> This never happened to me with micro USB or lightning ports

This happens regularly to the lightning ports among my family&friends. "My iPhone keeps stopping charging" "did you clean out the lint with a toothpick?" "Oh"

> Otherwise you can brick your Switch

The bricking was happening due to a faulty third-party dock that was sending 9V on a 5V line. Nothing to do with the Switch itself. You can use any old USB-C charger with the Switch, as long as it's not faulty.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/ckaiiv/an_e...

I previously worked in an environment where iPads were distributed to staff; the team responsible for supporting them had toothpicks on hand for this exact reason.

An argument may exist for lint etc being harder to clean out of a USB-C port once it had made its way in there, but haven't witnessed it myself yet.

Anecdotes can be given all day, but I would suggest it's a potential problem for any port of similar size being placed in pockets and bags.

> You can use any old USB-C charger with the Switch, as long as it's not faulty.

But you cannot use any USB-C to HDMI adapter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/7qgy9d/has_...

> sending 9V on a 5V line.

From what I could find after an hour of digging through USB specs is that that line is actually supposed to use 2V signals. (Though it's possible I misread.) So the faulty dock is even worse!

For the switch to tolerate 6V on that wire is already a healthy buffer. How hard is it to keep things 5V or less on the data wires of a USB device?

I don't think it was just docks I had my switch brick and I never used any 3rd part docks and the chargers I used were all either Anker (both wall and battery packs), Google phone, or Nintendo chargers.

"The Nintendo Switch has a USB-C port which means you should be able to use any USB-C to HDMI cable or dock to charge it or connect it to a TV, right? Nope. You can only use the official expensive dock or USB-C cables."

AIUI, the way this all shook out (that's an early story) is that you can stick any USB-C charger you want into the Switch directly, and it'll work fine without bricking anything. However, when a dock gets involved, it gets more complicated. The easiest and safest way to remember the matrix of safe vs. unsafe is "use the official dock directly and don't do anything else". Technically there are other safe things in the matrix, such as using the USB cable with a proper resistor in it, but it's all too easy to get any other such policy wrong, and not usually worth it.

Not that you're wrong to complain about the bricking issue. It's broken. It's just not quite as totally broken as some of the early articles thought. (For obvious reasons, nobody was too interested in conducting careful experiments to nail down all the variables.)

I agree but like you said it's a real issue.

Another issue is that not all USB-C cables to HDMI work either because I think I read somewhere that Nintendo didn't follow the HDMI specs.

It's not USB-C's fault of course but I've never seen so many issues with USB1, 2, or 3.

Sounds like anecdotal issues with USB C and possibly a firmware issue on the iMac.

I haven't had a single issue listed here in any of my own systems or when working as desktop support.

> I have to clean the USB-C port on my Android phone every couple of months otherwise it won't charge ... this never happened to me with micro USB or lightning ports.

You're lucky. I just did a quick poll of the 12 iPhone users near me, and 8 of us have cleaned out our lightning ports in the last 3 months. 2 just cleaned out now as they realised this is what was causing their charging problems.

> I bought a cable for TB3 to connect an SSD to my iMac and instead of getting 40Gbps I only got 480Mbps... my fault for not reading the small print, but having the same connectors for different protocols is not a smart idea either.

It's very stupid that TB3 cables aren't required to support USB 3, but thankfully that should go away over time with USB 4.

Well what OP bought is not a TB3 cable at all, but it looks like it. It was a USB 2.0 cable with USB type C connector, which is a part of the spec. I agree it shouldn't be, and that USB Type C should have a minimum USB 3.0 standard, but USB 3.0 doesn't mean anything anymore anyway.

Oh, if they got a not-thunderbolt cable then that's a smaller problem.

You are never going to prevent the existence of charge-only or similar cables, since they're a lot cheaper than running four high speed data pairs.

Raising the minimum to 3.0 wouldn't fix the problem, just make it sting slightly less. And you can't require the best speed on everything because that's expensive and 'best' keeps increasing.

In my mind the real crime is that you can lay out a bunch of cables and they can't be sorted from slowest to fastest. There are weird broken gaps, like cables that support TB3 but only TB3. Also that the labeling is awful. There should be a clear max speed icon on every cable.

I have the exact same issue with my Pixel 2, even after thoroughly cleaning the port it still hangs very loose and comes out easily. It has put me off USB-C, especially for mobile devices.