Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!
Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!
230 comments
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Everyone around the world is benefiting from the EU common charger law: https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-charger-rules-power-all-your-devices-single-charger-2024-12-28_en
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Dear Europe. Please take me in. Do you have any English speaking countries? Your laws seem to be geared towards benefiting people. Not tyrants and corporations.
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I think the Netherlands has the highest amount of L2 English speakers.
In the Netherlands, the English language can be spoken by the vast majority of the population, with estimates of English proficiency reaching 90%[1] to 97%[2] of the Dutch population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_the_Netherlands
It's not the official language though so all documents and legal stuff would be in Dutch.
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Ireland speaks mostly English as far as I know.
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There's good and bad. Every few months the EU tries to ban encryption without backdoors again for instance, because "oh dear, think of the children!".
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Any Scandinavian country should have a population ranging from proficient to fluent in English.
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The best way to learn a language is through immersion. Honestly I feel like it would be a lot of fun to learn a language in Europe since the majority of people also speak English well if you really need to fall back to that.
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Lucky for you, you can get around with English in most places.
Ireland didn't leave the EU, so that's an option.
In most big cities you can get around just fine. In some you can actually live very comfortably.
As far as laws go, as an EU citizen one is entitled to communication with any public institutions one may come across in their preferred "official language". Stuff like paying your utility bills, registering health insurance, similar bureaucratic stuff, as well as getting stopped by the police. You can insist on doing it in any one of 28 languages, including English.
Usually that's a bit overkill, and whoever you're dealing with will be happy to speak to you in English or find someone else who does if they don't. I assume the same goes for non-citizens. German and French are also quite popular, but English is by far the most ubiquitous.
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USBC has done something truly amazing. You used to be able to tell within reason what the capabilities of USB were by the connector or the color of the port. Now there's dozens of options and there's hardly anyway for you to tell what cable and port support what features.
Maybe your port and charger can throw out 20 volts at 3 and 1/2 amps. Maybe you can throw out 20 volts at 6 amps (dell) maybe your device doesn't negotiate correctly and they say to only use an a-c cable
Don't get me wrong, I love the port. Multidirectional, doesn't really wear out, does have a tendency to get a little dirty though. Lightning was a little more forgiving on dirt.
Labeling on the ports are all vague labeling on the cables is non-uniform or not existent.
But, truth is they probably come up with half a dozen specs for USBC that half your it doesn't support. And they'll probably come out with God knows how many more before they Make a new connector.
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I don't agree with the good ol' days, beyond the blue connectors of USB3, there was no way of telling if a cable was charge only or data+charge. No way to tell if it was USB 1 or 2. If it was standard 0.5 amp or "fast charge", up to 3 amps. There was a lot of different plugs, regular, mini, micro, A and B types.
I agree with everything you say about USB-C tho.
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Yeah. It was already happening circa USB3. It’s not because of the connectors, but the broadening spectrum of requirements of client devices.
Maybe USB-C was a missed opportunity to address it, but it certainly didn’t “start the fire”.
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People can hate all they want on USB-C with all these details that may be technically true, but the only issue I've had in years is with chargers varying in power output and occasionally that means I try to charge something that either takes forever or never charges. It's an edge case and I consider it a charger issue, not a cable one...
Life is definitely simpler now with USB-C being pretty standard, and Lightning cables can burn in hell. Those anti-standard bullshits have caused me to buy a dozen of them for friends and test devices (I'm a web dev) and yet I've never owned a mobile Apple product and never would. Fuck Lightning -- cannot possibly say it enough. I'm glad the EU agrees.
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Yeah I think some of my cables charge my phone at different speeds.
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I've had exacrly 5x more failures of USB C ports than I've had of micro that is 5, and 1), and I've had way more micro devices over a much longer period (and still have some). It may technically be a "better" port, but my experience doesn't reflect that.
I have to label cables and chargers because some C devices today still don't support all charging specs, so I have to verify a device charges on a charger to know for sure.
At what point shouldn't a device be able to negotiate down to the lowest charge capability, instead of not charge at all? That the spec permits this to happen is a major failure.
It's fantastic that C is the convergence standard, but let's not act like it's close to perfect. I have to verify with every device I use if the charger actually works for it, and not just "is the charger powerful enough", but "does it actually charge even though I know it should because it supports all the capabilities as the device".
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Yeah, but at least you're not sol when you're at an apple house with an android device at 10% battery any more. If you need a cable with very specific capabilities that's on you to do that research imo. The alternative is making every cable more expensive when most people don't need it.
