bring a special charger.
What would be even better is an electric toothbrush that doesn't contain a battery that would work with USB-PD plugged in. Why? Because I like putting my electric toothbrush in my checked bag because it's not essential, and technically you're not supposed to put lithium batteries in checked bags.
I too jumped on board with USB-C right away. Only downside is some hardware manufacturers use sloppy fitting USB ports. This was a major issue on my Touchbar Macbook Pro. Just slightly bumping the cable would lose sync with my dock.
I imagine whatever replaces USB-C in the future should fix this issue and make a more solid connection like USB-A. However USB-C could be the last wired interface as everything in the future will move to wireless.
Try a different cable and make sure the ports aren't full of rubbish. A good cable and clean port makes a fairly good connection with a solid click. Lot of time I've used a sewing needle to fish incredible amounts of pocket lint out of peoples phone ports and cables connect so much better.
There is already a robust market for chargers with a few connectors.
But I would like having a table with a plethora of sockets and cables available.
Lots of times, I come in and want to charge a bunch of things. Charge a few drone batteries + the controller. laptop, camera + camera batteries. charge things for a long drive, or a longer trip.
As to cables, sometimes I need USB-C, but there are lots of things that require other connectors like micro-usb, or a garmin watch. And sometimes cables go to other devices like wireless chargers.
This year I grudgingly switched from an iPhone 13 Mini to a Pixel 10, largely to get the full integrated Pebble experience, but having USB-C has been a surprising and delightful upgrade to my home/travel experience.
For sources, I basically have an INUI battery bank and a 100W wall adapter, then everything is a USB-C sink: Lenovo X1, Pixel 10, Nintendo Switch, Sennheiser headphones
Please, please, please: we NEED a magsafe version of USB C
Yes, you can buy adapters, but you end up w/device warts that don't work w/normal USB-C cords and my understanding that they are for the most part pretty dangerously out of spec
Magnetic coupling is an incredibly underutilized user experience tool
As much as it still pisses me off reading the Surface product head's comment that if you love USB-C then you love dongles -- while shipping a Mini DisplayPort connector -- I also think it's a waste that they didn't contribute their magnetic docking to the upstream spec.
We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")
I think one thing that we have come to think as electronic consumers, or just consumers in general, is to expect the absolute best modern version of everything (plug, AI model, car...). I think it is pure conditioning and we forgot the simplicity and convenience of things just working even with apparent downsides relative to acme version. Could USB-C be better? Probably. Is just settling on a standard so you don't have to think about it preferable? I think so. Consider USB-C standardization as an expression of a specific system of values.
I draw the line at cheap unbranded rechargeable toothbrush. I’d be too worried about fires with cheap cells. I’m happy to pay the premium for top brands for anything with lithium-ion batteries.
Meanwhile, that Xbox roughly needs 12 V at 7.5 A (let's say 90 W, but the internal supply is 165W) . So there is just no easy way to do it with USB-PD. Technically, you can make/buy some sort of USB-PD bench power supply to do this, but I'm unaware of anything on the market right now. One that I use (DPS-150) is limited to 5A output.
You're better off buying some chunky power bank (like Anker Solix) that has your regular wall plug outlets.
I agree. I'm looking at replacing my braun series 7 shaver, and I'd love if the replacement product had usb-c.
what really gets me though is products that support usb-c and then don't support PD, so you end up charging at a glacial pace. The most upsetting incidence of this I've seen is a powerbank charging via usb-c but not supporting PD. So slow!
As far as I could tell the cable is dumb. If you plug the cable into a regular USB-C socket (which I do not recommend) then the tip is +5V and the rest is ground.
In fact it's designed to plug into the plug marked "mobile" on the amp and the 3.5mm end goes into the line out of something else, providing AUX input, which is mixed straight through to the output of the amp (which is thankfully a regular 3.5mm headphone jack).
I guess they over-ordered USB-C sockets and decided to yolo it, or else for some reason only USB-C footprints fit into the space on the PCB. (But they still had to manufacture or were able to obtain these cursed cables ... it doesn't make a lot of sense.)
I'm still driven absolutely mad by how many devices are being released in 2026 that refuse to charge if they're connected to a port that negotiates USB Power Delivery. They don't fall back to 5V, they just don't charge at all.
Devices like this usually come with an A-to-C cable in the box and that's a warning sign, but an even more twisted version of this is when they come with a C-to-C cable and a Type C charger that does not support PD. That's the only combination they tested, and that's your problem now.
I now carry enough adapter cables that I can deliberately take PD out of the equation just to work around these devices.
I like the fact that we're aligning on one connector but it's hard for me to praise USB-C in and of itself. The connector feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not, and especially on lower-end devices.
The charging standards, voltages, and data rates, are frustrating because they're almost never labeled. This is especially true on low end, cables, and device devices. The worst offenders will only charge with a USB-A to C cable with low voltage, which is not what I hope for when I see a USB-C port on a device.
Keep in mind that you can buy cables that are USB-C on one end and whatever on the other end. I have multiple USB-C to 12V barrel jack cables for this reason specifically. No idea because you still need a special cable, but better than nothing.
Trimmer: I purchased this from Amazon USA for $70 on sale, now listed at $96. I am happy with it, but haven't had it long enough to comment on durability: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H "Manscaped Beard Hedger Men's Premium Beard Trimmer, 20 Length Adjustable Blade Wheel, Stainless Steel T-Blade for Precision Facial Hair Trimming, Cordless Waterproof Wet/Dry Clipper"
For video input or power supply? I doubt we would ever see it for power supply.
For video input it seems almost deliberate since the TV brands all benefit from licensing out HDMI and forcing it to be the only way to connect to a TV.
USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.
There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:
To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.
Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Fairly high. Nitpick time: The Gameboy Color[0] took a standard-size battery that you can still buy today. It did not need to be charged, but you did have to turn the system off to swap batteries unless you had a barrel-jack adapter.
Barrel-jack DC wasn't quite standard, but you might be able to find something compatible if you went to an electronics supply store and paid careful attention to the listed input voltage and polarity on the device. Regardless, most people didn't bother tethering their Gameboy and just fed it batteries since it ran forever on them.
The real proprietary hellhole started with the Gameboy Advance SP, and didn't end until the Switch used Type-C. Hell, the SP is basically a modern smartphone:
1. Proprietary form-fitting battery pack
2. Custom power input connector
3. No separate headphone output
Bonus points: the headphone adapter Nintendo sold for the SP didn't have a power pass-through, so you had to choose between headphones or charging. Though there are third-party ones now that do both headphone output and USB-C power input.
To add insult to the injury, the charging port of Nintendo DS Lite was almost mini-USB, but not quite - with enough force and some metal bending it was apparently possible to make it work with regular mini-USB cable. Absolutely idiotic design, especially since that port was just 5V input anyway, anyone with soldering iron could tweak USB-A cable to work with the proprietary charging connector.
> Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?
I personally hate USB-C as it's a poorly designed connector. It's flimsy and can easily broken yet at the same time difficult to insert.
I've had a couple be broken by getting "squashed" because there's no mechanical support because of the rounded edges so the metal easily pancakes.
They also seem to be easily damaged such they stop connecting through a failure mechanism I haven't quite figured out (my macbook air no longer reliably connects to them).
Finally, the ports don't have reliable insertion and they're sharp, so they scratch up whatever device they're on as people repeatedly miss the insertion position resulting in surface scuffing. Phones especially should not be using them because of this issue and should be using something like lightning that did not have any sharp edges which avoided most scratching.
Similar things for video (tiny HDMI male adapter), and even my walkie-talkie (the Chinese market has come up with Motorola programming cable adapters that are just little dongles - https://www.ebay.com/itm/800104798120 - I can reprogram and even reload AES256 keys into my radio!).
PD triggers let my travel CPAP run off of battery (using a Transcend Micro - it only needs a 19V PD trigger and a solid 100W).
And of course... an Ecoflow solar hat and a battery I can shove in my back pocket for when I'm wandering around in the open air.
