Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end.

Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake.

At this point I myself just don't differentiate USB versions beyond 3.0. 2.0 is the slow one, 3.0 is the fast one, anything newer is "so fast I won't ever saturate this much bandwidth anyway". Thunderbolt also falls into the last category.

Maybe not relevant as a consumer to have a difference in the spec version for that, but if you’re a manufacturer trying to implement it, it’s worth a bump to the minor version number.

Why normal people should care about the spec version is weird to me.

The spec does specify the connectors for using the USB logo and claiming compliance. But if you don't care about compliance then use whatever connector you wish!

The logical connection in USB doesn't care about the physical connection. Your phone could just have some soldered leads for all the protocol cares.

Unlike charge-only cables...

How else it could possibly play out? It's nice to think that NIST or a similar U.S. government agency could standardize everything, but outside of industries that are most government funded (defense, etc.) or deeply connected to government funding (medical research) the forces of marketing are going to take over eventually and at scale. It's not like the government can or will force consumer electronics marketing to be honest, at least in the U.S. and Europe.

I was a little disappointed, for example, to learn during the HDMI 2.1a fiasco that HDMI (the organization/legal entity responsible for the standards), VESA, etc. are loosely organized groups from the companies in the industries. So if they want to rename HDMI 2.0 to 2.1a to make their old products look better, nothing's really stopping them.

I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers.

No, it's specifically to give marketers what they want, which is the ability to advertise support for the latest version of the spec without actually having to improve the product.

It's not USB-IF's marketers that want this, it's the vendors who pay USB-IF whose marketers want this.

Either a new version of a spec says that all existing implementations are out of spec, or it add new optional features and existing implementations are that don't support them are still in spec. There's really no other option.

This naming was an entirely unforced error, and should be called out as such at every opportunity to keep it from happening again.

Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on.

Moving to WiFi 6 was a great idea!

Which they immediately made a mess of.

What version of WiFi has 6GHz support? 6e of course.

How about uplink MU-MIMO? Oh that's WiFi 6 Wave 2.

There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

What are you talking about? The whole point we're discussing here is that thanks to marketers we have the opposite of that where the exact same product has had three different marketing versions associated with it over the last few years without any actual difference.

USB naming/numbering was perfectly reasonable up to 3.0. Higher speed revisions got a new number and lower speed revisions kept their old one.

Then with 3.1 this all changed. Suddenly the same port that was a USB 3.0 port yesterday is now a USB 3.1 Gen1 port and the new 10 gigabit speed is USB 3.1 Gen2.

Then 3.2 comes along and suddenly those ports are now 3.2 Gen1 and 3.2 Gen2, with the new additions of 3.2 Gen1x2 and 3.2 Gen2x2 modes.

What would have been wrong with continuing the same way they had already been doing things and just calling the SuperSpeed+ mode "USB 3.1" while leaving the old ports referred to as USB 3.0, then when dual lane came around that is "USB 3.2"? It's straightforward, easy to understand, and doesn't have any chance of confusing someone in to thinking "well this thing has USB 3.1 Gen1 while this other one only has USB 3.0, I guess the first one's better".

> There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

The type C connector is independent of the versioned standards. The USB 3.1 spec was released in July 2013 while the Type C connector spec didn't come out until August 2014. USB 3.1's 10gbit SuperSpeed+ mode is allowed and supported on the same USB 3.x Type A and Micro-B connectors as USB 3.0 SuperSpeed uses. USB 3.2's dual link mode of course requires a Type C connector at both ends.

USB 4 actually requires a Type C connector, while it supports single lane operation for setup and fallback it requires all devices support dual lane. The 10 gigabit mode also uses different encoding than SuperSpeed+ so it's not just another rename.

This seems closer to the truth to me.

Being better at naming things is part of the reason that Apple became so successful.

"What do you want for your birthday, little Timmy? Do you want Apple AirPods, or Sony WF1000XM4s?"

Apple also sucks at naming and labeling things.

Which Macbook Air do you have? Today, sure, you can say "M1". But earlier models did not have official names requiring Apple themselves to describe them in documentation as something like "MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)"* or worse, resort to the internal part number ("MPXQ2xx/A, MPXR2xx/A, MPXT2xx/A, MPXU2xx/A" in that case).

Not that "Sony WF1000XM4s" is anything to write home about either.

Related, I have two old Mac Minis here and I can't tell which one is the several years newer one without finding a tiny model number printed on the bottom of both, looking them up, and comparing the specs.

