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That meme sucked
The USB standards are just… Comically overcomplicated. And almost everything about it is optional. They need a full revamp, making it simpler and mandatory on all future ports, devices and cables.
But they won’t do that, will they.
I miss FireWire, too.
Now that was a peripheral protocol standard.
sigh
I remember having a FireWire in one of the family desktops when I was a kid. Can’t remember what we might have used it for, though.
It resides in the same vague memory hole as the Zip drive that we had.
Yeah, the ZIP drive was just starting to take off when the Internet killed needing a sneaker net (at least of that size). Add in CD-ROM drives which you needed anyway. And good night.
Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn’t require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don’t notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.
I had a FireWire hard drive! I remember I bought specifically the enclosure that supported both standards since my motherboard had a FireWire port and on paper it was faster than usb! Too bad the HDD was as slow as molasses
Firewire was phenomenal for external hard drives. The speed was almost as fast as the drives so you were rarely limited by the port.
Yep, that’s because the actual data transfer was handled by the more capable device, instead of only the guest. I think the standard also required a minimum throughput, iirc, whereas USB only had a maximum.
Almost everything about it needs to be optional because sometimes USB is used to charge some cheap battery powered thing and sometimes it’s used to make a backup of a harddrive and sometimes it’s charging my laptop with enough power for it to be rendering video but still have a net charge increase to the battery while also providing Ethernet, video output, and keyboard/mouse input over the same one port.
Maybe optional opt out? Like to say you are usb-4 you have to have this format and support all of these features. Other you are USB 4 W/O x,y,z,PD,Video,etc. I also think PD levels should be labeled on power sources and sinks.
There should be a way to make it simpler.
Idk, something like “for USB 4 you NEED all of these”.
Or maybe USB 4 with levels like bronze, silver, etc.
Or make displaying data rate, display and charging capabilities all mandatory on all ports…
I’m not sure what, but “it’s a USB port; look in the manual and if you’re lucky you might learn what it does exactly” ain’t it.
People do not want to be limited to 1m long cords or only have thick and stiff Thunderbolt3 cords with 20 different conductors for a wired mouse.
Minimum specs like you are proposing just make the standard less useful and would lead to more competing specs that aren’t compatible at all (a la lightning cables).
To be a truly “universal” spec, flexibility is king.
I’ve never seen the one enclosed in a battery, but I’ve seen the rest.
I legit have never seen the battery used at all. They often use a plug, a lightning bolt confusingly, or don’t even label it at all.
“Basic”
It’s useful but it got me even more lost 😅
So many different standards my god.
I have never seen one with SS, but maybe they removed that part in Germany.
For those that don’t know
I see them on the back of full size computer cases and on docks. They will often be one SS port on the top. I had no idea what it meant before now.
Thank god that no one made a transfer speed standard of 88 Gb/s
For the people don’t know… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)#In_neo-Nazism
That’s for USB 14.
That’s for USB 14.
stop
hammer time!
I looked at two Dell laptops and a Geekom mini PC, all bought in Germany, and they all have the SS symbol.
So the SS Anne from Pokémon was a Nazi cruise ship?
Not in Germany, they renamed it to MS Anne.
You mean the MS Anne
🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Well, except all the legacy symbols on devices older than current gen.
It gets even better, each function of the port also needs proper support from the cable. Often cables do not support the full spec of usb to cut costs.
While the symbols in the post are often put on computers, for usb cables this is seldom done (only a few brands do).
Source: had to find a cable that supports both DP and PD to connect a portable external monitor after I lost the original cable. (1/9 cables worked)
For that portable monitor, you should just need a cable with USB-C plugs on both ends which supports USB 3.0+ (could be branded as SuperSpeed, 5Gbps, etc). Nothing more complicated than that.
The baseline for a cable with USB-C on both ends should be PD up to 60W (3A) and data transfers at USB 2.0 (480Mbps) speeds.
Most cables stick with that baseline because it’s enough to charge phones and most people won’t use USB-C cables for anything else. Omitting the extra capabilities lets cables be not only cheaper but also longer and thinner.
DisplayPort support uses the same extra data pins that are needed for USB 3.0 data transfers, so in terms of cable support they should be equivalent. There also exist higher-power cables rated for 100W or 240W but there’s no way a portable monitor would need that.
Sometimes people want to charge their phone in an outlet 10 feet from their airport seat.
Sometimes people want to transmit 8k video.
It’s not physically possible to do both tasks with the same cable.
But because USB is a flexible standard, we don’t have two incompatible specs to do the same thing. So when you get out of the airport and to your meeting, you can actually plug your phone into the meeting room projector for your business presentation. That’s a win.
Luckily, all new PC seem to choose Thunderbolt over only alt mode, which makes stuff more easy, since they have the flash on the cable (but are also more extensive, I gear
Yeah, it’s gotten so bad I eventually ordered a USB cable checker to figure out what any given USB cable is capable of (and to see if the cable has gone flaky, which seems to happen a lot). I haven’t received it yet so I don’t know if I can recommend this item, but … gosh darn you sure need something like this.
