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this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Doesn’t matter much. Is it a 7.5W cable, or maybe a 15W, 45W, 60W, 100W, 140W or 240W cable ? Does it support USB 2.0 (480Mbps), 3.1 gen1 (5Gbps), 3.1 gen2 (10Gbps), does it support Thunderbolt, and if so the 20Gbit or 40Gbit version ? Does it support DisplayPort alt mode?
You can’t tell any of this from looking at the cable. It’s a terrible mess.
The worst part is, I could accept that as a generational flaw. The newer ones get better, the olds ones lying around do less. OK, that’s the beast of progress.
But no. They still make cables today that do power only. They still do cables that do everything except video. Why? Save a couple cents. Make dollars off multiple product lines, etc. Money.
What could have been the cable to end all cables…just continued to make USB a laughing stock of confusion.
Don’t even get me started on the device side implementations…
That’s because it doesn’t make sense to use an €40 cable when a €1 cable would do.
Agreed, but not requiring labeling or some sort of method to identify was a real fuckup on their part.
My problem isn’t the existence of different tiers of cable, it’s that there is literally no way to know if the cable you’re using supports something until you try it.
Yeah, we used to have that. It was great. They even made it so you couldn’t even fit the wrong cable in a port. They did that by having different connectors for different cables.
Cable hell
Yeah but with modern thin & light mobile devices, that’s a bad solution. Then you need multiple holes to serve multiple purposes, which impacts waterproofing and requires extra space & hardware.
One port to rule them all makes sense. But it should have had a way to identify cables capability at a glance. I still prefer having one cable that can charge all my devices, even if the trade off is some confusing situations when it comes to cable capability.
Is this true? There's no app to test these by plugging them into your phone? No chip in them that encodes a spec sheet?