Comment by gwillz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwillz | Hacker News Reader

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I've always felt that manufacturers got the USB-C dongle very wrong.

Instead of converting USB-C to DP/USB-A/HDMI, the dongle should be converting DP/USB-A/HDMI to USB-C.

It's about upgrading the older perpherials instead of downgrading the new devices.

For example, the dongle is instead fixed to my DVI port on my monitor. Now my monitor has a USB-C socket, instead of my laptop or phone having a DVI socket.

It reduces bulk and now I truly only have to use USB-C cables everywhere. If someone knows where to find dongles like this I'd be very excited.

For USB-A, that's explicitly not allowed. From the standard:

    USB Type-C receptacle to USB legacy adapters are explicitly not defined or allowed. Such
    adapters would allow many invalid and potentially unsafe cable connections to be
    constructed by users.

For DP and HDMI, I haven't seen the standard so I don't know if they are allowed, but they probably aren't, because they would be confusing for users. Such an adapter would be a USB-C "sink", and when you connect two USB-C "sinks" together, nothing happens (it would be like connecting together two devices which only have the classic USB-B port). So if a user tried to use a pair of these dongles together with a USB-C cable to replace a "native" DP or HDMI cable, it wouldn't work.

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