... and I just realized I can hook my Sony Reon Pocket cooler up to the solar hat...
USB-C connectors are so flimsy compared to USB-A, it feels like a real step backward. It barely takes any pressure on the cable to make my charging cable fall out, or to rotate it just enough that it loses connection.
The cable will not just fall out. On my clean iphone I can hang the phone from the cable and lightly swing it around without it disconnecting. If it's just falling out it's because something is mechanically wrong or it's full of gunk.
Not to be that guy, but the USB-C specification requires an extraction force of 8–20 N for a new connector, measured on the sixth unplugging cycle after five conditioning cycles. After 10,000 insertion/removal cycles, the permitted range is 6–20 N.
Equivalent hanging mass:
8 N is 0.82 kg
20 N is 2.04 kg
So the problem you have is likely one of your manufacturer not producing equipment suitable to pass the USB-C spec.
As an aside, the specified extraction force for USB A is:
10 N minimum when new
8 N minimum after durability cycling
So pretty much the same, in some cases even less.
I don't have problems with USB-C connectors per se. I think HDMI is worse in terms of durability.
It's been a joy to not need to bring 3 chargers along when I travel.
I think the only thing we're missing to make the USB-C experience perfect is cable labelling. It's unreasonable to make every cable perform to the max spec, but if we could standardise on some labelling or colours for cables that are charging-only, 480 mbit (usb 2 speed), 5 Gbit (usb 3 speed), 10 GB (usb 3.1 speed), 20 GB (usb 3.2 speed), plus whatever higher speeds (and I guess Thunderbolt too), then we'd be golden.
I like the cables I have, and by know I know what cables do what, but it ain't obvious without testing.
I scan the emarker on every USB C that comes into the house and add a p-touch label. I chuck out power-only and ultra baseline (60 W/USB 2 cables) with no marker or resistors.
Power-only cables could be handy when traveling as they are essentially a condom, but they can only charge slowly and I always have a better cable with me. I wouldn’t mind a PD aware charge-only device but inquire require some MITM circuitry and I’m too lazy to make one.
Some cheaper devices I have (e.g. rechargeable LED light strip) _only_ charge via power-only cables. Was maddening when I realized I had thrown out all but one of the cables that can charge it.
Some manufacturers don't want to do the power negotiation aspect which is the cause of this, I believe.
Not even power negotiation but a simple resistor would be too costly for them to implement.
HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
Even purchasing them is a nightmare these days because everything says ultra super duper fast supreme and then the fine print says it's actually just 3.0 (or doesn't say at all sometimes on online storefronts). Multiple time's I've found myself in the store flipping around the box like a rubics cube trying to find the little fine print that tells me if the cable is more expensive because it's gold plated snake oil or actually matches the higher spec I need.
Even then, I've had success with older HDMI and DP cables up to fairly high bandwidths. It's only on a longer cable and a 4K screen, as well as one 1440p screen that was just really picky for some reason, that I've had issues.
Meanwhile, the instant I want to transfer a non-trivial amount of bytes, USB 2 speeds come and make my life worse than it needs to be (or at least it did before I sat down, found decent speedy cables, bought them, and then put them in their dedicated spot for me to find the next time I need to transfer files).
Agreed on the purchase experience though. It was a pain to find decent cables, but at least it's possible to end up in a happy place.
A huge problem for me, the only displayport 2.1a cable I’ve found that works for my RTX 5090 + 240hz uncompressed HDR 4K monitor came with the monitor. It’s amazing that it’s pushing around 80gbps through that wire and it’s an incredible visual experience.
> HDMI and display port are in a similar boat. Putting the spec on the connector would be so much help.
What if we just have different connectors for different specs? Then you'd know what supports what by what fits into the connection in the first place.
that sounds terrible; HDMI/DP are backwards-compatible on purpose, you can use your fancy-shmancy modern output with a now-ancient display
I went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.
Anything braided is almost always junk.
I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.
Braided works fine? I have plenty of Ugreen and others from Amazon, what matters is what's inside.
Someone shared this with me the other day. Haven't used it much yet but it seems like it will easily beat my previous strategy of plugging things in randomly and getting aggravated: https://www.whatcable.uk
Wasn't there a push at some point to enforce some sort of spec labeling for USB-C cables? Or was that a fantasy in my head?
That's what Thunderbolt 4 and 5 cables essentially are - USB-C cables with guarantees on speeds and PD power.
USB3 has/had some color labeling standards, but I only remember seeing it with type A.
USB A cables and ports have the inner plastic piece color coded. White for USB 1, black for USB 2, blue for USB 3 (5 Gbit/s), teal for 3.1 (10 Gbit/s). Red or yellow for always-on
Blue is the only one that's actually endorsed by USB-IF. For the most part USB-IF would prefer if everyone just used their little icons. Luckily manufacturers have a bit more sense and all follow the same color scheme (apart from the occasional black sheep)
Why not buy only 100W power and data cables?
That would be USB4 cables. They do have the problem of being awkwardly thick and stiff if you're using them for a lot of things.
And then there are the crappy devices that aren't compliant with USB PD and only charge with a USB-C to USB-A cable.
Thickness, and also cost.
Cost, really? A 2m USB4 cable from Belkin is $20 (eg INZ004bt2MBK). You don't save much going to 4 ft, sadly.
I find their cables to be pretty good (the TB5/USB4). They're certainly cheaper than Apple's. They have a soft rubber coating (not quite silicone) and a good bend radius. Compare to the super-stiff (but good) cables that Dell provide with their monitors.
The last part is a bigger issue for me. I can use my usb to charge most of my tech but when it comes to the exact cable that my interface needs to use I now have like 30 cables I have to try before I know which one was the correct one.
I too am a USB-C maximalist, but with a handful of differences from OP:
- You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
- I don't think I could live off just one charging port, but would rather just ditch USB-A entirely.
- I'm using wired earbuds, with a standard headphone jack, but with the number of full-sized cans that are using USB-C in some way it baffles me that there aren't more or them (or any, that I've been able to find) that also support using it for audio input, so you you can play them while charging.
> I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rechargeable+aa+batteries+usb+c
But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
> But in practice, I greatly prefer devices with integrated batteries, because they're more likely to be able to give me useful feedback about the battery level (e.g. a reliable low-battery indicator), rather than just winding down, or having a low-battery indicator with only a passing correlation to reality.
That has less to do with the battery being integrated and more to do with different battery chemistries having different voltage curves.
Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries. The problem is all these devices are tuned to an Alkaline battery voltage curve which is much more slanted than NiMH. NiMH has a nearly flat curve with a sudden drop off while Alkaline have a pretty steady decent (with a sudden drop off).
I'm aware of why it happens, but the net effect is the same. No device powered by AA/AAA is in practice going to be able to detect battery charge level correctly. Combine that with the annoyance of separate chargers versus integrated USB-C, and the result is that I never want to use non-integrated rechargeable batteries. (In practice, I also prefer to avoid devices that use AA/AAA/etc at all, for some of the same reasons.)
I'm aware these aren't mutually exclusive. To me, the bigger benefit of not integrating them is that I can just rotate in freshly charged batteries anytime they die, and don't have to care about being within proximity of a charger.
(I also find this important for gamepads, to the extent that I don't just opt to play wired.)
I do wish more devices supported hot-swappable rechargeable battery packs. My headset does that.
But in the absence of that, I'll take USB-C and the ability to charge while actively using. I find that useful even for wireless gamepads, because then I can attach them to a generic charger on one side of the room, and not run a cable across the room to the console/TV area, because the communication is still wireless and only the power isn't.
I use these USB-C rechargeable batteries in my travel kit, too. I love the flexibility of being able to pickup some AA/AAAs, charge the ones that just died, or swap in the 2 spares I travel with.
An electric toothbrush can never break: it can only become a toothbrush. You should never see an “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Out of Order” sign, just “Electric Toothbrush Temporarily Manual.” Sorry for the exercise.