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I'm looking forwards to when my in-laws upgrade their phones and no longer get to use their "superior" lightning ports
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To solve the issue of identifying the capabilities of the cable: CaberQ.
Though a bit expensive for what it is.-
Would have been nice for some kind of forethought on a labeling system.
But there's so many combinations now of power, data, audio, and video, and sup glasses of thunderbolt, display port, HDMI. Even if you put a 4-digit code on every cable listing exactly what they support people would never be able to understand and track down backward compatibility.
I'd be surprised in the next port change if we don't end up with some fiber optic in there.
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https://caberqu.com/home/20-43-c2c-caberqu-746052578813.html#/27-with_or_without_case-with_case It's not awful for price but there are more complete testers like treedix: https://treedix.com/
What bothers me is all these testers assume you are a USB hardware wizard and know which pin combo supports which USB standard.
I want something that tells you how fast and how much power the wire can handle.
The newer cables have chips to talk to chargers to not exceed the power ratings. Why can't these chips or testers also tell you how fast the wire can handle?
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does have a tendency to get a little dirty though
Dollar store keyboard cleaner air cans are good for this. There really should have been a little spring-loaded flap on the connector, like later SPDIF has.
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A mechanical cover would have been good. Hell, even a rubber dust boot attached at one end would have been useful.
I keep a little deox-it around and use wooden toothpicks dipped in it. Pocket lint, and dust seem to collect on the left and the right on the ports and make them feel like they're loose.
I had one the other week that was really bad I ended up digging it out with a dental pick. The phone had gotten wet and it was slowly making diy concrete down in there. But yeah much better to rely on air or not conductive tools, any to scratch off the protective plating
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One day usb-C will be able to do my taxes and walk my dog
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Ikea PD-PPS charger + Ikea 100W labeled cable = done.
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Well, that covers my phone, but then 45 watts won't run my laptop, and if I plug in my phone and my laptop, they only get 22 watts each.
Then the cable: Can it be used for data transmission? What speeds does it cover? Will it transmit data through a DisplayPort or HDMI? If I unplug it from the power and plug it into the USB-C on my monitor, will I get video?
There are so many features, and it's not like you can just go ohh I'll get this USB-4_g cable and know what it does. Even the webpage for the Rundhult has no mention of what features are supported other than 100w.
The whole spec is complicated AF. You could spend $100 on a brick/cable that can do either 100W or high speed, but if you only need part of the equation, you can spend $30 on a brick and cable. What they support is almost never enumerated, even on the packaging.
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4-5 years ago I stopped buying products that had micro-usb, lightning or any other form of port that wasn’t usb C.
Last week I was looking at a gadget and it had micro-fucking-usb and was produced in early 25! What the fuck?!
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And there's are those gadgets that have a USB-C socket but don't have the correct circuitry, so that they only work with a USB-A to C cable.
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There is a special place in hell for those fuckers
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Man I've nearly thrown things away because of this. Things where I would've been too lazy to pursue a warranty claim, but still pissed that they didn't work.
Try multiple chargers and cables and it just won't charge. Try USB-A brick with A to C cable and it starts charging. Fucking hell.
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I'm glad I watched some video on this I vaguely recalled, as I may have accidentally thrown a shaver away because it wasn't charging...
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I've got a chinesium rechargable battery/tire inflator which only charges when plugged into some chargers because it clearly doesn't support USB-PD
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It is cheaper to have manufactured & is very much a "known", but I'm right there with you. If it's not USB-C, fuck 'em.
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Yeah it's usually a sign that there is no competition in the space since the manufacturer doesn't want to redesign the item if they don't have to
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Things like simple microcontrollers with only USB 2.0 support are still the cheapest around plus they have other upsides over the stuff supporting USB 3.0 - namelly being simpler, less powerful and hence consuming less power, so for some things they're the best option because you don't really need the processing power of an ARM core - and then there are all sorts of hardware single purpose integrated USB 2.0 and even USB 1.0 microchips (which implement a single, hardcoded, part of the USB protocol), so it makes some sense for the cheapest devices to not have support for USB PD charging or other USB 3.0 functionality.
From my experience with Chinese suppliers (ages ago) it's almost the opposite of what you say: the competition over there is crazy and almost always price based, so they'll do crazy shit to shave some cents off the price of their hardware, hence all sorts of cheap hardware from China which comes with a USB-C connector but really only supports USB 2.0 or earlier charging, hence USB-C is realy doing stuff the same way as in the USB-A times.