I for one have no idea what ipads are better than what other ipads. Is Air better or worse than regular? How does that relate to Mini, in Apple laptops Air was the smaller laptops, but now there's also Mini?

At least companies leaning heavily into number-based schemes tend to make models with larger numbers the fancier more expensive ones. Acme Frobnicator 6400 is generally a lot better than Acme Frobnicator 3000.

From that point of view it makes a lot of sense. You need to differentiate the spec version from the features talked about in the spec.

From a marketing standpoint, it's terrible as most people need a simpler name and are incorrectly choosing the spec version. Marketing labels should just be "USB Gen 1" and "USB Gen 2". If you see "Gen 2" you know the spec version was at least 3.1, though that shouldn't even matter.

Maybe make a separate spec version for each transfer mode and require backwards compatibility. It's easy for the average person to understand "the higher the number, the newer the standard, the faster it goes". It's not as easy when there are 3 numbers, 2 of which are optional. If you have to use 3 numbers, you could at least make it look like a version number, so "3.1 Gen 2" would become simply 3.1.2. These are easy to understand too because everyone has at some point installed software updates.

From the point of view of the millions of people who have to use the damn things and probably aren't even aware the name comes from a spec doc somewhere, or even what a spec is, it makes absolutely no sense and the fact that the people who wrote the spec didn't make some effort to account for this means they failed badly.

Products like intel cpus have tiers like i5 and generations. This is kind of like what USB did but so much worse.

You are likely thinking of named features and of conformance marks, things like Superspeed 10 Gbps and the like. People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1, and in fact should demand to not have to know.

Compare/contrast: the 802.11 specification series. Each successive specification only lays out the unique new modes; with the expectation that devices support multiple specifications, where each specification lays out its own supported modes. So if you e.g. build a device that can only do 802.11n things, and not 802.11ac things, then you’ve built an 802.11n device. But 802.11ac peers — which are really “802.11ac + 802.11n” peers — will still be able to talk to it in 802.11n mode — but they do this according to the 802.11n spec that they also support; not according to the 802.11ac spec.

> People outside hardware developers aren’t expected to know USB 3.O vs 3.1

Why not? How else should you know whether your device can go at its full advertised speed?

Just say what speed it supports using which technology. SuperSpeed at X Gbps, SuperSpeed+ at Y Gbps, high speed at 480 Mbps. You can only use a speed both support.

It's always important to get acquainted with a topic before succumbing to the desire to mindlessly criticize in ignorance.

A quick search in Wikipedia shows that USB 3.1 specifies a brand new transfer rate, dubbed SuperSpeed+ transfer mode, "(...)which can transfer data at up to 10 Gbit/s over the existing USB3-type-A and USB-C connectors (1200 MB/s after encoding overhead, more than twice the rate of USB 3.0)".

This is a different transfer mode than the SuperSpeed transfer rate specified in USB 3.0.

To allow implementations to support both transfer speeds, the implementations that supported SuperSpeed transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen1, while the implementations that supported SuperSpeed+ transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0

To me that's a very convenient, and customer-centric way of putting together a standard. So there's a minor addition to a major release. Is that left to an annex? No. Do we fork standards? No. We just release a backwards-compatible v3.1 standard that in practice deprecates v3.0 and thus allows the whole industry to avoid piling up the list of current standards that we care about.

1) The standard has a version number. I would have suggested semver, except that USB will always be backwards compatible within the same physical port, so there's no need for separate major/minor versions. We can just use an incrementing number 1,2,3 etc.

2) The standard gives each physical port layout a name, eg. A, B, C. Port layouts can be added/removed in new versions of the standard.

3) The standard specifies and names various transfer rates, eg. T1, T2, etc with new names being added in new versions of the standard. (eg. version 1 defines speed T1, version 2 defines speeds T1, T2. etc.)

4) Manufacturers are not allowed to use the version of the USB specification in their marketing material at all. A port is not "USB 3.1", it's "USB C T2".

The version of the spec only serves to confuse customers because the whole point is that versions are backwards compatible. The only thing the customer cares about is the physical port layout and what features/transfer rate are supported over that port.

So the marketing names would be:

USB A T1, USB A T2

USB C T1, USB C T2, USB C T3

As a customer, I can easily see that I can't plug a "USB A T1" into a "USB C T1" because they are different physical ports. I can also see that "USB C T2" is faster than "USB C T1".

