Originally published at: Gadget tells you what that mystery USB-C cable can do - Boing Boing
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I love usb c, I wish we didn’t live in a world where you have to buy separate device to figure out which cable is usable.
Also, “that mystery USB-C cable” describes basically every usb-c cable, thanks to all the weird/proprietary things companies make them do. I wonder if things will settle into patterns useful to casual users.
I feel this pain a little more personally since I spent literal years with my latest older model phone claiming to need a different cable to connect to my car’s display. It was totally a software problem, every cable that failed magically works just fine now. (at least until the software crashes my phone into a reboot)
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I want a certifier that verifies the cable is safe and does not have additional hardware. Example 1 (Reboing from 3 years ago)
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My solution is to attach a labelmaker label whenever I buy one, with the data and charging specs. And discard freebie mystery cables so I don’t try to use them.
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How did they take something that was supposed to be a straightforward standard and £#€& it up so badly?
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i’m sure it saved manufacturers money to unify the port size and shape; and hey, no dongles.
but it’s a disaster trying to figure out what’s for what, and why some connection or other doesn’t work.
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Doing evidence-of-absence is never fun; but it would be extra unpleasant with newer or higher end USB-C cables since the ‘electrically marked cable assembly’ requires an embedded IC by design.
Some of the e-mark ICs are pretty punchy in their own right (CYPD2103A has a 48Mhz Cortex-M0 with 4k of RAM and 32k of in-system reprogrammable flash; because why shouldn’t a cable be able to consider itself a peer of what it’s connected to?); and, more fundamentally, the fact that there is supposed to be an epoxy blob of mystery in there turns the problem from “well, I can probably get a used veterinary x-ray system to check for implants more cheaply than I might expect” to a genuinely ugly game of determing whether that IC just supports e-mark requirements without making every inspection a destructive inspection.
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Will it tell me where the juice is coming from? And why the juice is sort of pink(ish)?
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I absolutely don’t think that the USB-IF is on the ball when it comes to intutive(just look at the absolute lunacy that passes for naming schemes); but it’s not really a surprise that ‘universal’ implies a quagmire when there are multiple competing objectives even before you get to vendor proprietary nonsense or cost optimizations of questionable honesty or competence.
Back when “universal” just meant “we’re coming for serial, parallel, PS/2, and ADB; plus maybe really low end external SCSI” there was still room for vendor fuckery and bugs; but there weren’t really a lot of inherent contradictions: everyone wanted simple-ish, cheap, fairly low speed, hotplug, trickle of bus power.
Now you’ve got a situation where some applications still want simple and cheap; but others want to deliver 40Gb of tunneled PCIe or DP and north of a hundred watts of power; and others still want to deliver 240w but barely care about data because type-c is the new barrel jack now.
Only so much you can do to square that circle without admitting that you can’t be all things to all people and going back to the older model of USB being the cheap bus and firewire or thunderbolt being the expensive one and something else being where the power is.
If you want to blow the lid off the price(and maximum cable length) you could regain simplicity just by insisting that all cables must be capable of all features; but nobody really wants to pay thunderbolt cable prices for every USB cable.
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Munroe FTW!
I think it’s called “industry consortium”. Where every player works to ensure the “standard” lets them claim compliance while still protecting their proprietary implementation.
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And even more than that, now that (as I understand it) many chargers in the EU must be USB-C, there’s regulatory pressure to have one cable that does everything. But doing everything is expensive, so there are cheaper cables that can do less. I look forward to the inevitable compulsory hieroglyphics to denote capabilities.
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I’d love to see some “compulsory hieroglyphics” be a mandatory part of the standard. Just get me a cheat-sheet, and I’d be good.
Provided the markings are actually dependable to mean what they say, and the cables must actually adhere to the standard they’re marked with.
But the standards committee will absolutely never allow such to be required. As long as it’s in the hands of groups like the USB-IF, it’s going to have lots of fuckery included. Give responsibility to IEC or IEEE and it would be far better. Could we maybe get ISO standards? . . . Not bloody likely before the technology has become irrelevant.
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I found a similar cable tester for less $.
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A reasonable compromise would be two classes of cable:
(1) Power only
(1) Everything
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Indeed!
And I’d like to propose that USB-C as of today is the only connector, and hopefully the last connector, we’ll ever need. for everything from normal business laptops and smaller devices.
And any engineer suggesting a new connector deserves a kick in the ass. Maybe a new one in 2025.
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