Yes, this is incredibly annoying and it’s also the reason why some USB cables cost more than others, even they may look the same superficially.
One of those cables that don’t work is rated for like 120W, with gigabit transfer speed… But it refuses to transmit display… Like bruh
That sounds like a dedicated charging cable. So yeah, they will (if at all) only transfer data slowly and not support any extras features like displayport.
A dedicated charging cable wouldn’t have “gigabit speed”
No USB cable has “gigabit speed”. It probably has 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 standard).
Maybe he meant a 5 Gbps Gen1 cable. That would be “gigabit speed” but still rather slow by today’s standards and won’t support DP. They are pretty cheap these days, so wouldn’t be suprising to see left over stocks being sold as charging cables.
No USB cable has “gigabit speed”. It probably has 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 standard).
What? I’m either misunderstanding you or this statement isn’t correct. Having USB cables that can move data at gigabit rates has been common for quite some years.
Here’s the latest stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4
Bitrate
20 Gbit/s
40 Gbit/s
80 Gbit/s
120/40 Gbit/s asymmetricWhat? I’m either misunderstanding you or this statement isn’t correct
I meant that no USB standard actually has exactly 1 Gbit/s. I even mention that next one if 5Gbit/s. Just a misunderstanding I think.
1080p at 60 Hz is 4.4 gigabit
USB-C video is usually DisplayPort Alt Mode, which uses a completely different data rate and protocol from USB.
Even using old 2016 hardware, a computer and USB-C cable that both only support 5 Gbps USB (such as USB 3.1 Gen 1) can often easily transmit an uncompressed 4K 60Hz video stream over that cable, using about 15.7Gbps of DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth. Could go far higher than that with DP 2.0.
Some less common video-over-USB devices/docks use DisplayLink instead, which is indeed contained within USB packets and bound by the USB data rate, but it uses lossy compression so those uncompressed numbers aren’t directly comparable.
Didn’t really think about that one but you’re right damn… (Looked it up, and it depends on the bit depth etc, but it’s around 3.2Gbps for the display settings if I’m correct)… So that explains a lot
Came here disappointed to see no one said anything about Black D inside white P
Edit: yes, I have the humour of a 16 yo
It’s the other way around 😘
What is the difference between USA and USB?
One connects to all your devices and accesses your data, the other is a hardware standard.
OIL
One gives you power, the other does everything it can to make sure you never do.
white P inside a black D
Additionally, USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 labels provide no information on the speed. Rather, “Gen 1” means 5Gb/s, Gen 2 means 10 and Gen 2×2 means 20Gb/s. These “Gen” labels are seldom found on products however.
So for example USB 3.2 Gen 1 is 5Gb/s while USB 3.1 Gen 2 is 10Gb/s
All so sales people can slap on a 3.2 sticker over the 3.1 that was on top of the 3.0 sticker…
The dear people at the USB Forum should be rewarded with the Nobel prize in namology for their clear, superior and non-confusing naming scheme and naming process that even the nerdiest of nerds can’t follow.
This has already been fixed by the forum FYI, the new spec is to just put clear text labels that denote the capability of the port. I can’t find the article I read but this one has an example of the new user-facing branding.
clear text labels
The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know it.
The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there’s more push for using symbols, which…can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.
Maybe “STOP” or “ON” and “OFF” or something aren’t that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. “ON”, “OFF”, “STOP”, “YES”, “NO”, “CANCEL”, “POWER”, “ERROR”, “RESET”, “UP”, “DOWN”, maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has “CERTIFIED”, hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?
Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that’d be for the US market. Okay, it’s easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can’t recognize a single Chinese character.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I speak English. I’d rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don’t feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.
Behind the scenes, here’s what those labels correspond to:
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USB 5Gbps: USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1
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USB 10Gbps: USB 3.1 Gen 2, 3.2 Gen 2×1, and 3.2 Gen 1×2
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USB 20Gbps: USB 3.2 Gen 2×2
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USB 40Gbps: USB4’s initial version as currently shipping
That’s cool. But even though it finally adds simplicity, it’s still yet another renaming of the same things.
Here’s a snippet from an article from 2019:
The upcoming 20 Gb/s USB 3.2 connection, which offers twice the speeds of the previous iteration, will be known as ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2x2’. Its predecessor, ‘USB 3.1’ will be rebranded to ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2’, while ‘USB 3.0’, which ran at 5 Gb/s speeds, will be termed ‘USB 3.2 Gen 1’.
Reading that I want to shoot myself, and even the latest change, which probably is a good one, drives me slightly mad due to the history of renaming everything so many times.
the history of renaming everything so many times.
Every time a new USB spec comes out the version number goes up. A new spec comes out because they add more features. The spec is a whitepaper that explains all the features. It’s a “The King is dead, long live the king!” situation.
If you just never used the version numbers to mean something that they never meant (transfer speeds) then literally none of this is confusing.