Admittedly thing are slightly more complicated because the transfer rate is not the only "feature", we also have to consider what kinds of data can be transferred. We can extend the full marketing name to:

USB C T1 (audio)

USB C T1 (audio,video)

etc.

Obviously this is too long to have on the port itself, so we can stick with just the port type and transfer speed (eg. USB C T2) as the short name.

The standard as a whole has a version number that increments with the entire standard document.

Port layouts are named A, B, C (and deprecated Micro-A, Micro-B, and Mini-A).

The transfer rates are now named: Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 1x2, and Gen 2x2. (These names are stupid, but they are names. Gen 1 is all the transport capabilities from USB 1.0 to USB 3.0 {including the now "classic" "superspeed"} and Gen 2 is new starting with USB 3.1 and the even worse named Gen 1x2 and Gen 2x2 are new starting with USB 3.2).

> Obviously this is too long to have on the port itself, so we can stick with just the port type and transfer speed (eg. USB C T2) as the short name.

Marking the port type is redundant because USB has been good about giving every port type a very different physical silhouette. USB A ports look nothing like USB B ports look nothing like USB C ports. (Arguably there are legitimate complaints that USB Micro-A and USB Mini-A had some visual at a glance issues in practice, but you couldn't insert the wrong cable into the wrong port.)

So yeah, that just leaves finding a better way to mark the ports (and cables!) with the transfer speed. "Gen 1", "Gen 2", "Gen 1x1", and "Gen 1x2" all take up a lot of space and maybe aren't the friendliest names to mark on/near ports/cables, but are in theory potentially the only bit of information that ports need to be marked that cannot be assumed by physical port shape. (ETA: Which the USB-IF Marketing names like SuperSpeed 40 and logos like an arc around the number 40 next to the USB symbol are designed to do, though the fact that people don't recognize them and they don't seem common enough in practice that people know they exist is a marketing failure more than a technical failure of the standards.)

If they were doing this then there wouldn't be any ports described as "USB 3.1" (see point 4). The version of the standard is not just irrelevant but actively misleading to use in marketing material.

> Marking the port type is redundant because USB has been good about giving every port type a very different physical silhouette.

On the port itself, sure, but if I'm buying a laptop online then it's pretty important what type of port it has, so saying "USB C T2" is a lot more useful than just "USB T2". How would I even know what silhuette the port has?

The two most important pieces of information are the type of port and the transfer speed. There are only a small number of possibilities for each, and the latter is a purely numeric value, so a letter/number pair is sufficient.

That gets to the edit I made at the end. The USB-IF Marketing group has never suggested marketing ports/cables as "USB 3.1". They've always preferred the "SuperSpeed {Bandwidth}" branding over "USB {SpecNumber}". There's a chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4#USB_3.x_.E2.80.93_4.x_dat...

(Admittedly, they are mixing messages by using "USB4 SuperSpeed {Bandwidth}" as marketing names for "SuperSpeed 20" and "SuperSpeed 40".)

But the fact that just about no one uses the USB-IF Marketing Names and instead reverts to easily confused "USB {SpecNumber}" branding is an interesting marketing failure by USB. (Not necessarily a technical failure of their specs.)

> On the port itself, sure, but if I'm buying a laptop online then it's pretty important what type of port it has, so saying "USB C T2" is a lot more useful than just "USB T2". How would I even know what silhuette the port has?

That's a slight goal post move from your previous comment about what to mark Ports/Cables. Sure, if you need to mark online materials you need to include port types. But it's still redundant on a physical port or cable to mark the port type when you are staring right at the port type.

I'm not sure you read any of that. I mean, they bumped the standard version to 3.1 from 3.0 after adding a new transfer rate.

Also, USB 3.2 was bumped up from 3.1 after adding two new data transfer modes.

I also add that the naming scheme is quite obvious once you start to think about it.

* USB 3.0 only supports the one SuperSpeed data transfer mode.

* USB3.1 was released, and it specifies two distinct data transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 mode and the novel Gen2 mode.

* USB3.2 is released, and it supports four transfer modes: the legacy Gen1 and Gen2 modes from USB3.1, and two new SuperSpeed+ modes which are 2x and 4x faster than Gen2.

If a USB 3.0 cable can suddenly become USB 3.1 (or 3.2) overnight, then what's the point of versions? And what's with "Gen #" at the end? Because a consumer is easily going to be able to see that a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is better than a USB 3.2 Gen 1 cable? Or maybe the sellers will just not advertise the "Gen #" portion? According to the Q&A section of this Samsung external drive[0], the difference between this and a USB 3.1 drive is nothing but the model number.

