The worst thing about USB is that it always takes 3 attempts on average to get the fucker in if you don’t know the orientation of the port.
Which proves that is has 4 dimensions of space!
That would explain why they were able to fit so many gigs into such a small little device and sell it for like, 20$.
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The problem is that not every manufacturer orients their ports correctly
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Oh god please don’t give them ideas…
Circular.
Cries is svideo
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And mic cables
Ugh those circular power cables that from the 90s that only had pins in one half…
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The PS2 (and AT) connectors keyboards and mice were largely using before USB were round…
Arguably still better though because you could just rotate the plug until it went in instead of flipping it back and forth 5 times to get it to go in. And they also had more reliable indication for orientation.
They still are widely used. There are certain things that you can’t do on some motherboards without a PS2 device.
you could just rotate the plug until it went in
That was a good way to twist and bend up all the pins. Don’t you remember how fragile they were?
I meant to add a warning saying I may have bent a few pins that way 😅
Twist gently…
😳
You know all the jokes about getting usb’s orientation right on first try, failing to push it in and trying the other way? Yeah, it was already worse than 50/50.
Honestly that connector always felt like shit. A tiny, easily identifiable mark/notch/whatever on both plug and port would have made it a lot better, even if it was still non-reversible.
What a pathetic excuse. You know what’s at the other end of a USB-A cable? A USB-B connector that didn’t have the symmetry problem. Also, Firewire existed around the same time (in fact, slightly earlier) and didn’t have the symmetry problem.
FireWire was an amazing interface, and nothing has quite come as close. The ability for devices on a FireWire daisy chain to talk to each other without the computer being involved made it excellent for storage
And excellent as an attack vector to crack computers you have physical access to.
If an attacker has physical access to a computer, the game has already been lost.
Yes, in part because of attack vectors like this.
USB has had its share of vulnerabilities too, I’m sure if we have dropped support the last 10 years would have seen a lot of shaves to the design of Firewire.
But it is a shame that so many cool features from the 90’s and 2000’s were just gaping security holes.
TL;DR: its cheaper that way,
And i value that decision
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Hindsight is 20/20. You’re raising every issue with the original USB plug, then proceed to highlight how they addressed these issues going forward.
You’re describing inexperience and calling it incompetence.
I don’t even know that I would call it inexperience. I just think a major part of the first pass was selling the idea of USB. You can design a perfect cable, plug, and protocol, it doesn’t mean anyone will use it. Most investors don’t know much about the technical details of a product. They do, however, understand the price. If you’re trying to make a difference in the world, you don’t always get to do it with style and quality.
AFAIK the real predecessor to USB was Serial cables and those were an absolute shit show. USB set out to create a more usable interface with a lower profile and cheaper cost. In many ways the minor flaws in USB becoming common gripes is USB becoming a victim of its own success. I don’t think they originally set out to become a power charging standard so the frequency at which devices were plugged in increased over time .
At least serial cables weren’t symmetric, although just barely. AT and PS/2 cables (or any DIN) were much more of a pain for me to plug in blind.
No one ever had doubts how type B or mini B or micro B go in.
I agree with most of your post, but micro B is a step too far. That fucking plug was always inserted with the following procedure:
- Try to plug it in.
- Flip the side and try to plug it in again.
- Flip it again because you had the right damn side the first time.
Always, always, always.
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Mini B was rated for something like 10x fewer insertion cycles than micro B, the retaining tabs would give out and the connector would fall off… or worse, twist and break the socket’s inner plastic bit.
For some reason I always had fewer problems (meaning none) with mini B breaking than with micro B or C breaking.
In my experience, Mini B was mostly used for data transfer, along with some other port to do the charging. Micro B got introduced as the “all in one” data+charging port. I’ve seen both kinds of ports break, but only the Mini B ones that were also used for charging; the data-only ones, were fine.
My conclusion is that charging ports use more insertion cycles and are more likely to break, and I keep magnetic charging adapters in all of them (as a side effect, twisting the cable or pulling at an angle just disconnects it, instead of breaking the port).
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No one ever had doubts how type B or mini B or micro B go in.
How lucky you were to never have a device that had one of these upside-down.
Or a printer with the B connector rotated 90° to one side.
Also a male USB 2 plug fits perfectly into a RJ45 slot :-/ In my days of tech support, I’ve seen multiple people plugging their USB printer cable into the network slot of their computer and it’s a perfect fit so they were always convinced they didn’t do anything wrong… That’s clearly a design flaw while all other connectors have distinct sizes.
