this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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Yeah but no one is forcing you to use thunderbolt for displays, I still don't get your point that forcing adoption of USB-C for charging locks you into the mess that is the rest of the USB standards
Its going to cause issues when you grab a random USB-C cable out of your USB-C cable box and try to use a low bandwidth cable that has USB-C connectors when you need a high bandwidth cable that has USB-C connectors.
I don't get how thats hard to understand.
Because you're arguing across purposes.
For most cabling standards thusfar in history, the physical connectors indicated the purpose and capabilities of the cable. This has a 9-pin DIN, it's an RS-232 serial cable. This has RJ-45s it's at least a 100BASE-T networking cable. This is HDMI, suitable for attaching a DVD player to a television.
USB has spent the last 30 years fucking that up by trying to make one cable to rule them all...except they've made like eight different connector standards, A, B, mini-A, mini-B, micro-A, micro-B, 3B and C. We've arrived into a world where we're allegedly standardizing on the USB-C plug and socket, but it has become damn near impossible to tell by examining the plug, socket or cable what capacities it actually has. A USB 3.1 cable can be outwardly physically identical to a USB4 cable. And they make USB 2.0 cables with A-C or C-C plugs, every smart phone comes with one in the box. None of the high speed data lines are rigged up, only the power and old USB2.0 lines are, so it will transfer data, just very slow.
Now, why do they do that? Because some people actually don't want the data lines. Because a USB 3.1 and later USB-C cable has like 19 conductors in it. that makes the cable thick and stiff. And if ya basic, all you do is charge thay phone, eat hot chip and lie, a high speed capable cable is difficult to run from the socket behind your headboard up the back of your night stand to the back of your wireless charger, it's so heavy and stiff that it might pull the empty charger off the table, like an HDMI cord does to a Roku. If ya basic, you don't care about data transfer speeds because you never transfer data via cable, your phone is a Tiktok and doordash machine. So why would you pay $30 for a single cable that sucks to use?
If instead you're the kind of umm actually jackass nerd that has a Lemmy account and opinions about systemd, you've got two Raspberry Pis on your desk next to the cable your new phone came with, and your phone is plugged into the PC you built with a USB 3.2 rated cable you bought from Cable Matters and then labelled as such with a Brother P-Touch label maker. /autobiography
Given that USB isn't bidirectional, having separate A and B connectors was actually a good thing, which USB-C has now gone and screwed up. Stupido example: let's say you charge up your phone using a USB-C wall plug adapter. We'll call the wall plug adapter (the device supplying power) the "charger" (this is normal), and we'll call the phone (the device receiving power) as the "chargee", ok?
Now instead of wall plug you have a USB power bank. So the power bank is the charger and the phone is the chargee. Eventually the power bank goes empty and you have to recharge it from a wall plug. So now the power bank is the chargee. Still not too bad.
But what happens when you try to charge one power bank from another power bank? Both use USB-C so which one is the charger and which is the chargee? Answer: the protocol says when you plug the two together, they are supposed to decide at random! A bunch of code in the chip and then you look at the LEDs to see which way the power is flowing. If it's not what you wanted, unplug and re-plug until it's right.
Even funnier, many phones now have charger capability, so you can recharge phone B from phone A and vice versa. Same confusion. Best of all is when your phone is down to say 30% charge, so you plug it into a power bank. Except oops, it didn't occur to you that the phone can end up charging the power bank instead of the other way around. Brilliant.
Someday maybe the USB committee will make up its mind about something. Meanwhile "universal" has meant "chaos everywhere", lol.
Unrelated but I just switched over from Reddit to Lemmy and that's exactly the kind of comments that I was hoping to find, you gave me a good laugh & write very well, thanks for this
You don't know the purpose of a USB-C cable because they all look the same.
Tell me, what is this cable capable of?
there are two cables there.
Judging by the thickness of the cable, they're USB 2.0 cables intended mainly for charging. A USB 3.x cable is going to be about as thick as the plug body. You vs. the guy she told you not to worry about:
Solid guess. You know your USB 2.0 USB-C to USB-C charging cables. (Its a 60w capable cable btw, not 120w or 240w, so don't bother trying to power your gaming laptop with it)