Comment by manacit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manacit | Hacker News Reader

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If I'm remembering correctly, it's not that far off from the (blue?) color coding with the USB A connector to indicate USB 3 support for particular ports? Either way, when power gets involved as well, that is a terrible user experience.

I had a friend bring over a Dell laptop with a USB C port that I naively assumed had TB3 support (it was listed as being "optional" on Dell's website). Turns out that the only way to actually know was to either watch it not work with a Dock, or to go into the BIOS and witness some missing settings that indicated TB3 support was not present.

For better or for worse, though, that's a manufacturer problem - they could have easily just not allowed _any_ USB C charging and stuck with an AC adapter, or spent the extra coin to make all of the ports work with a TB controller, etc. Companies have been making user-hostile decisions in the name of cost cuttings (1366x768 screens in 2018) forever, it seems like USB C is just another avenue for that.

My understanding of Dell's implementation is that the TB port has a little thunderbolt next to it while the usb-c one doesn't.

Not to be confused with the little thunderbolt next to some USB ports that indicates charging capability.

Clearly, that's a lightning bolt rather than a thunderbolt. Very very frightening.

Not to be confused with Apple's Lightning connector, of course...

> For better or for worse, though, that's a manufacturer problem - they could have easily just not allowed _any_ USB C charging and stuck with an AC adapter

For what it's worth, I personally would be thrilled by such a decision. I'm against having my power supplied through a data cable and data port. In theory it's safe, of course, but in practice people have fried equipment with bad cables. It's a hard standard to get right. It's as if we were all using Rust for systems programming up until 2016, when we all switched to C because it was "more powerful". In theory you can write safe C. In practice ...

I also think display connections should have their own interface. It needlessly complicates the protocol when we already have perfectly good connectors for this, HDMI, micro-HDMI, Displayport...

USB should be a dumb protocol with a passive cable. The only distinguishing feature between different USB C cables should be transfer speed, and different rates should be given a clearly labeled version number and distinguishing color, like USB 3.1, 3.2 etc.

Of course no one's actually going to implement this, probably the companies involved profit off of incompatibilities. Whenever you have to buy a new cable or new device because it's not supported by the old standard, it's proof this approach is winning.

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