I find Philips Sonicare toothbrushes break after about a year, long before the battery gives up. Which i guess is another reason not having integrated batteries would be nice. But then they might not make as much money whenever I buy a new one so they probably wouldn't do that
I've never experienced them breaking that quickly, but it's worth pointing out that the cheap models are far inferior. The motors are weaker and they even come with a worse charger that doesn't come with a normal wall outlet plug.
I don't like USB-C for toothbrushes to charge because there's water in the bathroom. The proprietary inductive charger/stand that comes with Sonicare/Oral-B electric toothbrushes are ideal.
Sucks that they are proprietary but they have been trivially easy to clone by third party manufacturers. $7 on Amazon.
Re. toothbrush, I have to take the opportunity to give Philips credit for the Sonicare electric toothbrushes they made ~15 years ago. That thing just keeps trucking, it’s incredible. I go on 2 week trips and don’t even bring the charger, and have no worries about it dying.
It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.
They are good! Although my wife manages to kill hers every few years, I don't think I've ever actually had one die myself. I also have my original UV sanitizing charger unit that I purchased new circa 2009!
I've found that one can buy just new handles on ebay though, without the head and chargers, for only like half the super high retail prices or less, even for the "higher end" models, so I do that every 5-8 years or so if one gets too bad.
Part of the reason is that they used NiMH for the batteries in those (I have 3 that are 20-30 years old some predating the Phillips logo). All of mine still work. The NiMH is good for 1000s of deep cycles. The one from the mid 90s is only good for about 15x 2min brushings. Luckily, you can still get new heads for them!
Yeah I was going to say, I'm at 20 years on a Sonicare (pushing 25 now that I remember it is 2026, damn...) and it still works fine. Holds a charge long enough that I've never run out on vacation.
My first Sonicare eventually died of a battery failure 20 years ago. My second would not die and I was stuck buying the old style heads that were hard to clean. I finally gave in and replaced it just recently. Modern lithium cells last forever in low drain, low duty cycle applications like a toothbrush.
I have a sonicare. great. The travel case it came with is actually an inductive charging case with a USB-A hidden inside ready to be unfurled.
The pricier ones have a case with just a USB-C port.
If only Philips would support USB-C for their OneBlade electric razors, instead of a USB-A to proprietary figure 8 barrel plug cable.
I got a no-name USB adapter for mine and it hasn't killed it in the couple of years I've had it, that's the one I take for travel. You can search for "USB QP2520" to find one.
Also, it looses functionality gracefully in that it is still a perfectly serviceable toothbrush even if it is out of battery.
That said, I have never had a Sonicare run out of battery either.
Philips knows how to penny pinch. Don't buy the more recent low end models.
Their kid's app has been great.
Counterpoint, mine died after a few years to the point where it would only go a few days between charges. Maybe the BMS wasn't good, because this started happening after it completely died on me on a trip once.
I bought a cheap electric toothbrush from a no-name Chinese company. The battery lasts 6 months on one charge with daily use. It cost about $20. I wouldn't be surprised if it's manufactured by the same factories that make Philips' toothbrushes.
And of course, it charges with USB-C.
Same. I was given one as a gift for graduation college in 2012 and it's still going strong
Ha I thought mine was on the verge of dying after a good few years of use (amazon reviews were all like, yeah it only lasted a two years), so I ordered a new one, but the old one keeps going so I keep the new one in reserve looming over it menacingly, and it just refuses to kick it lol.
Another vote for the Sonicare.
> - You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
I've had an Oral B electric brush for around 3 years now and it hasn't skipped a beat. I'd hate to have to change batteries when I can just pop it on a inductive charging dock every night.
You're probably missing out on the feeling of really, really clean teeth. Regular brushing never gave me the feeling of ALL biofilm getting stripped from the enamels.
Yea, first time I used an electric was great, haven't used a manual since.
> I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff.*
I thought the same, but that'll happen with devices that use AA batteries too.
I was using a cheap Panasonic EW-DJ10 water flosser that uses AA batteries, but the battery compartment contacts would corrode after some time.
I then switched to one of those China USB-C water flossers, but I think the built-in lithium battery's nearing the end of its life since it'll cut off randomly now. I also used to worry about charging it, since the USB-C port would need to be dried out before I plugged the charging cable in.
No idea what's a happy medium for electronics that need to work near water.
I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
Here's how the last few broke:
* Phone with typical inadequate battery + external portable battery pack plugged in, shoved in together in pocket running Google Maps navigation via bluetooth, and biking. My thigh bent the USB connector.
* USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
* USB-C plugged into phone and sat on while on car seat. Another thing any half-competent design intern would have listed on their stress test scenario list but it seems the senior designers missed
* Laptop plugged in on the edge of standing desk, USB cable got jammed in gap between adjacent desks.
I much preferred real, sturdy mechanical connections. They should just miniatureize the IEC power connectors and put straight up 19VDC through them.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week. They are simply not designed well for real people who do real things in the world, including physical work, exercise, hiking, woodworking, biking, and the like. They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
I do everything on your list. I also have young children who grab and play with things. Our household breaks 1 USB-C plug per year, if that.
I don't know if you were embellishing for effect, but anyone breaking 50 connectors a year probably isn't going to have success with anything short of a fully ruggedized connector solution, which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices.
Fully ruggedized is in fact what I want and what I consider truly consumer grade.
> which is not something you're going to get on affordable consumer devices
Not true. 1990s connectors hardly ever broke for me. They were all super rugged. I've dropped several-kilogram objects onto VGA connectors, SCSI connectors, and DC barrel jacks and nothing ever happened.
I buy the DC barrel jacks, those I've had inordinate problems on the inside of devices as they wear out but never on the power plug itself.
VGA connectors? I've bent the shield on more than one VGA or DVI cable, and it's a nightmare to get a pin straight enough if you happen to bend one... but possible sometimes.
I've destroyed lots of barrel jacks over the years. I wouldn't normally consider them that rugged.
This is a success! USB-C was designed so that the part most likely to fail is the inexpensive plug, not the socket.
One of the problems with USB mini-A was that the socket would fail, meaning the device had to be repaired or discarded. Combined with the short lifetime (about 300 insertions) it was a disaster which is why you almost never see it.
You’d be more unhappy of those failures had happened in your expensive device rather than your cheap cables.
Perhaps you are just not careful with things, I’ve been an early adopter and never broken one ( I probably have at least 40 different ones, some of which get plugged/unplugged multiple times a day).
My kids haven’t broken a single one either and they destroyed plenty of lightning cables.
I’ve definitely had them wear out and stop working, but I’ve never broken one.
Is IEC really the gold standard for connectors to you? I always thought they feel terrible to plug in. There's no snap or solid bottom-out indication to when it's "connected." And it just sits in the socket from friction that doesn't feel particularly solid. It's the kind of connection where if it gets yanked a little bit and the connection fails, it's not obvious because it's half-seated in the socket.
IEC isn’t great, hence you get a cage around them to hold them in for critical use.
That cage is for stress relief, and should be federally mandated on all external connectors of all devices.
Stress relief is a thing, people in the 2020s have somehow forgetten about it.
good luck miniaturizing that! :D
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week.
That's a you problem. I have never done this, and neither have any of the dozen people I just asked in my office.
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week
I don’t believe you.
I haven’t broken a plug yet and I’ve used usb c on all my devices for years now
There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side). Those are pretty robust, get the cable out of the way more reliably, and provide a much smaller lever for physical forces on the connector. They aren't the solution for everything, but they solve a lot of issues
For everything else there are magnetic USB-C connectors
> There are cables with 90° plugs (cable to the side)
This should be federal law and written into the constitution
> I break about 1 USB-C plug a week.
Wild. How often do you break the phone itself?
> They are designed by someone in a corporate office who just never gets out to see the real world.
> USB-C got mangled by office chair. If I had been a USB designer in an office, this would have been the FIRST thing I would have stress tested for
Seems like you managed to break one even though it was in the environment that you're saying they're designed for. Maybe you're the problem and USB-C, the technology that billions of people manage to use just fine without breaking on a daily basis, is perfectly fine.
