I see this as a general win since mfi seems to be reasonably open and USB-C has a lot of cheap cables floating around.
USB-C is annoying and I don't like having to worry about about my cable frying my device.
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/smart-office/using-the...
Yikes. I've never worried about that until reading this comment.
USB-C has such a loud hate-mob after it. And it's really just not bad. It really mostly is great.
1). If I have 4 USBC devices, and 1 USBC port, how do I connect them? With previous versions I buy a $10 hub. There are literally zero options to accomplish this with Usbc ( if I am wrong I would love to know about it, this is actually a problem I have)
2). The cables. Some cables support certain data. Some certain power. There are no markings to give me any of this information at all.
...albeit it'll only do data, and won't let you do P/D or video.
My impression is that the cheap-hub product got a lot harder to make because of how much more USB-C supports, such that you need to caveat any cheap product (as I had to there), and the products that do support all the USB-C features wind up being full dock-type hubs that start at around $70.
It has its own power supply. I have a USBC 14 inch monitor and a webcam plugged into the hub, and the hub plugs into my MacBook. The hub can power my external monitor, webcam and the MacBook.
Even chargers from ALLCAPS manufacturers on amazon?
It's just absurdly epic, in my book. Pick a completely random no-name brand it and there's like 98% chance it'll do the job fine, if you want a $30 100w charger for ex. In most cases, I would not be afraid to plug it in and find out. I expect some cheap chargers indeed probably won't be able to sustain full load, but I also expect they'll shutdown fine & not harm anything. It just seems unfair to try to reach into the absolute bottom-most reaches we can find to judge, and even if we do, I think most people would be impressed & shocked how little harm is done here.
But more so, there's so many perfectly fine all-caps brands that do have thousands of reviews that seem either quite legit or mostly legit. Nekteck has a 100w gan charger you absolutely can do fine with for $40. PPS and multiport capabilities abundantly available at under $50? Can we not be impressed a bit here?
Making 20V 5A & not messing causing damage is not the worlds wildest problem, even if you are cutting every corner you can.
I was trying to consolidate my chargers into a single charging station and I didn't realize started a saga. Eventually I had to give up. While I was getting down the rabbit hole, I tested dozens of different chargers and the results were quite unexpected. Though I didn't use an oscilloscope, the usb power meters used gave almost the same results, thus I would say the results were good. The best of those were a few ~$7 ones bought from Amazon, good/fair ones were either came with mobile devices or from popular brands such as A*r or B**n(I hid the names here deliberately to avoid being taken as ads). The worst were also among the two aforementioned popular brands. For A brand, its voltage dropped to 4.8V when under load ~1.8A but it caused significant interference that the USB light's switch stopped working after powered on. B brand were even worse, voltage dropped to 4.5V when under ~1.7A load.
So literally I gave up and continue to use what I have right now, at least for now.
I have no idea why a brand new cable would behave like this but after several scary interactions on the road I stopped trusting the standard and bought a better cable.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/poorly-designed-usb-c-cable-kills...
> Leung, who has been testing USB-C cables and posting about them on Amazon(Opens in a new window), posted a one-star review(Opens in a new window) of Surjtech's 3M USB A-to-C cable. Why did it earn such low marks? It "seriously damaged the laptop computer I am using for these reviews, a Chromebook Pixel 2015, and two USB PD Sniffer devices (Twinkie)," he said.
https://www.destructoid.com/after-the-mass-bricked-switch-si...
> To further quell that fear Nintendo has provided a landing page that explains what’s safe — and it basically boils down to USB-A to USB-C with 56K OHM resistors. Bottom line? Don’t get cheap bargain bin cables and you “should” be okay according to Nintendo. Or you can just opt for USB-C to USB-C to be safe.
Everyone is still going to have to re-buy 4x $60-100 power adapters, a $50 headphone jack for usb-c, and most anything else the want to connect to it. If you share a household with (gasp!) android, then you still gotta keep a bin for the apple vs android/everyone else crap and/or label them.
Belkin 65W 2-port PPS is like $50, and that is not going to fry your devices.
> a $50 headphone jack for usb-c
Even the Apple one is $10, and audiophiles have said the DAC in it is quite good.
> If you share a household with (gasp!) android, then you still gotta keep a bin for the apple vs android/everyone else crap and/or label them.
Not as of this fall.
This is untrue assuming you mean people switching from a Lightning iPhone to a USB C iPhone. Existing iPhones already charge over USB C PD (to Lightning) using the same USB C power adapters as a typical modern Android device or laptop, for example.
You should still by from a trusted or well reviewed source/manufacturer. My issue is the cheaper long cables I have all work but charging is not fast, just normal speed.
