The cynic in me sometimes enjoys the irony of watching USB become the fragmented ecosystem of loosely (or not) compatible interconnects that it was designed to replace.

(ok, it's not quite /that/ bad, but you get the sentiment)

It's so much worse than what it replaced because physical incompatibility meant you had no confusion. A VGA cable was a VGA cable, a power port was a power port, a ps/2 mouse was a ps/2 mouse.

The only thing it improved over was the hellscape if charging ports.

It's like a mountain range: the base is rock-solid, but the peaks (in speed, power, capabilities, even length) are standing apart.

And successfully scaling different peaks requires using different kinds of safety rope. Helpfully, the different ropes all look exactly the same.

Sounds like we should add some type of visual guide to help people realize which ropes to use.

Maybe make their physical shapes different enough so that you can't connect things which fail catastrophically together?

The thing is that they never fail catastrophically; t worst you get USB 2.0 level of interoperability.

But if you wan these top Mbps or W, or want 60 Hz 4k video, you may find out that not everything works with everything else, and proper cables play a crucial role, while being visually not distinctive at all.

I seem to recall that back in the early days of USB, the organization would hold a conference where all the vendors brought their devices, and everyone would go around testing compatibility with everyone else's devices. Often by making the most convoluted device configuration tree possible (because that's what the users would do).

Myself, I ran into an incompatibility for the first time ever last week in over 24 years of using USB devices. A new Thinkpad with Windows 10 would lock up it's USB bus if I plugged a USB speaker in using the hub on my Dell monitor. Hooking it up directly worked fine. These are all "legacy" USB 3.0 devices with Type A and Type B connectors, and have worked for years with other computers (PC + Mac). What a shitshow USB has become.

I also had a situation where a usb device was able to lock up the bus last week. Windows 10, dell dock, usb 3.0 hub. Same setup worked fine 3 weeks ago. I almost wonder if there was some Windows driver update causing it.

You just need the secret logo decoder card: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/usb-c/USB-Type-C/main/pics...

Hardly any of these cables are labeled properly. Even Apple has a Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 cable that it sells for $150 without any difference in the labeling.

Is there a difference from the cable point of view with thunderbolt 3 vs 4?

Let's put resister color codes on the wires, 2 sets of 3 bars (digit digit exponent), 1 for megabytes and 1 for milliamps. So red black yellow space green black red is 20 gb 5 amps.

Great idea! But what to do if some jack manufacturer will take a beautiful cable and waste it with an awful jack for the sake of some economical reasons?

I have many USB-C cables; zero of them are labeled with those icons.

Also that list excludes the thunderbolt versions which have a thunderbolt and a number.

There are some cables that show the power throughput [1], I would like to see cables that show data throughput as well.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Charging-Display-Wattage-Braided-Tran...

Ah, you need the scratch and sniff version of this card. My only complaint is how subtle the difference is between between the smell of the 45W fast and regular charging cables.

I'd be happy if a USB-C charger actually charged USB-C devices, even at a degraded (500mA) rate... but even that's not a 100%.

And i'm not alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPtcKycQeI