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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Too bad there isn't a single good USB-C SD card reader.

This one has decent reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-USB-C-Reader-Memory/dp/...

(Linking to amazon as an example, am not affiliated with the seller)

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Portable-Mini-Design-Cha... works well for me, but I must admit I mainly bought it for the hilariously out of spec USB micro connector (look at the fourth photo)

Are things still that seriously screwed up in the USB-C ecosystem? I was hoping they would have figured things about by now.

Up until USB 2.0 and to a degree, 3.0, USB was pretty straight forward in the fact that EVERY USB device plugged in worked.

Now you have USB C with a laundry list of supported features and protocols which may or may not be present on your device and most consumers are completely clueless. Does that USB C port on your device support Displayport? Does it do Thunderbolt? Can it be used for charging? What does it do exactly? Too many technical features in a consumer plug.

> most consumers are completely clueless

In my experience even many techies are clueless, myself included. I recently purchased a Lenovo* Thunderbolt laptop dock for my new Lenovo laptop that has a USB-C port, but quickly found out that this laptop does not support Thunderbolt: the dock plugs-in fine, but doesn't actually work. Apparently there is a separate "USB-C dock" in addition to their Thunderbolt dock, but I wasn't aware this was something I had to take into consideration.

I'm also left wondering what would happen if I took the USB-C charger for the laptop and plugged it into the USB-C port on my phone, or vice versa. How "universal" is USB-C anymore?

* I'm not a fan of Lenovo in general but that's what's available through work.

The charging should work if they've adhered to the USB Power Delivery standard. Laptops should be pretty good about this. Basically there are a couple of pairs of voltage/amperage ratings and the charger/device will negotiate the highest rate that both are capable of. It tops out at 100W (5A at 20V).

Qualcomm has their own "Quick Charge" system which is not generally compatible. A lot of phones (Samsung) are doing this, but a quick search says it might also work with USB-PD chargers.

In other words, it sounds nice but it's actually a bit of a mess. FWIW I use an Anker 5-port + USB-C charger at my desk with a Macbook Pro and it works fine (though it's 29W instead of 61W so it doesn't charge the battery during use).

http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyS8/comments/69xox4/the_galaxy...

That's one of the reasons I bought the specific dock offered by Dell for my XPS 15. The laptop and dock support thunderbolt, but it's carried across USB-C. Getting this all right and knowing it will work as expected was enough for me to pay an extra $30-$40 to make sure I got a well tested docking system.

The article I just read to make sure I had my facts straight before posting[1] said it best I think. USB-C is a connector, which support many protocols (including USB 3.0/3.1 and Thunderbolt 3).

In other words, it's the equivalent to the Ethernet in your network, over which you run a protocol like TCP/IP, or IPX/SPX (not that I think anyone actually runs this much anymore). It's confusing because for USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 the protocol and the connectors were fairly closely linked (although they did downgrade as needed).

1: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-Thund...

> In other words, it's the equivalent to the Ethernet in your network, over which you run a protocol like TCP/IP, or IPX/SPX

Not a good comparison as those are layer 3 protocols. A better comparison would be two layer 2 links such as USB and ethernet sharing the same plug along with devices offering varying levels of support for one, the other, or both.

I considered that, and while it's ultimately more accurate in specifics, I think it's much more confusing in general considering I'm not aware of much much competition in the data link layer (or at least I'm unfamiliar enough with it to make me unsure of any argument I might make). I don't think there's much difference in the important points by going up the OSI stack slightly, it's still a physical connection and a protocol over it (even if there may be additional protocols between those).

And yet, I plug an Ethernet cable into a switch manufactured 20 years ago, and it works great, albeit at slower speeds.

Twenty years from now plug a new USB-C cable into something manufactured twenty years ago and it may work too. You know what might not work too great now over Ethernet even if the connector works? An IPX/SPX device, since there's nothing to connect to on the other end. Your Ethernet network will be functioning perfectly, but you'll find yourself having trouble getting internet access because your router/firewall/etc are all running IP.

> and it may work too

It may work. It doesn't even now.

And IPX/SPX work just fine. I was actually playing a DOS game over multiplayer the other night.

Multiplayer on the same LAN (or with translation software to TCP/IP), right? Meaning you connected two IPX/SPX devices over it and they worked together. That's expected. But you wouldn't expect to plug in an IPX/SPX device and DHCP an address and use the internet (which would be possible with a IPX/SPX aware NAT firewall), just as you shouldn't expect to plug a laptop that supports Thunderbolt into a bock that support USB-3.1 over a USB-C cable and expect it to work The medium works in both devices, but there's a protocol mismatch.

USB-C's situation is so bad that you have to know which of the identical ports have certain features. Your bridging argument is just a red herring.

I can plug two devices together locally over Ethernet and expect them to work. I can't expect that of USB-C. Do you not see the difference?

it's definitely a pain to have a single connector that may or may not support several different transport technologies and/or power delivery. on the other hand, it's way less bad than having to carry around a different cable for each of those and having to cram all those different ports on the laptop.

my guess is that, in a few years, a standard set of the most useful features will stabilize and it will be cheapest to just offer that all the time. in the meantime we just have to deal with the growing pains and read benson leung reviews so we don't burn our houses down.

Same with a USB mouse from 2003.

I had a friend try to connect his Google Pixel to his TV using a USB C -> HDMI adapter and complain to me when it didn't work. I then explained that USB C has AltMode which supports other protocols like PCIe and displayport but only if the manufacturer has included such functionality. He was both confused and annoyed that his Macbook could display it's screen on the TV but his Android couldn't even though the have the SAME PLUG. Dumb Dumb Dumb.

And don't defend your choice to buy/use Lenovo. Screw what anyone thinks. I still have my 2011 Thinkbook classic running Linux to this day.

Isn't the Pixel just using USB 2 over the C connector?

yeah, I dont actually know of any smartphones implementing usb 3.x. would be kinda pointless considering the transfer speeds of the actual flash.

Most smartphones sport 200-500 MB/s flash speeds, so nearly enough to saturate USB 3. Perhaps some already could do so.

eMMC 5.1 could easily saturate USB 2.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8988/samsung-introduces-the-f...

isn't Thunderbolt for Apple devices?

Thunderbolt was developed by intel. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

> developed by intel

and Apple...[1]

Usually whatever Apple touches becomes very proprietary...

1.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

They ruined firewire with the idiotic trademarking of the name Firewire causing other companies to brand their products: IEEE 1394, 1394, i.LINK (Sony) and Lynx (Texas Instruments). That lead to similar problems that USB C is having where you have confused people asking questions such as "Is this 1394 camera compatible with my iMac?" or "Oh, i.LINK is the same thing as Firewire AND 1394? So I was able to use all of those things this whole time?" Things got a little better but combined with the per port royalty vs $0 for USB it was bound to fail. And that's a shame because it was a nice bus with very low latency, overhead and memory mapping. It would be perfect for creating small Linux clusters or distributed systems with just a few 1394 cables between machines. Superior to USB in every single way save for cost.

It's been around for PCs for a while too. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it started as an Apple/Intel extension to DP.

I've yet to see it in an AMD PC yet.

Thunderbolt wasn't really an extension to DisplayPort, it just initially re-used the mini-DP connector and has provisions to carry a DisplayPort data stream alongside the PCI Express data stream. When attaching something like a storage device, none of the DisplayPort-related stuff is active.

I wonder if they'll ever start giving the plugs different shapes to differentiate them :/

I might have to wait for the plug wars to end before I buy a new laptop.

I remember when I thought FireWire was going to be the future...then thunderbolt...display port...usb c...usb n + 1

Apple encumbered tech will never be the tech that wins the future

Only one of the standards listed was developed by Apple (FireWire). Thunderbolt and USB were both developed by Intel, and DisplayPort was developed by VESA. In all three of those cases Apple was just an early adopter.

To be clear, Apple is a member of VESA, so they may have had some input into the design of DisplayPort.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Electronics_Standards_...

Forgot FireWire was an Apple push. Nice to see they didn’t push lightening cables to Macs.

I can name others I adopted on PC including eSATA and Zip Drives.