Unfortunately that does not always help. My Anker cable started to burn next to me, while I was trying to fall asleep. It wasn't even USB-C, but still mini usb. Fortunately I didn't fall asleep fast enough and noticed a strange smell. Very scary, though.
I tend to take a picture of the barcode / proof of purchase with my phone and tag it with the item name before I chuck the box. The one issue I had with an anker cable I submitted a ticket with a picture of the defect, picture of the proof of purchase / barcode and the invoice from Amazon. New cable arrived in a couple days. I was impressed. Their stuff seems to hold up.
Any more details on where you sourced the charger / cable? Power supply? US/EU?
I don't see anything in the EU law that says every single device has to interoperate with every accessory.
USB cables available online from any arbitrary retailer could be so wildly out of spec they burn out gadgets, or include some phone home thing.
Of course technologists will scoff as of course they’re the only people on the planet.
I guess I'm not sure what your point is.
There's a reason that Apple is not that big in lower income countries like here in Spain.
The future, everyone!
God forbid you buy one of those "cheaper" $20 rubber cables and live in a house with pets. No joke, I have went through more than a half dozen of those cables from regular wear-and-tear.
(That said, I do agree that their branded cables are generally overpriced for their level of durability.)
This helps exactly no one - except Apple of course.
These are my “universal charging cables”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092ZT8CJ9
- USB A/USB C on one end
- USB C/Lightning on the other
They transfer data at USB 2 speeds
But my truly universal cables are these
- USB A/USB C on one end
- lightning/USB C/MicroUSB on the other end
- 10 Gbps data
- 100W charging
- video over USB C for my portable display that gets power and video over 1 cable
These are thicker and less convenient than the first ones.
Apple's tristar (or whatever they call it now on new models) should reject anything out of spec, I don't think a cable should be ultimately trusted that it will work due to very real world wear scenarios.
Phone home is probably tin foil hat thinking.
Probably, but also be careful which cable you're using! https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
This one is physically exactly the same as an Apple Lighting cable, but contains a WiFi Server and a bunch of other doodads
The ecosystem of USB C accessories is one of the best parts. Lightning accessories are incredibly expensive and incredibly limited by comparison.
https://www.amazon.com/Multiport-Adapter-Compatible-MacBook-...
For many many years there wasn't a reliable seeming 3rd party lightning to HDMI adapter. I bought mine in about 2019ish? And besides Apple the only one I could find was a sketchy clone of Apple's.
Theoretically it should be possible for a cable to spoof the ID of what it's connected to though, right?
Yes, but the authentication doesn't appear to be simple ID spoofing. This is from the announcement of the standard they're using:
"The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today announced the USB Type-C Authentication specification, defining cryptographic-based authentication for USB Type-C chargers and devices. Using this protocol, host systems can confirm the authenticity of a USB device or USB charger, including such product aspects as the descriptors/capabilities and certification status. All of this happens right at the moment a wired connection is made – before inappropriate power or data can be transferred."
https://usb.org/sites/default/files/article_files/USB_Type-C...
So theoretically it could be possible to break the authentication, but in practice, we can assume it's at least very hard.
This is Apple once again not respecting their customer.
MFi is costly and annoying (Android's AOAP is much easier because there is no paperwork and no key distribution), but it does bring some security (like "I am plugging this authenticated MFi ethernet adapter that was audited and that shouldn't pretend to be a keyboard and do stuff on my behalf")
How can you read that as a feature?
They want to protect users against themselves? What about a software interface for USB Host options (like OTG, how to present media, etc) is great. Does iOS already have one of those? A proprietary layer that stops you from using USB-C features unless they say it's okay is an abuse of their position. This is a money-grab.
They build a smartphone, they don't have to enable ethernet-over-usb if they don't want to (most Android phones don't). Just like they don't have to add cameras to their smartphones if they don't want to.
I guess they can totally say "you can only use MFi-certified ethernet adapter with iOS devices", and this actually brings security ("when you plug an ethernet adapter in your iPhone, you can be sure it won't behave like a keyboard and try to hack you").
Of course I wish everything was more open. But that does not make it an abuse of their position. Most software out there is vendor-locked and proprietary.
Does this mean that there is no possibility of someone would create a cable with some malware in it?
But at least it somehow protects against a fake accessory with some malware in it, because the accessory has to be authenticated (that I'm sure of).
* All USBC Cables will work for charging
* Probably all USBC cables will work for connecting to accessories
* Data will only be allowed to pass to a certified accessory
I think this is more likely to be very careful about what accessories you can use versus trying to stop you from being able to use an average usb cable to charge.