Why haven't phones just moved to have two USB ports?
A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...
I've needed 2 USB-C ports on one-port devices (phone, Steam Deck) a few times so I got this tiny 2-port hub with micro SD card reader (also has option for 3.5mm audio port instead of card reader): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKV7JSHC?th=1 "Satechi USB C Mobile Hub, 4-in-1 USB C Multiport Adapter, 4K HDMI, 100W Pass-Through Charging, 10Gbps Data"
Because the use case and demand versus the cost of engineering and manufacturing isn’t there. The market for USB headphones is minuscule compared to Bluetooth headphones.
Because space inside a phone is at an extreme premium. And this problem is solved by either using magsafe to charge or using an external hub for more ports.
See, I agree with this too. You wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about the random little things that are specific to just one device or another (IR blasters, the DAC on old LG phones, etc) if you could just plug in a second USB peripheral.
But what I'm more getting at is the other way around: that wireless headphones will already have USB-C for charging anyway. And that, particularly for larger ones (that have that port directly on the device, and not in a separate charging cradle), it really seems like a waste that more of them don't leverage that -- so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
>so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
Yes! And you could charge them off your phone!
If I could dream: wouldn't it be nice if you had headphones with charging cables attached to them so that you never had to worry about losing them.
And phones could have a convenient extra port for plugging such headphones into.
Ah, one could only dream.
There are still wired options, though, right? I don't really miss them, the nostalgia is not strong enough to forget how often the damn cable would catch on something and try to rip the headphones off my head. Or the cord noise. I get that people do not like having to eventually replace a battery, but high quality wireless headphones are a nice upgrade IMO.
Heh. I hate having any attached cables, they're too easy to fray. But otherwise I am with you, I only buy wired headphones.
See, you also lose me at non-removable cables as a point of failure, for the same reason OP loses me at "toothbrush"
Because physics sucks! USB ports take space, a phone is not Mary Poppins' bag :-).
My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc.
There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave").
I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars.
Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon.
Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit.
Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm, as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact.
People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to.
____
¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
> My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC).
I know what you're saying, but to be a little pedantic about it it's actually only USB 3.
(I wish there were mobile devices supporting USB4; it would bring them significantly closer to feature parity with larger devices.)
I had a pair of sennheiser urbanite headphones that used USB (micro :( ) for digital audio input, and you could use them while charging. Was shocked and disappointed when i eventually replaced them with Audio Technica ones that could only charge via USB but didn't do audio via USB, only bluetooth or analog.
I agree (and am sad) that it's not a ubiquitous feature, but headphones with a built-in dac do exist
Just recently acquired a set from "Philips" that is an 8-pack of lithium-ion AAs with a charging-case that connects to USB-C (Note: the case itself doesn't have its own battery, like an earbuds case would -- it's just a normal charger that doubles as a case). Sounds like this would be great for your toothbrushes and such!
For the vast majority of things I need to power or charge, dumb USB charging is fine, and I have a 10-port Anker “IQ” charger that works great for most of those things. Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist? I don’t need 65W on each port. I just needs lots of ports for gadgets that can trickle charge for hours at night (4 kids, lots of devices). I mostly want to standardize on USB-C host cables, but no one makes a cheap device for doing that more than a decade after USB-C became a thing.
The reason is because while you want to use the low end the general public does not understand that USB-C is the connector only and that various levels of power and data depend on the cable and the device at both ends.
If you sell a 10 port USB-C charged someone is going to plug 10 MacBooks into it and complain it doesnt work.
The best I have seen for what you want is
https://ca.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-500w-desktop-charger
but is not cheap at all or something like
https://www.amazon.ca/Powered-Aluminum-Adapter-Computer-Prin...
Macbooks aren't the absolute best example anymore, since 20W is plenty to charge ARM-based MacBooks in a few hours, so a 200W 10-port charger could do a fine job with 10 MacBooks.
But your point is still valid. As a nerd I really appreciate being able to use say, my 100W laptop charger or the car jumpstarter pack I have to charge up my earbuds or an electric toothbrush, since it reduces the number of weird little cables or chargers I have to keep track of, but it sure does baffle the non-technical majority that their toothbrush charger fits their laptop 'for some reason' but of course does nothing - plus the confusion when they realize they could physically plug the toothbrush into a pair of headphones, or plug two portable batteries together.
I've seen 1000W (or so they claim) 10 port USB-C chargers on Amazon. Not Anker, just a no name Chinese brand I am not going to trust. But they do seem to exist. Like the sibling comment says, I assume it's because people expect USB-C charging capabilities to be a lot higher.
> Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist?
Isn't this just a USB 3.x hub?
You know of a 10-port USB-C hub that can negotiate power (old USB style, not PD) without a host device?
I'm guessing it's because people expect USB-C ports to at least handle 18w.
My Sonicare worked for almost 15 years. I don't worry about the reliable brands dying on me.
TFineA mentions a USB cable tester. I know very little about testing or all the standards involved in USB. And I would like a way to test cables.
Is there a good reason we can't hook one (or both?) end(s) of a cable to a computer and use a program to tell what it does?
Sort of. USB-C cables have an emarker chip inside them which reports the capabilities of the cable. The USB controller on your laptop reads this chip and makes use of the info, but as of today there is no standardized way for the controller chip to pass this info up to the OS. I assume most of them don't even provide an interface at all for the OS to request it.
I vaguely recall someone from Google working on this issue for Chromebooks. I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this since they control the OS and hardware. For now you can buy tester devices which read the emarker info and show it on a small display. There's also more advanced testers which test the actual signal integrity and error rates, but these are very expensive and made for the cable manufacturers.
I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside. Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge, but all the cables look the same, and you don't tend to know in advance.
This is really only a problem if you buy cheap cables. Pick the baseline spec you want your USB cables to meet, and throw out all the ones that don’t. Problem solved.
It’s still a minor frustration if you have to borrow a cable, but that’s solved by packing a cable, and by encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables.
Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.
Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".
I do electronics professionally. This is likely because in order to save a bit on BOM costs, the device itself doesn't have the necessary pulldown resistors to signal to turn on VBUS.
USB-A has always-on VBUS while USB-C doesn't. Because the spec allows for always-on VBUS in a USB-A to USB-C cable, some devices just assume that they're always being powered by one of those cables.
It's because they are straight up defective. The USB-C spec is pretty clear in that the power pins have 0v until you signal for a voltage. This isn't a failure of USB-C, you should just return defective devices to the OEM.
Thankfully this defect is becoming less common outside of temu junk.
That's because they didn't implement USB C correctly. Maybe it was to save less than a penny on the BOM, maybe it was arrogance ("it works for me! send it!"), or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, they didn't do it right.
By standard, USB C provides no power at all unless the device being powered follows the rules. They're easy rules to follow. The minimum viable way of doing it right requires just two tiny resistors inside of the device.
I have a water pump like that, the reason: they have omitted the 5.1k resistors…
you'll never guess what solution i'd suggest for that specific problem...
Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.
If you want to cover all use cases your only option are the 240 W, 40 Gbps cables, and they are not cheap (https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Supports-Display-Transfer-Charg...).
amazon hides some prices because i'm viewing the page from canada, but it looks like that says the cable you linked is $15?
that's what i've been paying for cables, and it seems reasonable to me.
It's a cable, it should cost $2 at most.
40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2. That said, outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor, you don't need a 40gbps cable.
> 40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2.
I dunno, Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap. DOCSIS 4.0 does 10Gbps on some really ancient cables. I'm sure Cat9 will do even better, at least the cat people and the doc people are trying harder than the USB people.
Unifi even has a PoE-over-coax solution. Add some Anker GaN shit and I'm sure it can be miniaturized.
> outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor
As soon as I need a "special" cable to connect a laptop to a monitor, we're effectively back to the 1990s-2000s when I needed a special monitor cable. There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
The whole point of this thread was "one type of cable for everything" and "grab any USB-C cable from your personal stash and they all work for every use case".
99% of user use cases for USB are charging batteries and copying a word document on a flash drive. For those cases literally every port and cable works. For video, in every office and home, the thunderbolt cable just sits in the monitor at all times with just the USB end free. Meaning there is no confusion around which cable is the video one because the video one only ever sits connected to the monitor.
While I now no longer have to carry around a bag of chargers when I travel or fish through a bucket of black DC adapters for the right one.
You can trade-off cable shielding for electronics power and corresponding heat to encode/decode stuff.
Ethernet is notoriously power hungry, but I bet you can use a phone cable and still get tens of Gb over a very short range.
> There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.
I completely disagree.
When the only difference between cables is max speed, that's still a huge improvement over a nest of different cable types, half of which are custom. And it's easy to get into a position where all your USB-C cables differ only by max speed.
Which is worse because they all look sort of the same, but they are not the same.
It's even worse for non-techies, who don't understand what a gbps or a watt is, and who will leave a 1-star review, or worse, trash their cable, because their cable was "slow" but was meant for 240W PD but only supported USB 2.0. They purchased it initially because it had 5 stars.
Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
The situation in the early 2000s is I could spot the cable I needed from a mile away.
Just about every data cable standard has different speed capabilities on a per-cable basis. Ethernet, HDMI, and displayport have the same issue and usually with even worse labeling.
> Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.
That requires they never increase the speed again. Seems like a bad starting point.
And most people will accept the tradeoff of different cable speeds when it means long charging cables can be 10x cheaper. The problem is when manufacturers choose to use bad labels.
And if you push people off USB they're going to use 27 different kinds of cable and you won't be able to spot which generic black wire you need from across the room.
Also, if we pretend they set the max speed in stone in 2013, it's easy to get yourself a full set of 240W 10Gbps-per-lane do-everything cables in every length from 0 to 2.5 meters. $25 isn't an amazing price but sticking with passive cables keeps you out of the real nasty prices.
USB 2.0 cables can be thinner, more flexible, longer, and cheaper. You could decide to only ever use thunderbolt cables for everything, but you'd be paying $40-$100 for a cable as thick as a mains power cord and doesn't offer any benefit at all to charging your phone.
We need better labeling rather than making every single USB cable a 40gbit thunderbolt cable.
The apple usb c charging cable is like $30, it is well worth the money of you are into software defined radio I can report. Not sure what magic they pulled of, but all the tricks in the book it seems!
okay, i mean, that's exactly what my original comment said: this is only a problem if you buy cheap cables.
If some of your devices require a $30 cable and you use the same cables for everything, then you use a $30 cable for your mouse.
If you're buying a cable for a specific device in a specific circumstance than by all means get the cable that meets that. Then it's not a problem about "what is its functional support", it doesn't matter, that's your mouse cable that you use for your mouse on that desk. That's the monitor cable you use to plug things into that monitor. That's the dock cable you use to plug things into the dock.
For all the cables that are your flex carrying around places where you don't know how it'll be used tomorrow, get a good cable and you won't have any issues.
It's also only a problem if they overcomplicate power delivery design such that you need expensive cables.
They could have made it just DC +19V and GND over 14 gauge wire with a nice, outdoor-recreation-grade connector and called it a day.
USB power delivery doesn't need expensive cables. Basic 240W cables cost $3-4.
I have some Thunderbolt cables that are like $80 apiece because they're like 3 meters long. I have like five or six of them because each one only carries one video signal.
(I used Thunderbolt so that touch and pen inputs could go over the one cable. These days though I just use a MacBook Pro, and hook up a capture card when I need to access the Windows)
> throw out all the ones that don’t
> encouraging as many other people as possible to also throw out their cheap cables
One of the main advantages of a single standardized plug is reducing e-waste. This just sounds irresponsible. Having a single tool that covers every possible use case is rarely a good solution.
Device makers need to stop including these garbage 4 cm A to C cables. I have enough USB cables and bricks to last my whole life. I don't need to collect a million more spec violating ones in a drawer I will never use.
Things are shifting though. Ikea ships their USB-C stuff without cables now.
> This just sounds irresponsible.
The irresponsibility lies with the companies making the non-compliant trash in the first place.
There's no way to know if it's a "cheap cable", not even by price.
Sure there is. Buy reputable brands from reputable marketplaces that clearly state the specs, and if you get products from them that don't comply stop buying from them.
I'd call that trial and error.
If switching to a type-A charger fixes it, it’s probably the device manufacturer’s fault, not the cable. Many manufacturers that need the 5v standard you’d normally get from an old type-A charger screw this up.
For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…
I don't think it's cost reasons these are being omitted. The customer refunds would easily exceed the savings. It's most likely designers just swapping a micro usb port with a usb c one in an old design while making no other changes and seeing it works with the A to C cable they have.
I share your theory about micro usb, yeah. I know it’s not cost savings, it’s just lazy/ignorant. If they’re changing the footprint on the board for a type-c port, they can add some smd resistors.
> Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge
You can fix that by buying USB-C to USB-C adapters with 5.1 kiloohm resistors.
It should have taken the manufacturer less than one cent to include the resistors, but as a consumer product they will unfortunately cost at least a dollar each.
Buy yourself a handful of good cable for charging. (I quite like the silicone anker 643) And throw everything else away in a box.
For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.
Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.
I read about this so often, yet it's a problem I just never encountered. If I need super high bandwidth like connecting a display, I pick one of those annoyingly unlflexible fat cables. Easy. They even tend to feature the TB4 flash icon. Surely I would not expect any of the light and nimble ones to do that trick. When I need strong PD, it's also either one of those or one of the far more flexible but still quite thick braided ones. Often they have some hinge gimmick connector to prevent any hope for bandwidth one might be tempted to have. All other cables, I expect nothing but legacy USB. Yeah, and some of those won't do data at all (curiosly those are never the lightest cables in my stable, the lightest ones tend to do the legacy USB "gear not, some bits will eventually get through!" just fine)
> I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside.
Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.
USB-IF actually does have pretty clear labeling and standards that address most of the issues being posted in this thread. But most USB devices and cables are not certified and not compliant with the specs.
Short of making USB proprietary and behind a licensing and certification scheme there is no way to solve this. People need to stop buying cheap junk.
This is an acceptable failure mode. I'd be nice if there was a standardized LED flash or color that you could get so if your relative said something isn't working, you could ask, "Is it flashing three times?" or whatever.
The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.
And then you go someplace, realize you left your charger at home, and find out despite your friend having dozens of barrel type power connector power adapters not a single one match the size/voltage/amperage/polarity of your device.
Or you just borrow their USB-C adapter and don't have any worries.
The thickness / durability of the cable is a pretty good indicator, if it's thin and flexible it'll only do basic charging if it's thick and durable it's because it's packing enough wiring to do power delivery, video etc, everything except probably Thunderbolt.
All standards-adherent cables that are adorned with USB C connectors at each end can supply at least 60W of power.
This has nothing to do with feels.
Yeah I have some devices that expect the manufacturer charger (I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something) and I'm not even sure what was the point in giving it a USB C connector.
>I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something
This kind of defect is extremely rare since this would basically be a USB killer frying every other device you plug it in to. 99% of the time it's the device is missing some resistors on the cc pins which signal to the charger to send 5v. Since usb-c it defaults to 0v until you request something. But USB-A has no CC pins so it just puts 5v out at all times.
I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expecting 5V, there's a healthy chance it'll .. stop expecting 5V.
We blame usb-c for all this, but it does feel like some mffrs are going out of their way to screw it up.
Yeah maybe USB-D will get it right. But probably not. I had such high hopes for USB-C. Now I keep a couple USB-C to USB-A adapters lying around to force the charger (which is just a normal home outlet with a couple built-in USB-C ports) to speak old school USB-A charging instead of trying to negotiate PD with a shitty device that did not implement USB-C correctly.
Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.
Unfortunately the EU has written USB-C into law, so there will never be a USB-D. I guess we should be glad they didn’t do this 30 years ago, or we’d still be using PS/2 connectors.
Law is not immutable. It will be changed if/when there is a need to.