My girlfriend works in IT at a school so I asked if she’s encountered this too. She said “all the time, they’re right next to each other” she also added that a lot of people put their thin charging cables into the headphone jack breaking their laptops. And that for some of them they “fit better” in that jack than the one it’s meant to go in.
Way back before USB, joysticks had a DIN-25 connector that was identical to the
MIDInetwork connector.I blindly plugged my brand new MS Force Feedback joystick into the
MIDInetwork port behind my miditower (yes I’m that old) and watched the magic smoke rise out of the joystick. That was not a good day to learn about plugs. The network carries 50 volts or something. Stick wasn’t happy.edit: corrections! Here’s a photo of the network card: https://i.imgur.com/fBJixkM.png
Strange. I always thought they were the exact same port. Because most of the time you would need a sound card to plug in a joystick. And nowadays I can’t use my MS Force Feedback because all the USB adaptors don’t implement all of the MIDI stuff the joystick needs to run the force feedback.
Oh you are right, I misremembered: what actually happened was that I was indeed going for the MIDI port of my SoundBlaster card but found a matching socket in my networrk card!
I will update my comment to correct this.
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I’ve done it myself when feeling the back of a pc and trying to get away without looking. I’ve been doing IT support since high school.
You mean USB Type-B, right?
Initially, the plastic inside the connector was white. They started to use black to denote USB2.0 devices, and USB2.0 rapidly became the standard. They at least tried to do something similar with blue plastic with USB3.0.
It’s basically the only example I can think of where the plug and socket are rotationally symmetrical without also being reversible. That’s the kind of thing where I ask “did you test this before you shipped it?” Thirty years later we’re still plagued by the damn thing.
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If you had Macs, USB 1 was around a lot earlier, and really only good for peripherals and HID for a long time. FireWire and external SCSI drives were necessary because USB 1 wasn’t even viable for anything beyond external floppy drives. USB2 was a boon to external drives and bigger thumb drives, but took a while to arrive at the time.
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I built a Pentium 2 in 1998 and needed a separate pci card to add usb 1.1 (which was what most early Usb was) USB2 came out in 2000. By then I was ready to upgrade the motherboard and the next one had USB built in, but I can’t remember if it was usb 2 or not, since that might have been late 99
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New question: why did it have rotational symmetry?
Cheaper. Any other questions?
Oversight
Because fuck you that’s why
New question: Fuck me? 🥺
Considering the much higher cost of production then vs now, it makes complete sense. The economy of scale took care of that problem with time.
About a decade ago or so, I found myself in a reddit argument with someone that claimed they had never attempted to plug a USB in unsuccessfully. They said that every single time they’ve plugged in, it was the correct way. Some people are insane.
Maybe he did it only once and worked out of luck.
I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it’s pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it’s meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it’s usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing
I have a similar “power” and while I’m not flawless, it’s only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don’t actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones
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If it’s on a laptop I could see it. The empty half almost always needs to be on top on the male side because the female end is almost always plastic on top.
That person is either a flat out liar, or they are incredibly anal and waste a lot of time looking at the connector and input every single time they connect a cable.
I don’t really have a problem looking at the connector before plugging it in. I thought this was an overblown meme.
I do not have a problem with looking at the connector when I can see it. But often enough I am fumbling a cable into some connector behind a PC, docking station or at night when the light is out.
If you can see through the two rectangular cutouts on the plug, it’s the right way around. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help if the plug is turned 90°, and also some computers have it upside down (looking at you, GPD).
Well, I rarely fail because I look inside the connector and see where the plastic is and then plug it properly. I tend to fail when I cannot see inside the connector because it’s in a weird spot.
I guess the redditor was either bragging about always looking inside or was a kid
I wouldn’t say it’s never happened to me but 99% of the time it works. I just look at the idents, face it right way up, and shove it in. Unless I’m drunk or it’s dark, I’ve never been able to relate.
Overall not a huge deal to get it wrong occasionally, but to lie that you’ve never attempted to plug a USB in the wrong way up is insane.
- Attempt to plug in the USB A device
- If you succeed. End procedure
- Otherwise, destroy the reality you currently reside in. All remaining universes are the ones where you plugged in the device on the first try.