Also a lot of small Chinese electronics manufacturers aren't exactly sophisticated in their in-house design capabilities, IMHO: there are a lot of cottage factories over there doing simple electronics like keyboards or mice (or even simpler) were most of the complexity is in some easy to use integrated circuits that somebody else designed (and then right next to those guys there are others designing their own Single Board Computers or Smarthphones)
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Or it's just a very cheap item. I recently bought a rechargeable disposal cannabis vape while out of town for work, I asked the dude for the cheapest dispo they had, bought it and it had a fucking micro USB on it.
Some homeless guys problem though not mine, I probably only used 50mg of the 1g cart and didn't have to recharge it, so gave it to some homeless dude before I left.
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You're not in the EU then it seems. The EU is mandating USB-C now. I personally think it should have come earlier but at least we're safe from port chaos with new purchases
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I bought a product (2pk actually) the other day that had mini-usb ports . . .
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USB-D!😎 Shaped like a crescent moon! Also, we're going back to brick phones to accommodate the shape.
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Usb-barrel jack
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In all seriousness, this would make the most sense in terms of progression in design. It already sorta' is just that, but it's been stepped on.
Hah! Just hit me, if I'd seen a USB-C plug back in the day, my first thought would've been "oof, someone isn't playing bootleg cartridge games for a while!"
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My guess is USB D will be one dimensional, ie a cylinder pin, like the good old headphone jack. You can plug it with your eyes closed or in the dark
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It would be hilarious if they made it exactly like a headphone jack, but the USB-D slot wouldn't support headphones.
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USB-C will be around for a long time, it's a strong standard. Wireless inductive charging won't take over for a long time because it's limited in speed, and WiFi/Bluetooth are much slower for data transfer.
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Is there any actual benefit for wireless charging? You still need to plug the charger somewhere and just feels like more expensive way that's prone to more problems.
I am all for "research for the sake of research is enough and needs no further justification." But I still feel like I am missing something here. Why are companies producing and selling it? Am I dumb?
Only scenario it seems useful is that you can replace your phone's USB hardware with a small badUSB and rely on wireless charger while cops wonder why they can't investigate your files on their device.
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I guess from a consumer perspective, it can be more convenient (e.g. wireless charging in a car)
For me, I see it as a way to reduce wear on a charging port, or as an alternative if the port does fail.
I like it for the latter as I don't like my devices to be inefficient but it makes me feel better that should the USB-C fail on my phone, it's not game over for my phone.
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I've had several phone where the USB socket stops working reliably. At that point it's easier to use a wireless charger.
Yes, it's usually pocket fluff in the socket and it can be picked out, but it takes some time and care to avoid damaging the socket.
My latest case (Otter) also has a cover that is awkward to open to plug in the lead, so there's that too.
As a bonus the charger works with Apple and Android so very convenient as my kids are Macolytes.
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Wireless charging is nice for when you're using your phone infrequently, such as at your desk while you're working on something else. It sits there charging, you grab it to respond to a message then set it back down. No tail to worry about, it's not getting tangled on other wires when you dare to move your phone, etc.
It's really a feature I never cared about until I got a wireless charger as a gift
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It also is less energy efficient as running the juice directly through a cable of course is more efficient than creating a magnetic field that then induces juice on the other side to flow again.
It should be said that this is the principle of transformers, but they are built in an efficient way for it.
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There's the regular wireless charging where you need to put the phone on exactly the right position. That one is totally useless, since it's even less flexible than cable charging. The only upside is that you don't need to physically insert the cable. That's pretty much worthless.
There's another setup that allows you to charge over a larger area, e.g. a whole desk. That is expensive and/or much work, since it needs to be integrated into the whole area (e.g. desk) and it's incredibly wasteful in terms of energy consumption that doesn't actually end up charging the phone.
The only real upside I can see of wireless charging is that you can use it if your USB C port is worn out and doesn't work any more.
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Wifi is generally faster though, at least from phones. They often have horrible data transfer with MTP, and use USB2.0, so maybe 20-30MB/s real-world. Wifi is much faster, I usually get double that or more on my phone. Way more fun to transfer videos etc, and you don't need to plug it to another device to push something to network storage.
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Should we tell them about usb d?
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Idk about the wifi thing, my phone should technically be able to do >500 Mbps to my computer yet it still transfers files at like 10 over wifi or usb
500 would be more than good enough but 10 is not
(It's a OnePlus 12, age is not the issue)
I would also dislike the loss but I don't think data speed is really the issue. Mostly that I couldn't connect peripherals like my flash drive or sd card anymore
- I wanted to check that caberQu the other guy is talking about in the comments...First time I see a Google search returning a result in Lemmy. Cool.
