Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckler | Hacker News Reader

I really like interoperability and ubiquity of USB-C, but I think the part that I find frustrating is that the actual cables themselves are not standardized around data transfer rates.

I recently bought a small USB-C hub that allowed you to connect to it with your own cable, and it has an HDMI port. I also decided to buy a longer, but cheaper USB-C cable to connect it to my machine, thinking it would work. Well the HDMI port wouldn't work at all. Everything else was fine. I actually ordered a replacement because I thought the hub was defective.

Come to find out, it will only work with USB-C cables with e-marker that allows a higher data rate. This info wasn't clearly stated anywhere, it was only listed deep in a support post. So that was a fun discovery...

View on HN

It's a consequence of consolidating on a single connector format.

It doesn't make economic sense for every cable with the same connector to support the same power or data rates. Sometimes you just need a phone charging cable, sometimes you want to charge and drive a laptop at over 100w, and sometimes you need to carry 4k60hz hdr video over 10ft which is pretty dang hard.

So now we're in a world where the cables have different functionality, but you can't tell them apart. So you have to keep the cable with the device it came with and you lose the benefit of having the single connnector format entirely!

Key thing is in all three cases, the same cables work.

The end nodes vary in capability, but it's nice I don't have to fish out my crescent-ended connector to differentiate from my flat-ended connector because I needed a higher transfer rate.

One stack of USB-C cables lets me connect all my devices together. Whether they make sense connected together is up to me.

Except the same cables do not work. Cables frequently lack PD capabilities. Cables often lack video pass-through capabilities, especially for alt-modes. The data rate is completely unpredictable. It may or may not support hub passthrough. All of this is dependent on the cable, so if you solely buy TB3 USB3.2 PD cables you're fine, but if you try to actually use a cable included with one device with another device, it might not work due to lack of any of the above, with no obvious indication as to why.

If you have one of the expensive "supports everything" cables (100w charging, Thunderbolt 3 @ 40mbps) then yeah, the same cable will work. I couldn't even find a 10' one on Amazon with a cursory look. Some of the 6' ones were in excess of $70.

Both 100w charging and high speed data transfer are problems that get harder over long distances, and trying to do them both in the same cable requires many non-trivial feats of engineering, quality materials, and manufacturing.

No one ever said USBC was going to bring these features to cheap $5 cables you buy in the checkout at the corner bodega.

But the EXISTENCE of those $5 cables with extremely limited capability muddle the entire market. I'd call them counterfeits, except for some reason they're spec compliant!

I can't say I agree.

We're in a world where if you have a high speed cable designed for 4k60p HDR, in a pinch you can also use it to charge your phone. In a pinch you can also use it for a data transfer. In a pinch, you can also use your charging cable to transmit 720p video.

The cables should be marked, if they are not marked with their capability then buy them from another vendor that does mark them.

It's no different than ethernet cables, they all look the same, they could be cat5, cat5e, cat6, etc.

Ethernet cables of any repute have the category printed onto the insulation.

Usb cables should do the same, most don't I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com