Why can’t all my chargers just charge all my stuff?

Re:Why can’t all my chargers just charge all my stuff? by gumby on Monday April 17, 2017 @08:37AM (#14130494)

USB Type-C unfortunately isn't the panacea it first appeared. Because of all the alternate modes and range of power options, no end user can tell, just by looking at it, if a given cable will work. Worse, because of backwards-compatible fallbacks ("be liberal in what you accept..."), you may plug two thunderbolt devices together with a cable that only supports USB 2, and have them "work", just slowly.

I only realized this when I got my first Type C notebook. Until then, it all sounded marvelous. And on a technical basis I think the Type C standard is quite well thought out.

However the cables themselves are never marked in any way that describes what protocols they can support. I hope the USB consortium adds some sort of marking requirement, or I think we'll see a lot of unhappy users once Type C becomes widespread.

Labeling is hard (there are plenty of third parties who don't care) but

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Re:Why can’t all my chargers just charge all my stuff? by phil21 on Monday April 17, 2017 @11:07AM (#14131403)

I agree with this. The USB consortium needs to come up with labeling/licensing standards for cables and do so ASAP. The utter travesty that is this space was entirely predictable, and they did nothing about it? This is exactly what happened with USB 1.1 -> USB 2.0 cables, and we're just making the same mistake twice.

It's so bad that Apple even ships a USB-C 2.0 cord with it's Macbook Pro chargers. What the heck?!

I've since replaced all the non-3.0 and non-thunderbolt USB-C cables I have so I have a universal set, but I shouldn't have had to do that and it was rather expensive (and difficult) to track them down.

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