</rant>

The USB Consortium has been overrun by marketing that thinks that making things more confusing (read: tricking) is better for the consumer.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-256GB-Extreme-Solid-State/dp/...

I honestly have no idea what you're trying to ask.

Keep in mind that:

* USB3.0 was released in 2008.

* USB3.1 was released in 2013.

* USB3.2 was released in 2017.

Each standard is standalone, and specifies all of its transfer modes. I wouldn't be surprised if each of these specs also included fixes, and thus technically would represent different specs.

3.1 took 3.0’s features and added more optional features to make a larger document.

3.2 likewise.

You are likely thinking the actual feature marketing names. Things like USB-C connectors and Superspeed 20 Gbps. These do not change release to release. They also might require conformance testing to use those names.

I actually blame the current mess on PC motherboard manufacturers for wiring up a crapload of non-conforming ports, like a “USB-A Gen 2x2” with a red plastic tab. IMHO thy did this because nobody wanted to take the risk of actually pushing toward USB-C. It left them without a way to use a certified/marketing name, hence pretending engineering names were appropriate.

No, it's not.

If you implement it from the legacy USB 3.0 spec then you don't care about it. It's SuperSpeed, and that's it.

If instead you implement it to comply with the USB3.1 spec then you have two separate transfer modes specified in the 3.1 standard: the legacy Gen1 and the newly-added Gen2.

If instead you implement it based on the USB 3.2 spec then that standard specifies four distinct transfer modes: the Gen1 specified in USB3.2, the Gen2 specified in USB3.2, and the new ones.

> just because the USB Consortium said so.

Who exactly do you think the USB consortium is? I mean, how do you think a standard is put together?

Yes, it is.

> If instead you implement it to comply with the USB3.1 spec then you have two separate transfer modes specified in the 3.1 standard: the legacy Gen1 and the newly-added Gen2.

No. If your device only supports 5 Gb/sec speeds, it's USB 3.0, yes. "SuperSpeed" and all that jazz. But with USB 3.2, it's now (magically) USB 3.2 Gen 1[0]:

> Under this rebranding, the standard previously known as USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 Gen 1 will now be called USB 3.2 Gen 1. Furthermore, the standard previously known as USB 3.1 Gen 2 will now be renamed to USB 3.2 Gen 2.

Yes, there's different transfer speeds, but if you only support 5 Gb/sec, you're a "Gen 1" device. If you're arguing that implementing USB 3.1 mandates support of the 10 Gb/sec mode, you're wrong. If that was the case, there'd be no point of this "Gen" nonsense because a 20 Gb/sec device would just be "USB 3.2" and a 5 Gb/sec device would be "USB 3.0".

Remember the whole debacle a few weeks ago about HDMI 2.1 essentially just being HDMI 2.0? Why would they do that other than to confuse? The only reason for this (USB) stupid naming is to confuse consumers into thinking that their 5 Gb/sec device is "top of the line" because it supports "USB 3.2" or "USB4".

For example, here's a "USB 3.2 Gen 1" flash drive.[1] It's a 5 Gb/sec flash drive, but it's 3.2 instead of the more appropriate 3.0. Why? To confuse.

> Who exactly do you think the USB consortium is? I mean, how do you think a standard is put together?

I think it's a consortium of companies. Many of which have marketing teams. And I'm right.[2]

[0]: https://www.msi.com/blog/new-usb-standard-usb-3-2-gen-1-gen2...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-128GB-Ultra-Flash-Drive/dp/B0...

[2]: https://www.usb.org/members

That's not how things work.

Devices are implemented while targeting a standard.

If you implement a USB 3.0 device then you do not support any data transfer mode capable of doing more than 5Gb/s. If you're a customer looking for more than 5Gb/s and you see that a device is only USB3.0 then you already know that it won't cut it.

That's the whole point of this submission. M1 macs don't support USB 3.1, only USB 3.0. Why? because they patently don't support the transfer speeds made possible by the new data transfer mode introduced in USB 3.1.

M1 macs support USB4.

USB specs define multiple transmission modes and speeds from port to port over a cable that one can support. They define alt modes you can support.

Separately there are conformances and marks. E.g. if your cable supports transfer according to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 in our lab, you can _market it_ as Superspeed 20Gbps, put the logo on the connectors, etc.

So the argument would be that Apple M1 doesn’t support Superspeed 10Gbps.

Which, as an aside, I’ll need a lot more than one person testing with a single (likely non-conformant) cable before I will believe.

