USB-C enthusiasts are (from my experience) people who haven't really used it much and think that they will be able to get around with a single cable and a single connector standard.
People who actually tried to use it for a number of things quickly realize that USB-C is just the name of the physical connector, which has nothing to do with what the device supports, which in turn has nothing to do with what the (unlabeled!) cable supports. There are no standards for labeling devices or cables, so you quickly end up in a world where you have a bunch of cables and devices all using a single plug, but you have no idea which device will work with what. I daresay this is a worse situation than having multiple types of plugs and cables, because at least then you could set reasonable expectations.
Add to this the fact that there are no reliable hubs for USB-C connectors, so you're basically stuck with what your laptop/computer offers, unless you want to live in a world of crappy unreliable hardware (I don't).
Well, I'm using it for my monitors, soundcard, power, iPhone/iPad charging, Sony headphones, and external hard disks.
What exactly am I missing from the whole issue, since I don't seem to be having any problems?
Can it be fixed by not buying crappy cables?
Unfortunately that isn't enough yet, as there is no "universal" cable, and may never be. You can have an excellent cable that nonetheless fails for what you plugged it into, or (potentially worse) falls back to something that kind of works (e.g. a slow data transfer through a port that supports PCI-e).
The biggest botch the committee made was not mandating connector labeling. I'd have gone with colors, but not everyone can see them. If the cable had resistor-style stripes to indicate what it supported, and if the ports on the host devices did likewise we'd be in much better shape. Even some licensed logos would have helped though the connectors are so tiny.
Then again the names the USB committee has come up with in the past (high speed, SuperSpeed, 3.0, 3.1 etc) have uniformly been confusing rather than elucidating.
In my case I agree: I have had nothing but success with Type C, and it has simplified my life (except for the lack of high power chargers). But I had to learn more than most people would or should have to in order to get there.
What is missing that they aren't universal? Is there some kind of tradeoff between full power load and full data transmission capacity or something?
As far as I know a universal cable is not possible. My reading of the spec says that it should be but I am not a USB implementor and some of my friends who are tell me it's not possible. In any case nobody ships such a thing.
The charging cables provided with devices are likely to be power-only. With the 87W charger, Apple ships ones that can carry about 100W (the maximum per USB spec -- 20V@5A) which requires thicker conductors; my understanding is that those cables don't carry data (i.e. they can safely be plugged into any third party brick without you worrying that the remote device will attack your computer). You want a power-only cable for this purpose. I am not sure of they have the same cable with the smaller adaptors.
The very high speed cables only work over short distances unless you go to optical (which I'm not sure anybody has deployed).
The most standard cables carry "USB 3.1" which is just another name for USB 3.0 carried over Type C connectors. The higher frequency and higher power cables are more expensive to design and build so will cost the customer more. That's one reason you have to specifically look for cables for DP, PCI-e/Thunderbolt etc.
No, it's not; USB 3.1 adds the new SuperSpeed+ mode over all supported connector types (and USB 3.2 adds two additional SuperSpeed+ modes for Type-C connectors.)
USB Type-C connector spec is a separate spec issued after USB 3.1, USB 3.1 isn't USB 3.0 over Type-C connectors.
Overall, I think a quick glance at the whole discussion under my comment proves my point quite well.
Things like charging your phone can be done with USB C.
Things like external hard drive are generally done with Thunderbolt
Things like External GPU's have to be done with a Thunderbolt cable that is less than 1m
All of that said, I am not 100% sure of all of that, because it is all so confusing.
If you ignore Thunderbolt, can you always rely on the latest USB-C cables Apple and Google sell working for everything? Or are there still issues?
This affects everyone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)#Thunde...
Dating back to the early days of Apple, they have been hyper conformant with the spec (e.g. no drivers needed to connect to conforming devices). They still are.
I answered your question about which cables above.
Why? External USB drives are much more common.
TL;DR: USB drives are really really slow.
625 MB/s is 5Gb/s; the switch from bits to bytes seems to be a way to exaggerate the difference from Thunderbolt speeds quoted in GB/s; at any rate, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (equivalent to USB 3.2 Gen 2×1) 10 GB/s cables and device support isn't hard to find; I don't know that anyone had USB 3.2 hardware (controllers, or cables supporting the new 2×2, 20Gb/s, mode) yet.
Currently there are four common speeds/specs for the high-speed lanes: none, USB 3.0 at 5GHz, USB 3.1 at 10GHz, Thunderbolt 3 at 20GHz.
Cables that can support the higher speeds without signal loss issues tend to also be increasingly short. That's another issue getting in the way of an ideal cable; it's hard to carry such high frequencies to the same distances.
There's no tradeoff between speed and 100W support, but most cables do lack 100W support for whatever reason.
A lot of cables (even from Apple and Google) pick the "none" option for high speed lanes. Such a cable can only run at USB 2.0 speed and is often called a "charging-only" cable. (True charging-only cables are significantly more rare. They also probably violate the spec.)
Dude, you're using a pair of headphones that cost more than most people's cellphones and laptops. Normals use years-old Android devices, out-of-date Windows 7 laptops and the absolute cheapest peripherals from the drug store.
Of course that stuff is going to be buggy.
Even the Nintendo Switch, due to its hardware, uses the highly unusual "myDP" USB-C display standard instead of conventional alternate mode.
But it's enough to just read the cable reviews to learn that things are not always fine.
Also, one thing which cannot be blamed on "crappy cables" is that the presence of a USB-C port on a computer does not mean much at all, because in general one has no idea what can be connected to it.
It used to be the case that anything of the same connection type would - at worst - not work if it wasn't designed for that piece of equipment. But now you have a situation where things "kinda" work together so consumers are encouraged to mix and match yet some of the time it could literally break your hardware.
So now we have a situation where some people are too scared to mix and match which breaks the entire point of a standard connection type - and on the flip-side you have other people who are left with bricked hardware because they were unlucky enough to plug the wrong charger with the wrong device (for example).
I have a few modular power supplies around from different vendors, and I made the mistake of using one cable in a different vendors supply.
The supply side had the same connections; so I thought that I could just mix-and-match.
Turns out, that even though the connections are standardized, I ended up putting ground on a 5v pin, 12v on the 5v, 3.3v on the 3.3v (magically) and 5v on the 12v pin on a standard SATA connector.
As a result, I fried several hard drives, because the output of the supplies wasn't standardized for the connector type. I can't even imagine an end-user using a volt-meter to check which are compatible with which vendor.
This was a problem before USB-C.
TL;DL: Check your modular supply cables, and don't use other vendors cables.
USB-C on the other hand is a standard.
That kind of brings me to my next point: proliferation of cables and dongles. Whenever I travel now, I need to have the same USB-A to micro-B cables I was already using, plus some pure USB-C, plus USB-A to USB-C. Not uncommonly, USB-C to micro-B gets thrown into the mix. And the variance across all those is even greater than the pure USB-C stuff. Good luck keeping track of voltage, directionality, data vs. power-only, and all the other variables. For now at least, the addition of USB-C has made things far worse.
I for one would be happier if USB-C were only for laptops and tablets, and all the people making the zillions of smaller devices would FFS stick with micro-B like they were already starting to. Then I'd only need one power adapter, two kinds of cables, and no dongles, instead of this mess.
Text labeling could work, but could get out of control, especially at the rate that the standard is changing. Would it need to list the specific features the cable supports? Or can I assume that a cable labeled with 'Thunderbolt' will be compatible with all future iterations of Thunderbolt?
Maybe we can do something like resistor color codes with colored bands to make a rainbowed venn diagram of cable features. Surely that's a good idea which will only decrease complexity :P
Well, it's clearly less complex than letting the cables unlabeled...
Not everyone! Personally, I couldn't care less what color my cables are (unless the color is telling me something important about the cable).