They’ve officially renamed the transfer speeds one time after people made a big huff. here’s how they changed:
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USB SuperSpeed -> USB 5Gbps
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USB SuperSpeed 10Gbps -> USB 10Gbps
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USB SuperSpeed 20Gpbs -> USB 20Gbps
And If you can’t follow along with that, I’m really, really sorry. There’s not much I can do from a internet discussion board. XD
Yes, I am the only one confused. It’s not like half the tech internet blew a gasket over how confusing and bad the renaming of the generations were. Just me. I guess I should just read the whitepapers of every standard going forward, silly me.
Well if there’s anything I expect from the new-cycle masses, it’s rationality.
Heaven forbid, we try and do better!
I guess I should just read the whitepapers of every standard going forward, silly me.
You don’t have to read whitepapers to know the difference between Ethernet, CAT6 and RJ45 even if your grandpa doesn’t know the difference.
It’s not too much to expct the “nerds” to know the real names of PAN connections, too.
-
-
Do people care? You just plug in your thing and it works, fast enough in most of the cases.
Why can’t I tether my phone to my laptop with two out of three of my cables?
I have an Android phone with a USB-C port and a laptop with (several) USB-C ports.
I have three cables that I carry with me: a USB-C-to-USB-C cable, a second USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and a USB-A-to-USB-C cable. None of these are charging-only power cables, and I’ve used them for data connections.
One of the USB-C-to-USB-C – an unmarked cable – doesn’t permit for USB tethering to be used.
The other two do not.
The other USB-C-to-USB-C cable even has USB 3.1 symbol.
I don’t know why.
Looking more-closely, it looks like the other two don’t have a data connection established between the Android phone and the laptop from the laptop’s perspective. They’ve let me do so with other devices.
Checking what data transfer rates a given cable supports electrically
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to query the “e-marker” on a USB cable from Linux today; I found a comment from someone saying that kernel support is still being worked on. You can use
lsusb -tto show the negotiated speed between two devices, so can use them to infer the speed.https://lemmy.world/post/18014298
What USB PD rates does a USB cable or power consumer or charger support?
I don’t know of a good way to determine this from a user standpoint. Note that this is a matrix of voltages and currents, so it isn’t just “I support up to rate X”. Also, not all devices display the rate of power that they are providing or consuming – in fact, most don’t. My Android phone, a reasonably-sophisticated device and one with a display and capable of both providing or consuming power, doesn’t show the rate of power consumption or provision, just “slow” or “fast”, without additional software.
I have – had – a laptop that just won’t charge if a charger doesn’t support a certain USB PD profile, which its provided charger did but not all charging devices did.
When I plug in two devices that both support USB PD, which is the consumer and which the provider?
When I’m in my car, I typically I have three devices that have USB PD ports and can either provide or consume power – a large powerstation, a laptop, and a phone. I eventually learned a few facts:
First, the direction in which power is being provided via USB PD is independent of which device is operating as a USB host or device using USB OTG ports; it’s possible for the direction to be different from the direction of power provision.
Second, apparently the direction of host/device order is random, and devices just remember the host/device direction for a certain amount of time, so that if you plug two USB OTG devices into each other and the direction is not what you want, the idea is that you can figure it out from one or more of the devices indicating this and then plug them in in the other direction.
Third, as best I can tell empirically, USB PD does the same random thing.
This creates all kinds of fun if one device powers off and then on again or something; my laptop can start draining its power to my powerstation (generally not what I want), or my phone to my laptop, since all the USB PD ports in question support USB PD in both directions.
Which end is which on an active USB cable?
I have an active optical USB cable, which I obtained so that I could put my computer in a closet, a long way from the rest of my devices; USB on copper has very limited range at present-day speeds without a repeater. It functions in only one direction in terms of data transfer (and obviously can’t move power). That particular manufacturer labeled it, though there’s no standard for labeling that.
In sum
USB does have reasonably good fallback, so most cables and most devices tend to sort of do something to some degree – they move some amount of power and some rate of data, though some devices have hard demands on what they need and there isn’t a great way to assess what a cable or device supports in most cases from an end user standpoint. But it definitely could be a lot better from my standpoint.
I’d also add that while I have rarely had problems with it – only came up with one USB-powered analog audio mixer that had less-than-amazing power circuitry and bled noise from dirty power being provided by USB through into the audio signal, and where I put it on a dedicated charger – USB power can be stupendously dirty. I was watching some guy with an oscilloscope investigate various devices, and all those sensitive devices are accepting all kinds of craziness in terms of power. I’m surprised that USB power sources aren’t required to provide some hard guarantees on what they can do in terms of load and response.
Additionally, USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 labels provide no information on the speed
Correct.
USB X.X is the name of the technical whitepaper that describes the standard.
For a long time, USB had three transfer rates. The first legacy speed (slowest) was hardly ever used. The Second was called “Full Speed” and the fastest was called “Hi-speed”. Because people could not remember which if these two were faster, they referred to the whitepapers in which they were introduced.
When later versions of USB were introduced people have tried to continue this mental “shortcut” and have caused themselves nothing but confusion.
The superiority of german aryan ports proven once again.
(this is a joke, nazism is evil and I hate it)
“Universal”
My dick fits into all of them
Seems pretty universal to me 😎