It's not a flexible specification, its straight up bad engineering. The specification literally says if you do not want negotiation, you must add the resistor.
Usually they won't charge because they're not actually USB-C devices but are just broken and only pretend to be one (mostly due to missing resistors on CC lines, but there are other ways a device can be non-compliant too).
I wish there are easy ways to figure out the maximum current and wattage supported by a cable. So many cables don't label themselves except on the box!
Note there is a link at the end of the article to a device which can test cables and determine exactly that! But it's a sign of the problem that you need that thing.
With USB-C cables I tend to throw them out unless they are premium cables that cost upwards of $20, I mean I could keep the cheap ones around to charge this or that but cheap cables have this way of going bad, like they are supposed to work if you plug them in either way except they don't, you plug your cheap device in overnight to charge and it doesn't really charge, etc. No way I could trust my wife to handle it.
Personally I think USB got worse in a lot of ways in the 3.0 generation, like at 1.0 they designed a bus architecture that could enumerate 127 devices on a root hub. USB 3.0 doesn't promise anything and ff you start plugging in hubs to your laptop you will hit undocumented limits and find devices start dropping out randomly when you've plugged in several devices and it gives me the heebie jeebies because a mass storage device could drop out. I know mainstream filesytems today are pretty durable but still...
Even the simplest 3-wire cable with nothing but wires in it will handle 45W charging already, which is enough to power my laptop. It needs to be physically broken to not work. If it doesn't, it's usually the device's fault. There are many cheap devices out there that are just USB-C-shaped and don't actually implement the spec, working with some kinds of cables and not working with others.
Personally I have stopped buying cables that do not disclose this information. There are pretty fine alternatives that do, so I see no reason to take gambles.
My only issues so far come from charging protocols rather than cables anyway.
Moreover, stuff like how many watts a cable supports are issues that happen regardless connector type.
You're welcome: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DYJL5Z67
This device let me categorize all my loose cables (and throw out the truly terrible ones). It was worth every penny.
Not saying this device is not cool, but one can also get this info easily in a computer, if you find out what to look for. One had presented a utility here some time ago with a menu bar icon showing this information
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972511
If I remember correctly, that application/your computer is simply reading what the device _claims_ it can do whereas this device tests it.
That app is probably a good place to start but I wouldn't trust it fully.
These PD testers are cool (I thought about buying one), but honestly, for the price of a tester, one can buy 2, maybe even 3 good quality cables and just throw away the rest.
Fair point, I just have oodles of cables (literally 10-20+ per combo of micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C <-> micro/mini/standard-USB-A/B/C each) and I like having them all organized by capability so that when I need one I can grab from right bin.
Before getting the tester I just kept buying new "known good" cables whenever I needed one since my cable drawer was just a huge unknown.
> Reads eMarker chip parameters in Type-C cables, providing detailed performance information (e.g., maximum current, voltage, data transfer rates) to help users fully understand cable capabilities and ensure safe, efficient device usage.
Good thing nobody lies.
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Your chance is 100% because the charger for GBC is 2 AA batteries ;)
Yeah, the GBA SP would have been a much better example. What an odd connector. I really need to get around to modding a USB-C port on to mine.
Yeah, or you can just get a cheap retro handheld with similar stylings that will charge via -- you guessed it -- USB-C.
This is a rather stupid to rave about, but I was in amsterdam several months ago, and I forgot to bring my NA to EU plug adapter. I was a bit miffed having to buy a new travel charger, but it's become the best one I own. (Only because all the other chargers I own were spawned into existence around me/came with some device)
65watts isn't even that much, but its enough that I don't need:
- the mac charger that's always connected to the magsafe cable I can't use with anything else,
- the dinky iPhone brick with the cable that needs USB-C on both ends,
- and the slightly less dinky pocketbook e-reader charger with the cable that needs USB-A on the brick-end and micro USB on the business-end.
2x 65 watt USB-C ports and 1x USB-A running at whatever anemic power USB-A is capable of pitfully spitting at my ancient e-reader without drawing the ire of UL or something (5v/500ma still?), perfection.
You should go purpose-buy a charging brick, anything is better than the freebie ones you get with stuff.
I cannot recommend enough https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable to know what power and data capabilities your cables support.
I used to think of myself as one as well but that's changing as of late.
Looking back 15 years or so, I remember the old ThinkPad and Dell Latitude/Precision docking stations functioned reliably for as long as I can remember.
Today I have a variety of USB-C and thunderbolt 3/4 docking stations, all of which have been affected by various issues. The the manufacturers of these things don't care.
The latest casualty is a Pluggable TBT4-UDZ, which randomly decided one day that I should only have one working monitor instead of two. Doesn't matter if I use Windows, Mac or Linux. Meanwhile, the same monitors & cables work fine with my desktop.
I appreciate USB-C as a means to charge my stuff, but from now on, I'm going to try and use other ports and cables for everything else. Every laptop's settings will assume only the main screen will ever be used. I've no time to get used to a nice multi-monitor setup just to have it taken away when the USB-C dock starts acting up.
I've always been a thinkpad fan but their docks were clunky huge uncomfortable things for me.
I had a hp nc2400 that had a very nice little dock where you'd set the laptop on top of two guide poles an then slide the dock connector in from the side. A very compact design.
The thinkpad docks just always used so much space on my desk.
I would like the USB-C connector was more durable. I've literally never killed a USB-A connector, but enough lateral force and USB-C just breaks. I suppose it was made so small due to mobile devices, which is understandable, but came with tradeoffs.
Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)
Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.
I've had the opposite experience. Lightning was been far more fragile than USB-C.
Lightning is just better overall.
I agree. Lightning is such a better connector and one of the main reasons I still haven't replaced my phone. If lightning could've just been updated for higher bitrates it would have been so much better.
I went through lightning cables fast. Unsure why, maybe I sweat a lot, or keep my phone in humid places.
But every so many months I had to replace the cable because the 4th pin would be burned.
I don't have that issue with USB-C. But I do feel that the lightning receiver is less fragile over the USB-C one. Removing lint from a USB-C receiver is harder.
Try the relatively recent Anker Prime cables, the ones that are both braided and soft. I haven't managed to break one yet, despite breaking several past Anker cables that also claimed to be durable.
I don't have a problem with USB C cables, and even if I did it wouldn't be a big deal. The cables are cheap compared to the devices they charge. It is broken USB-C ports that frustrate me about them, or ones with worn out clips.
What way are you breaking them? The two failure modes I've seen are the port getting full of pocket lint for phones (easy to fix) and the port ripping off the PCB. The second one is a design issue where some ports are entirely surface mount rather than having the grounding pins go through the pcb to anchor it on.
I have had a few failures and I can only assume it's the second one? I have one on a thinkpad that only works if you hold it in the right position
I would happily be a USB-C enjoyer if manufactures stopped forgetting the stupid CC resistors meaning that you device will not charge with a C-to-C cable.
It should be considered a defective design and recalled, I have been burned several times by this.
I'm reminded of one my favorite south park bits, where Cartman freezes himself to wake up in a future that has a nintendo wii, only to discover the technology of that time doesn't support the plug-in format for the wii.
I love USB-C.
My ONLY problem with it is it's just a bit too small. That creates mechanical problems within the plug which are annoying. Plug it in and pull it out 1 too many times and eventually you get a loose connector cable that needs to be replaced.
Generally that's fine as all my chargers have replaceable cables, it's just an annoyance.
I get trouble with the female ports too
I have had a failed port on my laptop - fortunately the laptop can charge on two of its ports but it sucks to have lost one.
I have had a failed port on an iPad, and on my phone. Again I was fortunate to have a fairphone, so I just replaced the port.
I also find that I'm constantly stressed that the plug is going to snap.
That being said, in ten plus years of using USB-c.. this has never happened to me or anyone that I know.
It's actually kind of impressive, all things considered.
I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max and I don’t want to get rid of it or anything, but I am kind of looking forward to the glorious day that it breaks. Once it breaks, any phone I get (iPhone or Android) will have USB-C, along with my laptop, with One Adapter To Rule Them All when I travel.