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
I feel like that’s a way to rapidly run out of spare universes
I wonder how that redditor is doing now? Still batting 1.000 with USB A adapters?
Honestly, with high quality USB A plugs you could feel the logo on the side that was “up”, and if you knew which side your motherboard or front panel considered “up”, it’d be easy to always plug devices in correctly.
Just that the vast majority of manufacturers stopped caring relatively early on, which meant you couldn’t rely on it anymore.
The logo isn’t that reliable but it’s usually slim side up. Not sure about sideways ports though.
Only usually
I say usually but it’s basically the rule. Of all my things only the QNAP NAS has a slim side down port, and maybe that’s some other convention I’m not aware of since it’s for the copy-data port. That’s among a random pile consisting of a Cisco networking equipment, Intel NUC, old macbook, new microsoft and HP laptops, a hdmi/usb switch, ps4, and a raspberry pi
Ooo so much tech, much IT /s
I’m an IT worker so ya I have a bunch of junk and I’ve seen a lot of ports
Which is why that person is/was a massive liar.
Did you burn the witch?
Yeah, that’s an easier test, you don’t need huge scales and a duck
They’re supposed to label the USBs so that you can tell which side is the top side and which side is the bottom side.
The problem is that, A they often don’t label them and, B I can’t remember which way round it’s supposed to go anyway, so it wouldn’t help.
Most things I have are labelled properly, and I’m only hedging my bets by saying most because I can’t think of anything I own that isn’t labelled properly
Perhaps a controversial opinion here, but the usefulness of reversibility is vastly overrated. It’s not a game changer, just a tiny first-world luxury that’s nice to have, but it does it by introducing a bunch of unnecessary complexity that I’d rather avoid. Not worth the trade off IMO. I can count on one hand the number of minutes USB-C has saved me by being reversible and I honestly don’t care
Engineering centric worldview versus user centric worldview.
I’m happier with how long usb c last before they start getting finicky than I am the reversiblity.
In theory, USB-C should be better, but in practice, the quality control is all over the place.
All of my micro USB cables and ports have lasted just fine. I used one daily with my phone for 10+ years with no issues, and I’ve only had maybe two cables ever actually fail. Meanwhile, I’ve already had at least 5 USB-C cables or dongles that have fully failed, and plus the primary USB-C charging port on a laptop just completely die. I wish it was better, but it just isn’t.
Also if USB-C was just replacing just micro USB I’d be ok with that. But the problem is they’re also replacing USB-A, and Type C is not nearly as durable as Type A since it’s so small, it’s just physically impossible. I wish they made a larger version of the Type C port. Same shape, same pins, just bigger in every dimension. As large as Type A, for durability.
I’m not a big fan of Apple, but the lightning connector is just better, physically. It’s way more durable in practice since it’s just a solid piece. I wish USB-C was designed that way instead of what we actually got.
I’ve never had a good experience with micro-USB, mini USB was meh, but for whatever reason the stuff using micro was always bad.
USB C was designed so that the spring contacts that wear out/get damaged are in the relatively cheap cable, and the solid, more durable tang that the contacts slide on is in the expensive device.
Now let’s have a look at Apple’s design for their lightning connector… hmm I wonder why they designed it like that?
That’s not going to get you Thunderbolt, mate
The issue is that USBC was the first standard to really take the mechanical design process seriously in a consumer context. In doing so, it was made both way more ergonomic and way more durable. I’d argue that without the focus on some of these “small but marketable” consumer-oriented bits, we would not have gotten the great overall connector design we did.
I’m not a big fan of Apple, but the lightning connector is just better, physically. It’s way more durable in practice since it’s just a solid piece. I wish USB-C was designed that way instead of what we actually got.
If I recall correctly, Lightning connectors are designed in a way that makes the port more likely to wear out. USB-C is designed in a way that makes the cable more likely to wear out. I would rather replace my $5 charging cable than replace my $150 (or more!) phone.
I am just laughing here because I spent the day dealing with ancient serial tech pigtails and DB9s. You people have no idea the pain of losing multiple days of your life trying to get RS-232 to work. Especially when stuff doesn’t follow the standards it is supposed to follow.
Yes, you’re right: that was controversial.
Well if you only plugged one USB in your life you have a 50% chance of never having plugged it in wrong.
USBs have three sides so it’s 33%
I believe it’s actually 0% bc the 3rd correct side only reveals itself after you fuck it up twice
But in practical use, people found out that even a 50/50 chance of plugging the connector in the right way is annoying enough to warrant the additional complexity of reversability, hence the development of USB Type C.