Expensive or crap. Anker and a couple other companies are slowly chipping away at the problem, but the laptop makers have made the problem worse (see below). One of the newest Anker hubs finally has charge passthrough, a couple usb ports, a video and an ethernet jack for $70. This is the first I've seen in this price/performance ratio. To get a hub with more connectors than that you quickly get to $120, and with twice that many you're talking $200.

Apple should have retained a few more ports for a couple of years. The SD card reader and one or two other ports on for a while, and they put the USB-C jacks so close together that you have to use tethers (dongles with 3 inch cables) to plug anything in. The 'small' USB to USB-c adapters you see will overlap the other usb port, so without a dongle you run out of ports quickly. And you know, some of us still put their laptop on a riser when working and now you have all of this shear stress because the dongles aren't long enough to touch the desktop. Dongles floating everywhere.

It's just markup, you can get the same hubs (same exact hubs, I verified this by comparing the internals) from AliExpress for $20-50.

(Charge pass through, Ethernet, SD, microSD, USB Ports, HDMI 2.0 all in one adapters.)

Example links to a couple of the good ones?

The ones I bought were from "WarmSea" and "Dodocool" but I think buying whatever's cheapest and has the ports you need makes sense. It's just a USB hub after all.

The main issue is that a lot of USB-C stuff, even now several years in, is still flaky junk that doesn't work as advertised or lists the wrong features

If it's not as advertised and you pay with PayPal then you can get a refund fairly easily :)

Do they have the same shielding?

Any replacement of the utterly ubiquitous USB 2.0 & micro-USB 2.0 was always going to take many years. Give it a few more. The Nexus 5X was one of the earliest harbingers, and that was only two years ago.

The MacBook 12" was introduced in April 2015, nearly three years ago, with just one USB-C port and a stereo jack. Nonetheless, USB-C devices have been introduced in a glacial pace (I bought a 12" at the end of 2015 and there was still almost no useful USB-C accessory available).

We'll eventually get there and I agree that things will be messy for a while, with USB2-only USB-C charging cables, MacBook Pros that support Thunderbolt over USB-C, MacBooks that don't support Thunderbolt over USB-C, etc.

(I do like the plug though, it's reversible and compact.)

The standard is let's say not so well thought out. You can still kill your computer by plugging in wrong USB-C.

I get the point you are trying to make, but there’s a lot of things besides just USB that are susceptible to frying your hardware. The root cause is shitty manufacturing, there’s almost nothing practical the laptop can do to prevent a badly built device from doing at least some kind of damage.

sure, but manufacturers seem to be uncommonly bad at implementing the new USB 3.x specs, power delivery in particular.

the majority of USB-C cables on sale violate the power delivery spec in important ways.

I haven’t seen or heard of a USB-PD cable issue outside of cheap Chinese knockoff crap. Have you?

just going off my memory of this spreadsheet [1].

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wJwqv3rTNmORXz-XJsQa...

You can kill almost any computer if you plug in a power cable that switched hot and ground. That's not a fault of USB-C. It's completely unrelated to the subtleties with resistor marking.

Edit: Why the downvotes? Was there any issue with killing computers outside that one batch of backwards cables? Seriously, if a power cable is 100% backwards that's got nothing to do with any standard.

the downvotes are probably because it's not usually a polarity issue. the most common issues are with current/voltage negotiations between the charger and device. when this isn't implemented correctly, either the cable or the charger itself (maybe even the device, idk) can erroneously negotiate a power level that is too great for the circuitry to withstand.

you're right that it's not exactly the fault of the USB-C spec, but at the same time, manufacturers would probably not mess it up so much if it were not so complex.

Chargers already need to be able to handle phones that pull arbitrary amounts of current, or they will fry on non-C cables too. Other than test-and-see, the negotiation is done with data packets, and a bad cable can't cause anything to go wrong. There is nothing that both fries devices and is the fault of USB-C.

The million cables that have the wrong resistor don't make things worse than they already were pre-USB-C.

Noticed that too, but thankfully USB-C is versatile and I can use almost (have some FW800 readers still) literally any reader I’ve owned before by just buying a new cable (or sticking adapter on end of existing cable).

There are some with USB-MicroB sockets, you can just use a C-to-µB cable with those, no ugly A-C adapter needed. (For example: Lindy UHC-300) I have about a gazillion other devices with Micro-B sockets anyway…

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