This is also true with USB A, B mini-A and mini-B, mini-AB, micro-A and micro-B, and micro-AB; also A, B, and micro-B actually have two versions each of the connectors, with compatibility in one direction, so you don't even always know that physical connectors are compatible from the connector name without also the USB version.
If it was designed to have a single connector for charging cables, they were designing to solve a solved problem.
Also let's not forget that USB-C is two-fold rotationally-symmetrical in contrast to micro-B.
And I didn't forget the laptop. I just don't take it with me much. And I prefer the mag trick of older Macs.
So, congrats, you have a connector that everyone can standardize on. Now, once literally everyone else moves of the old standard, we'll be there.
Seriously look at my list of things I have. I suspect my phones and hopefully the spare batteries I buy in the coming years will be USB C. However, my bike gear and other hobby equipment won't any time soon. Even my laptop and tablets are going to be years before I update them to one that supports USB C.
So again, outside of laptops, the world had standardized on a connector. That my laptop was different is as relevant to me as knowing that my drier isn't USB C any time soon. That I'm now going to have to deal with a ridiculously slow transition from the de facto standard everyone else was following to USB C is just obnoxious.
Edge case? Probably, but only because most people don't consciously factor this into their purchase decisions. It's clear that USB-C is the way forward for phones, and once that happens on the low-mid market segment, everything else will follow.
This isn't an insult. Just pointing out that most of the electronics world had standardised. To pretend otherwise is just odd.
No, not "literally everyone", as laptops weren't using micro-B for charging.
So, my headphones, my bike computer, my bike lights (front and back), my spare batteries, and my other tablets.
Also, I confess, yes. I was being rhetorical. :)
It sounds like USB-C is that, but worse.
(If there's any way to tell what cable is a data cable, I'd love for someone to enlighten me.)
I've had generally good experiences with Type-C and IMHO is an improvement over buying video out dongles for every device and being able to use a single cable for charging.
I connect my desktop to different phones via USB-C, my phone to my headphones, laptop to monitor, my headphones using my car charger, etc. and it all works. The charging bricks and cables are cheap on sale -- $30 for bricks that can charge laptops and about $4 a cable. We're a 100% USB-C household and will only buy electronics with USB-C or USB. I'm waiting for everything else to go USB-C: come on projectors, razors, speakers, and musical instruments.
I suppose my biggest gripe is that things that aren't USB are able to use the USB-C form factor. For instance thunderbolt. My dock at work connects with thunderbolt over USB-C, and everything works fine minus the display port pass through. It's kinda cool that it works at all to be honest. Oddly enough the Ethernet jack and Dock sound card are run over USB so those work fine.
To be fair, OSX warned me something was drawing too much voltage, and I still tried it like 5 times after that, but the screen did flicker on a few times and work for a sec before it all went kaput.
Source: USB-C household with a 9 year old and a new switch.
The only unofficial thing I used was the cable itself. Once I bought their cable, the switch charges on everything I connect it to now.
Not quite the same issue as burning up my switch (as of now), but issues nonetheless.
Was it a cheap USB A -> USB C Cable without a resistor? Those a well known to be dangerous [1]
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/353410/3-problems-with-usb-c-you-n...
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/87vmud/the_...
I'd send you the correspondence between Nintendo and myself but I feel as if I've wasted enough time on you already.
There is an upside to that terrible timeline though: an opportunity to have the new name be USB-C++
You're probably right that because USB-C is a newish standard, manufacturers might make idiotic newbie mistakes like the ones Surjtech made with that cable. That would argue in favor of waiting... though I'd estimate that you're more likely to be struck by lightning than encounter a retail USB-C cable with power and ground reversed.
Now we're to trust the same bottom scraping hardware/software makers with an already overly complex serial port.
USB-C inconsistency on the hardware side of things has been a meme by itself. With this addition sometimes when you plug a device in it might not work despite being the exact right device/port combination (which would be a miracle on it's own even in the current environment.)
I don't know. Maybe in 5 years when we've glued on all the stuff we want from this connector things will be okay. In the meantime though it's chaos. Committee approved chaos.