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Comment by spaceywilly | Hacker News Reader

What a mess… couldn’t this be done in software instead? As in, if you try to charge your phone with a cable that doesn’t support fast charging, the phone could detect it and pop up an alert. I’m not sure the average consumer would know what to make of these labels, and that’s assuming the cable manufacturers would comply and put accurate labels in the first place.

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That's way too slow and way too late. It doesn't help finding the cable in a drawer, and it certainly doesn't give you any assurance it's a power-only cable before plugging in some unknown power supply.

But yeah, let that happen too. It's also useful.

> assuming the cable manufacturers would comply and put accurate labels in the first place

Putting the wrong label on the cable is plain simple fraud. You can easily get some civil recourse, and if you are feeling revengeful, you can make a criminal complaint against the seller. Compare that with our current situation.

Good luck perusing that course of action with a random Amazon or Alibaba seller.

A well known brand? Sure. But those are not generally the source of the problems because of that.

That’s how it’s already done. I don’t know why no device actually exposes that information, but the e-marker in every USB-C 3.0 (or beyond) cable tells the device exactly that: The highest supported physical data rate and charging speed.

There you go. Seems like software could display this in a much more useful way than these labels ever could. Even the example in the article isn’t complete, it lists the data rate but doesn’t say anything about the amperage support for charging.

Just a simple information window that lists the max charging Wattage and data transfer speed of the current cable/charger/device configuration would suffice.

My Pixel warns me when it is "charging slowly".

But it doesn't warn "charging slowly because the cable you're using doesn't support fast charging" vs "charging slowly because the charger you're using doesn't support fast charging". It tells you there's a problem, but not what the cause is even when it can determine the cause.

That's not true for PD charging cables though right? They are generally USB2 speeds if they have data pins beyond what's required for PD charging at all but they're just direct electrical cables without any chips as far as I know.

https://www.lumafield.com/article/usb-c-cable-charger-head-t...

Devices could (and usability wise I wish they would!) show low data speed only warnings. No OS’s I know of currently do.

The device definitely knows, all the information is accessible in the USB info if you know the special tools to run to dump it.

At least Windows used to do this for USB 3 (before USB-C was a thing) devices plugged into an USB 2 port when the computer also had USB 3 ports available: https://superuser.com/questions/1022542/windows-10-display-a...

It would seem that with e-markers in USB-C cable (and assuming that USB 3/4 still expose device information like that to the host), an extended version of this should be possible: "Your computer and this device support x Gbps, but your cable caps out at y Gbps; use a better cable to make this connection faster".

They can do the opposite direction too, detecting a USB2.0 cable when a higher speed one is needed. It still boggles my mind that no corresponding warning pops up.

Even without an e-marker, there has to be some way to know that the client device can support a higher speed and warn the user - it seems like USB device capabilities supports that?

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iokit/1425036-usb_...]

Per the specifications, the absence of an actual chip serves as a one-bit marker indicating "this cable supports 3A and USB 2 speeds" :)

5A already needs a marker, even at USB 2 speeds!

At least the label on the cable is useful for those of us that understand and doesn't intrude on those that don't

A popup we all have to suffer wether we want to see it or not or if we understand it or not. Oh guess I could disable it right? Yeah another task for me to do on every device I own, no thanks.

This is an excellent design solution, my only comment would be the type layout could be nicer.

The lowest power USB-C cable is still 60 W which is more than enough for any phone (aside from some Android phones with proprietary 100W charging protocols that need their own custom chargers anyway)

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