That’s the dream, anyway. Life rarely works out quite that cleanly for me.
I’m a cold-dead-hands 13 Mini owner, but even I’ll admit to the temptation of replacing the last device I have that doesn’t use USB-C with something that does.
This is how I feel with my Airpods. Just break already!
So many kids toys use custom brick chargers, especially remote control cars. I refuse to buy anything that isn't USB-C, I'm not keeping track of all of those.
With a soldering iron and USB-CD PD trigger boards, I've successfully converted a few of this kind of thing.
There are barrel jack USB-C adaptors now that you can just glue in place. Very useful for homelabbers.
The step I've taken is just purchasing USB-C to barrel in various voltages and labeling them appropriately.
I think that's changing too, my son got some cheap radio controlled boat a few weeks ago, the remote uses AA and the boat has USB-C as input (interestingly enough, it has a weird USB-C cable with a built in light to signal when charging is done).
I recently bought a very cheap RC car for my kids, and it was USB-C rechargeable but instead of having a port it just has a USB-C cable that comes out of it and plugs into a power brick. I love that.
I'm the same. Though I still think they could have made USB much neater as a protocol, USB-C now does everything I need for goto-connectivity.
I recently looked at the connector and reflected on how insanely small it is. It's no wonder it took decades to get to this point, and it's a very neat physical design at a great price. 16 pins and 10A in that little thing. Amazing.
It took that long because nothing it does now was ever a requirement. It was created as serial/parallel port replacement (fun fact - max speed parallel port is faster than USB 1.1, at ~2.5MB/s).
If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.
I agree with using a single ubiquitous power standard for small electronics and electrics. That’s almost what USB-C is these days. We need better labelling of cable capacities when there are 20w and 120w cables that at a glance look the same.
I was afraid this article was going to say one connector for everything when it said maximalist. If it had said to kill eSATA, SPF+, RJ-45, DisplayPort, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and a bunch of other ports it would have been far more controversial. I’ve seen people saying we don’t need card formats anymore because everything can just be an external USB-C flash drive. I’m glad this article wasn’t that maximalist.
The USB spec does have labeling standards that are pretty clear. But uncertified temu junk obviously doesn't use them. There shouldn't even be such a thing as a 20w cable, the minimum with no emarker chip is 60w.
For many things, though, a barrel jack is sufficient and doesn’t require the additional cost and complexity of USB-C. Barrel jacks have their own problems (is it inner positive or negative, what current is required, what’s the diameter of the inner and outer rings), but after that it’s as simple as it gets, both electrically and mechanically.
Diameter, length, voltage...
Any USB-C cable that isn't defective can handle enough power for anything up to a light duty laptop.
I go to Europe enough that I ditch the universal adapter and get a European ubs-c wall plug. A little more maximalist at home to store but more minimalist while traveling.
Same. Other devices I'm powering with USB-C:
- Vacuum, $???, Xiaomi, okay (hard to clean filter): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-vacuum-cleaner-p30/ (gift from friends)
- Beard trimmer, $90, Manscaped, great (but I just got it): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H
- Shaver, $20, Xiaomi, great: https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20... (purchased at Xiaomi store in Manila)
- Front door palm reader lock, $299, Eufy, good (slow charge speed mitigated by second built-in battery): https://www.amazon.com/eufy-FamiLock-Smart-Lock-Recognition/...
- Lighter, 10 for $66 after negotiating, Shenzhen Vasipor Technology Co, good but needs USB-A-to-USB-C cable: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-Powered-Recharge...
How funny, I also have the Xiaomi shaver, also bought while in BGC Manila. It's great, but does have a tendency to turn itself on in a packed bag
This USB-C toothbrush is something I've been looking for so I don't need to bring a special charger.
What would be even better is an electric toothbrush that doesn't contain a battery that would work with USB-PD plugged in. Why? Because I like putting my electric toothbrush in my checked bag because it's not essential, and technically you're not supposed to put lithium batteries in checked bags.
> instead I purchased a cheap USB-C rechargeable fan
I really don't get that. Why not a handheld fan? It's cheap, doesn't require a battery, and doesn't need electronics.
I see more electronic fans than handheld fans, and I just don't get it. People like buying brittle plastic future e-waste?
I too jumped on board with USB-C right away. Only downside is some hardware manufacturers use sloppy fitting USB ports. This was a major issue on my Touchbar Macbook Pro. Just slightly bumping the cable would lose sync with my dock.
I imagine whatever replaces USB-C in the future should fix this issue and make a more solid connection like USB-A. However USB-C could be the last wired interface as everything in the future will move to wireless.
Try a different cable and make sure the ports aren't full of rubbish. A good cable and clean port makes a fairly good connection with a solid click. Lot of time I've used a sewing needle to fish incredible amounts of pocket lint out of peoples phone ports and cables connect so much better.
I wish USB power strips were common and well made.
Like AC power strips, with a long cable and a body maybe 12" long with spaced out USB-C and a few USB-A ports.
I'd also like a version that sits on top of a desk and is angled towards you.
They make things like this for AC, but not USB.
(actually there are a few out there by no-name brands, but not many)
> actually there are a few out there
Because the usecase of charging many (think 5 or more) devices at the same time for hours is pretty rare.
There is already a robust market for chargers with a few connectors.
But I would like having a table with a plethora of sockets and cables available.
Lots of times, I come in and want to charge a bunch of things. Charge a few drone batteries + the controller. laptop, camera + camera batteries. charge things for a long drive, or a longer trip.
As to cables, sometimes I need USB-C, but there are lots of things that require other connectors like micro-usb, or a garmin watch. And sometimes cables go to other devices like wireless chargers.
I am a USB-C maximalist too. Until I find a cable that doesn't do what it looks like it is supposed to do. Then I suffer from USB-C depression.
This year I grudgingly switched from an iPhone 13 Mini to a Pixel 10, largely to get the full integrated Pebble experience, but having USB-C has been a surprising and delightful upgrade to my home/travel experience.
For sources, I basically have an INUI battery bank and a 100W wall adapter, then everything is a USB-C sink: Lenovo X1, Pixel 10, Nintendo Switch, Sennheiser headphones
Please, please, please: we NEED a magsafe version of USB C
Yes, you can buy adapters, but you end up w/device warts that don't work w/normal USB-C cords and my understanding that they are for the most part pretty dangerously out of spec
Magnetic coupling is an incredibly underutilized user experience tool
As much as it still pisses me off reading the Surface product head's comment that if you love USB-C then you love dongles -- while shipping a Mini DisplayPort connector -- I also think it's a waste that they didn't contribute their magnetic docking to the upstream spec.
We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")
Why do you need to verify my request, USB-C maximalist?
I think one thing that we have come to think as electronic consumers, or just consumers in general, is to expect the absolute best modern version of everything (plug, AI model, car...). I think it is pure conditioning and we forgot the simplicity and convenience of things just working even with apparent downsides relative to acme version. Could USB-C be better? Probably. Is just settling on a standard so you don't have to think about it preferable? I think so. Consider USB-C standardization as an expression of a specific system of values.
I draw the line at cheap unbranded rechargeable toothbrush. I’d be too worried about fires with cheap cells. I’m happy to pay the premium for top brands for anything with lithium-ion batteries.
I wish my Xbox Series S would work on USB-C. Some guy modded his with a buck convertor[0] and I wish there was an easier way in 2026.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Z1U3AYo1I
Well, the issue is USB-PD:
- 12 V × 5 A = 60 W
- 20 V × 5 A = 100 W
- 28 V × 5 A = 140 W
Meanwhile, that Xbox roughly needs 12 V at 7.5 A (let's say 90 W, but the internal supply is 165W) . So there is just no easy way to do it with USB-PD. Technically, you can make/buy some sort of USB-PD bench power supply to do this, but I'm unaware of anything on the market right now. One that I use (DPS-150) is limited to 5A output.
You're better off buying some chunky power bank (like Anker Solix) that has your regular wall plug outlets.