[a]: Made up names; USB 3.0 didn't have this mess

You have USB 3 Low speed and Full Speed (aka usb 1), USB 3 High Speed (aka usb 2), and USB 3 SuperSpeed.

Expecting the USB consortium to give things useful names or at least let them keep their names we got used to is the same madness as expecting a singular useful version number from anything Sun derived.

Anyway, according the article everything links at USB 3.1 Gen 2 SuperSpeed+, but then usually doesn't send data at anywhere near the link rate, so that's not an extra layer of confusing.

The x.y numbers were not a mess until 3.1

No, not quite. What do you think the USB3.0 SuperSpeed is? Why, a brand new transfer mode.

> If I plugged a USB 3.0 cable (9 pins) into a USB 2.0 (4 pin) hub, the device still worked at the lower speeds.

You'd be glad to know that nothing changed in that regard with USB3.0, 3.1, and 3.2.

In fact, the whole point of this submission is to showcase how M1 macs are only capable of drawing a lower data transfer speed unlike the new Mac Studio, thus proving that the M1 macs don't support USB 3.1 Gen2, aka SuperSpeed+.

No, not really. Feel free to point out exactly which argument you feel was ignored.

> The issue isn't that things have changed; it's that they've changed in a way that makes things confusing for consumers.

That seems to be the source of your confusion: nothing has changed. Each USB spec is backwards compatible and specifies the same data transfer modes.

And there is no confusion: if you pick up a USB2 data storage device you know beforehand it won't support SuperSpeed. If you pick up a USB3.0 device you know beforehand it won't support SuperSpeed+. If you pick up a USB3.1 device you know beforehand it won't support SuperSpeed+ 2x or 4x.

The whole point of the submission is to call out that M1 macs don't support USB3.1 unlike the new Mac Studio.

The article also clearly states that Apple doesn't actually advertise USB3.1, just USB3.

The retroactive renaming of speed+versions. I'm not talking about the Mac.

> If you pick up a USB3.1 device you know beforehand it won't support SuperSpeed+ 2x or 4x.

My whole argument is that this confusion wouldn't be an issue if the USB Consortium had reserved USB 3.1 for 10 Gb/sec speeds exclusively. In other words, this:

    3.0: 5 Gb/s  "SuperSpeed"
    3.1: 10 Gb/s "SuperSpeed+"
    3.2: 20 Gb/s "SuperSpeed++"

3.2 continues to describe everything in 3.0, which means it continues to describe how to make devices supporting 5 gbps over USB-A/B

There’s no point complaining that the engineering spec versioning strategy is confusing, when no consumers should have been exposed to it. The problem is squarely on manufacturers and the tech press.

> the implementations that supported SuperSpeed transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen1, while the implementations that supported SuperSpeed+ transfer rates were dubbed USB 3.1 Gen2.

This is supposedly better than USB 3.0 (original standard), USB 3.1 (new standard, same SuperSpeed as USB 3.0), and USB 3.2 (new standard and also SuperSpeed+).

Not quite.

* USB 3.0 specifies SuperSpeed. No need to go on about GenX given it's the first one introduced by USB3 is there?

* USB 3.1 specifies two data transfer modes: Gen1 (the one introduced in USB 3.0) and Gen2 (the fancy new mode just introduced).

* USB 3.2 specifies the Gen1 and Gen2 modes from USB3.1, and adds two additional modes.

Nobody cares if multiple speeds are "introduced by USB3". If 3.0 introduces one speed, and 3.1 introduces a different speed, people can understand that just fine.

Even if you do want to focus on "introduced by USB3", then you just need "3.[generation]" or "3 Gen [generation]". Not "3.[spec revision] Gen [generation]"

… but it still seems indefensible. This comment almost reads like satire. I know standards are hard, really hard, but this seems indefensible. Especially the Superspeed -> Superspeed+ (this is ridiculous). Will this get simplified with USB4?

The old transfer mode was

> Superspeed

But the new mode is different, it’s name is

> Superspeed+

I’m sorry, I take your point in the first paragraph but I can’t find a way to wrap my head around how this system helps anyone.

/s

But yes, they should have just had the version determine the gen, so a 3.0 port is always gen 1, a 3.1 port is always gen 2, and a 3.2 port is always gen 2x2. Or alternatively, skipped the version increment and marketed the new protocol as "USB 3 Gen 2", with no minor version. But now we have devices with "USB 3.1" printed on them even though they can only do 5 Gb/s.