The USB-C design turned out to be much more durable and versatile (signal and power wise) in addition to reversability compared to the previous USB designs, and it is developed specifically to address the problems people found with USB-A/B/MicroUSB.
Sometimes problems only reveal themselves through real life usage, and iterative improvement through a scientific trial and error process to address these problem is how you get development progress.
USB-C has more connectors for data and power than A/B so it’s not a surprise that it’s more capable.
What’s really changed is demand. No one really expected USB to be used to power everything, it was only ever really expected to be used on computers and maybe digital cameras, smartphones used to arrange matters for themselves. It was only when they two began to adopt USB aas well that calls for smaller ports and higher capacity cables started to arise.
We are way past it being just a power thing though. USB-C is effectively the standard wired general purpose data bus these days. It’s slowly cannibalizing HDMI and DP as well (via thunderbolt), in addition to power cords.
Is so dumb that HDMI or DisplayPort over USB-C is called “alt mode”
The USB Consortium are the only group worse at naming things than Microsoft.
The worst parr is it used to be good naming scheme. After 3. They went back ended the meaning of 3.0 and 3.1 and made it bad
No one really expected USB to be used to power everything
Yeah, it’s not like the U stands for Universal or something.
And yet it still can’t retingulate droopglers. Pathetic.
I’m not really sure what that means. The original A/B specification did not allow for much variable voltage. It’s only universal in name, not in nature. There was absolutely no way to deal with high voltage devices, the cables were not adaptive.
USB 4.0 specification allows for powering things like electrical drills. No way the original USB A/B specification can handle that.
You are right to an extent but the context of its original universality is in the rest of the name. Universal serial bus. The idea was a universal port for dealing with data and connections not neccesarily power.
Yeah, Universal Spower Bus. Sounds right. I was reading the “power” part emphasized in the comment you replied to. Prior to mass adoption by phone mfrs, USB wasn’t powering all that much. You’d usually have 5v wall wart and cable ending in a barrel connector. Hate those things.
I chuckled more than I would like to admit about that spelled out USB name, dunno, it’s funny
The barrel connector was reversible, and I don’t think I ever had one fail.
They did always use way too much space with their AC adapter things and for whatever reason nargles liked to steal them.
The Universal Spower Bus
sounds like an awesome transit vehicle!
Let’s take a ride!
Edit: Spower is a contraction of Space and Power. Yes, you heard me right. It’s running on spinfinite space power!
And there you have it,
The Universal Spower Bus:
As long as it’s a serial bus
Can someone explain to me why I keep reading about people having problems plugging in USB A connectors upside down? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Per the spec, the holes always go up. They indicate the correct way to plug in the port. Not only that, but the printed logo on the connector also always goes up.
The only time this is SLIGHTLY confusing is if you have a desktop tower where the motherboard is essentially mounted sideways, but for that case it just takes an extra second to think which way is “up” from the perspective of the motherboard.
And before anyone says “who reads the spec?”, it feels like I subconsciously knew this for something like a decade before I even knew what a spec was.
Sometimes you’re working on an IoT device in a tight space, which makes rotating/seeing everything much harder.
Especially if you drop the cable it falls into a crevice somewhere.
You probably won’t have trouble plugging it in the first time, but gods forbid you unplug/replug it then the cable rotates 540 degrees and you have no idea how it was plugged in before
Yeah that’s fair. But I feel like I’ve seen these “USB superposition” memes since before IoT was even a thing.
I’ve seen enough devices with the usb ports mounted upside down, for whatever strange reason. Also sometimes you want to plug something in without looking, this is much easier with USB-C
That’s wild, I’ve never seen an upside down port.
I agree reversibility is better and am happy usb c will finally kill this meme.
I wish it was 50/50. A lot of the time it wouldn’t plug in so I flipped it. Still didn’t work so I flipped it back to the original orientation and it magically plugs in.
USB & me: third times the charm!
Can you imagine if it was a triangle with only one correct way to plug it in?
Apologies to the shit alternative universe I just created
For USB-A, it’s usually not even 50/50. It’s the witchcraft superposition when the first two tries don’t work.
Yeah, people don’t take into account quantum positioning, pass-through phenomenon, or the fact that I can’t “see” when I plug it in wrong and that makes me think maybe my fingers are dumb and I missed the hole and not that I need to reverse it and try again.