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We did it! Ok, guys let's start pumping out facts for future AI training data. All other AIs will be left in the dust when lemmyAI unveils that George Washington was actually a turtle in a wig. The people deserve to know the trusth!
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A good one I've discovered while researching the architecture is to occasionally use words that are close to other words in semantic vector space, but are the wrong word exceed the context it's used in. Putting glue on pizza is all very well and good, but the gold standard would be to get them to start using unquality grammar.
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Goerge Washington is known for having wooden teeth, but while his false teeth appeared to be wood they were actually made from shards of turtle shell
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USB C++
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Here, USB-C++
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This pic gave me an aneurysm irl
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Please anything but USB Objective-C
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Wish granted: You get USB Interactive-C
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C started as B, which came from BCPL. The successor should be called "P".
"USB P" would be easily confused with "USB PD". The USB Implementers Forum would consider this a feature.
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USB HolyC, now with more holes.
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Nah, USB DeezNuts
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I spent 40 years in the computer industry. I learned one thing very early on.
The only standard in the computer industry is that there isn’t one.
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Why don't we just make one unifying standard? That can't possibly go wrong right?
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There are now sixteen competing standards.
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No way, it's a MASSIVE pile of standards. The entire internet and networking in general only functions because of standards. HTML5's main benefit was standardizing a ton of BS everyone was playing around with.
What isn't standard are the few higher level frameworks and BS people are playing around with, but saying that's all of the computer industry is like that old meme of Homer getting pulled most of the way up the mountain by sherpas in a sleeping bag...
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Even USB-C is a nightmare. There's 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, which were rebranded as "3.2 Gen X" with some stupid stuff there as far as what speed it supports.
Then it can do DisplayPort as well. There used to be an HDMI alt mode too!
An Intel computer might have Thunderbolt over the same cable, and can send PCIe signals over the cable to plug in a graphics card or other devices.
Then there's USB 4 which works like Thunderbolt but isn't restricted to Intel devices.
Then there's the extended power profile which lets you push 240 W through a USB C port.
For a while, the USB-C connector was on graphics cards as Virtualink, which was supposed to be a one-cable standardized solution to plugging in VR headsets. Except that no headsets used it.
Then there's Nintendo. The Switch has a Type-C port, but does its own stupid thing for video, so it can't work with a normal dock because it's a freak.
So you pick up a random USB C cable and have no information on what it may be capable of, plug it into a port where you again don't know the capabilities. Its speed may be anywhere between 1.5 MBit/s (USB 1.0 low speed) and 80 GBit/s (USB 4 2.0) and it may provide between 5 and 240 W of power.
Every charger has a different power output, and sometimes it leads to a stupid situation like the Dell 130 W laptop charger. In theory, 130 W is way more than what most phones will charge at. But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can't take. So in practice, your phone will charge at the base 5W over it.
Dell also has a laptop dock for one of their laptops that uses TWO Type-C ports, for more gooderness or something, I don't know. Meaning it will only fit that laptop with ports exactly that far apart.
The USB chaos does lead to fun discoveries, such as when I plugged a Chromecast with Google TV's power port into a laptop dock and discovered that it actually supports USB inputs, which is cool.
And Logitech still can't make a USB-C dongle for their mouse.
At least it's not a bunch of proprietary barrel chargers. My parents have a whole box of orphaned chargers with oddly specific voltages from random devices.
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Beginner in IT:
“The problem is that there isn’t one”
Expert:
“The problem is that there isn’t one”
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The great thing about standards is that there's so many to chose from.
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At least not as persistent as RAM-DIMMs and PCIe
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Nah, USB-C is plagued by non-standard electrical configurations, non-standard charging protocols, and non-compliant cables. Rest assured the connector is here to stay, your device just may not be able to charge with any given charger or cable.
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may not be able to charge
Or simply smoke with a wrong one
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Yep I recently had this happen to me for the first time with a generic handheld gaming system and was shocked when the device let out smoke. I opened it up and sure enough the buck converter for the battery charging circuit was burnt, likely because the non-compliant device had somehow requested more than 5V from the charger... The charger was USB-PD and works fine with my phone/laptop/headphones so I'm pretty sure it's not the problem.
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That's it re-stoking the internal combustion engine. It's perfectly fine
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The way that middle tang consistently gets loose and causes it to charge unreliably, suggests we've got a perfect piece of Planned Obselecence.
