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It's 2018 and USB Type-C Is Still a Mess (androidauthority.com)
An anonymous reader shares a column: USB Type-C was billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power and data delivery with display and audio connectivity, and ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Unfortunately for those already invested in the USB Type-C ecosystem, which is anyone who has bought a flagship phone in the past couple of years, the standard has probably failed to live up to the promises. Even the seemingly most basic function of USB Type-C -- powering devices -- has become a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions. The problem is that the features supported by different devices aren't clear, yet the defining principle of the USB Type-C standard makes consumers think everything should just work.
The charging example clearly demonstrates a very common frustration with the standard as it currently stands. Moving phones between different chargers, even of the same current and voltage ratings, often won't produce the same charging speeds. Furthermore, picking a third party USB Type-C cable to replace the typically too short included cable can result in losing fast charging capabilities.
The charging example clearly demonstrates a very common frustration with the standard as it currently stands. Moving phones between different chargers, even of the same current and voltage ratings, often won't produce the same charging speeds. Furthermore, picking a third party USB Type-C cable to replace the typically too short included cable can result in losing fast charging capabilities.
Just last week I plugged a model 3 Tesla into a supercharger. It soaked up electrons at the rate of 120 kW. 300 Amp at 480 v or something insane. And while Tessie is drinking 11 kW in the garage 48 Amp at 240 v, to store enough energy to run the whole house for three days, the cell phone struggles to store 2300 mAh in one hour, enough to run one dinky little phone for 18 hours.....
What a mess...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
While having a poka-yoke connector is good, what made USB 1 so successful was that it was simpler and cheaper than the competitors. The Apple dock connector had 30 pins, including dedicated pins for audio, video, power, media control, serial, usb, and firewire. RS232 had 9 and had no error correction, no metadata, no power, and was slow. Firewire with a lean 6-pins allowed for bidirectional communications and was essentially a peer-to-peer network. USB had a mere 4 pins, was unidirectional, and didn't require the devices to know how to talk to each other (hence the need for a hub). It was technically inferior, but won because of price. USB2 merely improve the speed and power of USB1, so it was a no brainer to win in the market.
USB 3 abandoned the simplicity that made USB 1 and 2 successful. It took the kitchen sink model, and it is flailing the same way it's predecessors did when they took that approach.