News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by gambiting on Thursday March 29, 2018 @10:39AM (#16707407)
It's insane to me that you can have two USB-C cables that look exactly the same externally yet provide different(and incompatible!) connections. You can have a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, Power-only, Display-only, Thunderbolt-3-only "usb-c" cables that all look identical outside yet won't work for your use case. Prime example to me was that the USB-C cable supplied with the MacBook Pro cannot be used to connect the LG displays sold by apple which also use USB-C, and the user gets absolutely zero explanation as to why it doesn't work, no error, no warning - just a blank screen. That's nuts.
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by lmm on Thursday March 29, 2018 @10:47AM (#16707490)
> You can have a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, Power-only, Display-only, Thunderbolt-3-only "usb-c" cables that all look identical outside yet won't work for your use case.

Half of those are not spec-compliant. There are only 4 different legitimate types of cable: 3.0 non-power/thunderbolt, 3.1 non-power/thunderbolt, power-capable non-thunderbolt, and thunderbolt. That's 3 more types than there should be, but let's not make the problem worse than it is.

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by lugg on Thursday March 29, 2018 @11:00AM (#16707594)
Wait what.

That is insane. Who thought this would be ok?

Is there any cables that are fullspec?

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by lvh on Thursday March 29, 2018 @11:16AM (#16707708)
Yes: Thunderbolt. I only buy those because the $10 extra I spend on a cable now will never matter if I have to deal with this nonsense even once.
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by edude03 on Thursday March 29, 2018 @11:32AM (#16707860)
Only 0.5M TB3 cables are full spec. Longer ones only support USB 2.0 apparently
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by lvh on Thursday March 29, 2018 @04:39PM (#16710833)
Do you have a souce for that? I have a 1m TB3 cable that appears to do USB3.1 just fine, and Newegg sells a 2m one that claims the same. [0]

[0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAERN68H8...

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by edude03 on Sunday April 01, 2018 @09:53AM (#16728254)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/08/15/psa-thunderbolt-3... is the first result I found. I could be out of date but I can't find a cable that's 2m long, 40gb, supports 87w+ and USB 3
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by dijit on Thursday March 29, 2018 @12:03PM (#16708121)
I thought 0.5M TB3 was for 40G and any longer (up to 2M) is only 20G...
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by dijit on Monday April 09, 2018 @03:25AM (#16791059)
I got downvoted, but I was right:

> At launch, there'll be one passive Thunderbolt 3 cable that supports Thunderbolt, USB 3.1, and DisplayPort 1.2, but with a max bandwidth of only 20Gbps.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/06/thunderbolt-3-embrac...

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by Phrodo_00 on Thursday March 29, 2018 @02:21PM (#16709585)
> Who thought this would be ok?

Whoever thought that using the same cable for thunderbolt was Ok. Probably Apple or Intel

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by digi_owl on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:05PM (#16708724)
Thunderbolt is not even part of the base spec, it just piggy backs on the generic alternate mode that can just as well carry Displayport vidoe (or anything, really).

Most of it is not even with the cables, but the chips and software at either end.

Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by Too on Thursday March 29, 2018 @12:28PM (#16708345)
"only" 4???!
Re:Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant by Dylan16807 on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:09PM (#16711532)
Are you sure 2.0 C cables are invalid? Can you back that up?