I agree. I'm looking at replacing my braun series 7 shaver, and I'd love if the replacement product had usb-c.
what really gets me though is products that support usb-c and then don't support PD, so you end up charging at a glacial pace. The most upsetting incidence of this I've seen is a powerbank charging via usb-c but not supporting PD. So slow!
Recently bought a guitar amp which came with a cursed USB-C cable:
http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/IMG_20260709_123740.jpg
I'm curious, what amp is this? Is it for charging something? The end is TRRS, is there a DAC/ADC molded in the plug for audio interface purposes?
The amp is this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B098JTSJTH
As far as I could tell the cable is dumb. If you plug the cable into a regular USB-C socket (which I do not recommend) then the tip is +5V and the rest is ground.
In fact it's designed to plug into the plug marked "mobile" on the amp and the 3.5mm end goes into the line out of something else, providing AUX input, which is mixed straight through to the output of the amp (which is thankfully a regular 3.5mm headphone jack).
I guess they over-ordered USB-C sockets and decided to yolo it, or else for some reason only USB-C footprints fit into the space on the PCB. (But they still had to manufacture or were able to obtain these cursed cables ... it doesn't make a lot of sense.)
I have one of those cursed cables but then a 3.5 female socket! I have already lost it as well :/
Why is no one mentioning the masterpiece of the website!
I'm still driven absolutely mad by how many devices are being released in 2026 that refuse to charge if they're connected to a port that negotiates USB Power Delivery. They don't fall back to 5V, they just don't charge at all.
Devices like this usually come with an A-to-C cable in the box and that's a warning sign, but an even more twisted version of this is when they come with a C-to-C cable and a Type C charger that does not support PD. That's the only combination they tested, and that's your problem now.
I now carry enough adapter cables that I can deliberately take PD out of the equation just to work around these devices.
I like the fact that we're aligning on one connector but it's hard for me to praise USB-C in and of itself. The connector feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not, and especially on lower-end devices.
The charging standards, voltages, and data rates, are frustrating because they're almost never labeled. This is especially true on low end, cables, and device devices. The worst offenders will only charge with a USB-A to C cable with low voltage, which is not what I hope for when I see a USB-C port on a device.
>feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not
No end to the official Apple lighting cables that died on me over the years, and across iphones and ipads.
I have had so many laptops and other devices with unrepairable flaky loose ports that I am no longer a fan of the standard
Any recommendation for electric shavers that are USB-c ?
Keep in mind that you can buy cables that are USB-C on one end and whatever on the other end. I have multiple USB-C to 12V barrel jack cables for this reason specifically. No idea because you still need a special cable, but better than nothing.
https://www.meridiangrooming.com/collections/trimmers
more of a trimmer but this had an alright replaceable blade set up and has USB c. if you need the rotating heads I haven't seen one just yet though
Xiaomi has a few; I got their teensy travel one but more models: https://www.mi.com/global/product-list/personal-care/shaver/
Trimmer: I purchased this from Amazon USA for $70 on sale, now listed at $96. I am happy with it, but haven't had it long enough to comment on durability: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H "Manscaped Beard Hedger Men's Premium Beard Trimmer, 20 Length Adjustable Blade Wheel, Stainless Steel T-Blade for Precision Facial Hair Trimming, Cordless Waterproof Wet/Dry Clipper"
Shaver: I purchased this in-person at a Xiaomi store in Manila, very happy with it especially for the price ($20-ish): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20...; Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Skin-Touch-Waterproof... "Xiaomi Electric Shaver S200"
We'll we ever see usbc in TVs?
For video input or power supply? I doubt we would ever see it for power supply.
For video input it seems almost deliberate since the TV brands all benefit from licensing out HDMI and forcing it to be the only way to connect to a TV.
usb maxxing
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Someone's trying to talk about stuff they never used, experienced or googled ever.
But yeah game boy advance cable is $2.5 one day delivery here in Poland
> No. One charger. One cable. One standard.
USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.
There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:
To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.
Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.
> What are the chances that I could find the exact charger needed for a GameBoy Colour?
Fairly high. Nitpick time: The Gameboy Color[0] took a standard-size battery that you can still buy today. It did not need to be charged, but you did have to turn the system off to swap batteries unless you had a barrel-jack adapter.
Barrel-jack DC wasn't quite standard, but you might be able to find something compatible if you went to an electronics supply store and paid careful attention to the listed input voltage and polarity on the device. Regardless, most people didn't bother tethering their Gameboy and just fed it batteries since it ran forever on them.
The real proprietary hellhole started with the Gameboy Advance SP, and didn't end until the Switch used Type-C. Hell, the SP is basically a modern smartphone:
1. Proprietary form-fitting battery pack
2. Custom power input connector
3. No separate headphone output
Bonus points: the headphone adapter Nintendo sold for the SP didn't have a power pass-through, so you had to choose between headphones or charging. Though there are third-party ones now that do both headphone output and USB-C power input.
[0] No "u", not even in the UK
To add insult to the injury, the charging port of Nintendo DS Lite was almost mini-USB, but not quite - with enough force and some metal bending it was apparently possible to make it work with regular mini-USB cable. Absolutely idiotic design, especially since that port was just 5V input anyway, anyone with soldering iron could tweak USB-A cable to work with the proprietary charging connector.
> Using my USB-C cable tester, I can be sure all the cables I have can deliver the amount of power my devices need.
Wait until they discover off brand usb cable with incorrect e-marker.
> A Pixel 8 Pro (running GrapheneOS)
> Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?
[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/review-pebblebee-clip-unive...
[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4079
I personally hate USB-C as it's a poorly designed connector. It's flimsy and can easily broken yet at the same time difficult to insert.
I've had a couple be broken by getting "squashed" because there's no mechanical support because of the rounded edges so the metal easily pancakes.
They also seem to be easily damaged such they stop connecting through a failure mechanism I haven't quite figured out (my macbook air no longer reliably connects to them).
Finally, the ports don't have reliable insertion and they're sharp, so they scratch up whatever device they're on as people repeatedly miss the insertion position resulting in surface scuffing. Phones especially should not be using them because of this issue and should be using something like lightning that did not have any sharp edges which avoided most scratching.
I've been using retractable USB-C cables with as many compact "connector-size" dongles as I can get my hands on.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FC1HSS9X/ for RJ45/Ethernet - these are super small and deliver full gigabit speed, for instance.
Similar things for video (tiny HDMI male adapter), and even my walkie-talkie (the Chinese market has come up with Motorola programming cable adapters that are just little dongles - https://www.ebay.com/itm/800104798120 - I can reprogram and even reload AES256 keys into my radio!).
PD triggers let my travel CPAP run off of battery (using a Transcend Micro - it only needs a 19V PD trigger and a solid 100W).
And of course... an Ecoflow solar hat and a battery I can shove in my back pocket for when I'm wandering around in the open air.
... and I just realized I can hook my Sony Reon Pocket cooler up to the solar hat...
USB-C connectors are so flimsy compared to USB-A, it feels like a real step backward. It barely takes any pressure on the cable to make my charging cable fall out, or to rotate it just enough that it loses connection.
It's because your port or cable are filled with pocket lint. Get a sewing needle and fish it out and it will connect again.
No, it's because USB-C is physically smaller and shallower. You can visually compare them and see that
The cable will not just fall out. On my clean iphone I can hang the phone from the cable and lightly swing it around without it disconnecting. If it's just falling out it's because something is mechanically wrong or it's full of gunk.
Not to be that guy, but the USB-C specification requires an extraction force of 8–20 N for a new connector, measured on the sixth unplugging cycle after five conditioning cycles. After 10,000 insertion/removal cycles, the permitted range is 6–20 N.
Equivalent hanging mass:
So the problem you have is likely one of your manufacturer not producing equipment suitable to pass the USB-C spec.As an aside, the specified extraction force for USB A is:
So pretty much the same, in some cases even less.I don't have problems with USB-C connectors per se. I think HDMI is worse in terms of durability.
Well it's a common manufacturer problem then, because USB-C connections are universally floppy and loose.