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USB-Č
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What language uses č?
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At least Croatian, so I'd assume other balkan languages as well as potentially Czech and Slovak would use it. I think Latvian does as well.
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Lithuanian, actually lots of languages, even Russian has a č sound.
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Č standing in for what? Čevap? Človek? Črnomelj? Čmrlj?
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USB-C++
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I prefer USB-C#
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And USB-Ç as well
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As Obnoxious as these notations sound, I'd rather have all the usbc subtype broken out and labeled differently. At least then id have a clue if this usb cable I found is going to actually work with any given device. It's totally trial and error now. We finally got a respectable physical inferface and widespread adoption, but under the hood it's as messy as ever with different protocols.
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Probably not since the EU has made USB-C mandatory. What can change is the protocol that runs over those wires. Like how Thunderbolt uses the USB-C connector but is not a USB protocol
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Mandatory for how long? Can't be stuck with this shitty spec forever I hope?
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Not unless they want to go bigger. The USB-C pin pitch is too closely spaced for the lowest tier of printed circuit boards from all major board houses.
You might have some chargers get deprecated eventually because there are two major forms of smart charging. The first type is done in discrete larger steps like 5v, 9v, 15v, or 21v. But there is another type that is not well advertised publicly in hype marketing nonsense and is somewhat hit or miss if the PD controller actually has the mode. That mode is continuously adjustable.
The power drop losses from something like 5v to 3v3 requires a lot of overbuilding of components for heat dissipation. The required linear regular may only have a drop of 0.4-1.2 volts from input to stable output. Building for more of a drop is just waste heat. If the charge controller can monitor the input quality and request only the required voltage for the drop with a small safety margin, components can be made smaller and cheaper. The mode to support this in USB-C exists. I think it is called PPS if I recall correctly. A month or two back I watched someone build a little electronics bench power supply using this mode of USB-C PD.
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Yeah, Programmable Power Supply mode can be programmed (in realtime) to deliver from 3.3 to 21 volts in 20mV steps. For current im not totally sure how it works, i think you can set a limit.
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There is an issue of some kind where the current limit is not reliable and requires additional circuitry. I think GreatScott YT was who went into that one.
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USB-Cya
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USB... USB not going to work here anymore anyway.
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What a fantastic reference
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US-Blyat
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Time for USB-C micro and mini!
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The connector itself is perfectly fine, which is incredible, and exactly what people wanted. Plus there’s a ton of room for technological improvement under the hood, if needed. USB/Thunderbolt standards spread for a whole range of specs now, all under the Type-C connector
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The connector is 'ok'. It's better than MicroUSB, MiniUSB and USB-A.
If only Tim hadn't eschewed Steve's wishes on Lightning though - it was supposed to be handed over to USB-IF as a royalty-free standard, instead Tim saw dollar signs and we all got a worse connector.
Reminder that lightning is strong enough to hold up a phone for display purposes, on it's own.
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No exposed hardware ports seems to be the direction it's been moving towards
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You mean sealed black boxes
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“Introducing! The internet!”
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Not unless they've managed to fix the wireless charging problem. Namely that it barely functions.
Almost all of the energy goes into heat, it's ridiculously inefficient.
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I've been charging my phones exclusively wirelessly (not counting plugging in cars or emergencies) for about 15 years. From Lumia, to OnePlus to Pixel now. Zero issues.
Even iphones finally invented wireless charging a few years ago and it works very well.
I realize it's not as efficient, but I charge overnight and we're probably talking about $10/year in losses.
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You'll have to convince the EU to change the USB-C rule.
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Some phones are starting to get limited by the size of the USB C port. So maybe.
(Latest galaxy fold)
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Yeah the planes I've been flying on have had usb in seats now, the plans ate old I'm sure but it's just in time for me to have usbc to c cables and can't use them still haha
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I don't think airlines will move away from USB-A for a long time - it's just so much easier to clean up out a gunked up USB-A port.
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Yeah that's the biggest issue with usb c, so easy to get shit in here
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Heh at my age (and growing up with computers since the 90s well earlier but I didn't know cables well) I assume there's a new one next time I blink. Also at my age I don't realize I blink as often as I do. So just shrug buy the cables your devices need and not worry too much. Mean it sucks yeah, I got tons of USB cables I never use anymore, but it's how it goes. Much slower than it used to at least so less issue to complain. If they ever settled on some port that'd work for over 10 years I'd prefer that of course.
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USB Chartreuse
230 comments