First try doesn’t go in: oh I guess I have to flip it. Second try doesn’t go in, fiddle it a bunch still doesn’t go in. Fuck I had it the first time. Third try goes in immediately
It always works the third time, 60 percent of the time.
To save a penny on each connector. The USB group is ran by hardware manufacturers. They do not have innovation as a core value.
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Most people weren’t adding and removing peripherals (and potentially multiple things using the same kind of connector) from their computers multiple times a day when many of your examples were in common consumer usage.
Now we plug and unplug peripherals all the time, and for a great many people those multiple plug/unplug cycles are all using USB, and have been long enough to have plenty of frustration about this.
I don’t think Type-A or its creator should burn in the depths of hell, but it’s a legitimate complaint for a usage case that most people didn’t experience prior to loosely about the time that USB started to rise in popularity, or so my recollection of the chain of events tells me.
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I think the big thing with Firewire and DisplayPort, though, is that the port isn’t a rectangle. It’s flush on one size and angled on the other so that you know which way it plugs in no matter what. It being non-reversible wasn’t an issue because of that. USB, on the other hand, has the same shape whether it’s right-side-up or upside-down.
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Yeah, I don’t think the complaints stem from the connector not being reversible but what you described in the last paragraph.
Yep. It’s not that it isn’t reversible, it’s that it’s non-reversible contacts inside a symmetrical connector.
Which boils down to: people want to be able to plug something in without thorough inspection.
An easy, cheap solution they could have popularized from the start would be to print something like an arrow on both the port and plug to line up visually.
Apparently manufacturers are only supposed to put the logo on the top. But since a lot of companies didn’t print the logo, or only embossed the logo so you could barely see it, or put the ports on the parent device sideways, this was never much help.
Combine that with the fact that they never actually told anyone this, and it was basically useless.
I must be dumb cause I still need 3 tries to plug in a HDMI/DP port.
USB B takes 6 tries: first three times in a RJ45 port, then 3 more after realizing I’ve been messing with the wrong port all this time.
IBM token link connectors were hermaphroditic
I used to work in a call centre and a lot of headsets use that connected design.
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So, thanks for the PTSD I don’t think I’ve seen those ports in over a decade. Pluging in your headset into those ports was like submitting to torture.
But yeah that’s them.
It’s really interesting that they never became standardised outside of the call centre industry because really they would have been great in consumer electronics and I’m not sure why they never became popular.
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I learned a long time ago that it takes three licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, because commercial breaks during Saturday morning cartoons told me so. Sometime later, I also learned that “three” is usually the magic number for correctly plugging in a USB Type-A device.
……what the fuck?
Edit: Guys, I get the reference to Tootsie Pop ads and that USB-A connectors are often stubborn to connect. The “wtf-ness” comes from the writer making such an oddball reference just to arrive at the number three
If you’re still confused, it’s an apparently universal experience to try to plug in a USB, feel resistance, flip it, feel much more resistance, and then realize you were correct the first time. Hence, three is the magic number.
Still not sure what that has to do with tootsie roll pops, other than the number 3? Explaining why someone said something doesn’t automatically make it not weird
No, I know, we all know the ad, we are just trying to figure out what that has to do with USB’s other than a use of the number “3.” It’s a really weird part of the article that elicits a “wtf” whether you get the reference or not. Getting the reference doesn’t make it not weird.
Oh yeah, no, I agree. I just wasn’t entirely sure, if they thought it was even weirder than it still is, because they did not know the joke about the USB sticks. Just trying to help via dumb memes. 🙃
I can respect that
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Yeah no I get the reference
I actually have some USB-A to USB-C cables from DeWalt with reversible USB-A connectors. Certainly no reason other companies couldn’t have built them that way.
Yeah, I bought some JBL sound equipment and those USB-A side cables are reversable too. Just a flap with the connectors on both sides.
But why is USB C directional? One phone I have won’t charge if the cord is in one orientation but fast charges in the other orientation.
Technically cables are part double sided (USB3 wires, grounding) and part single sided (power, USB2), while ports should be double sided.
You just got a Zoolander cable, that’s it.
It isn’t. Either your cable is bad, or the port on your phone is bad/broken.
Clean it. fixed
Symmetric is the default but not required by the standard, so directionality is permitted if irregular.
the problem is the plug is rectangular (has exterior rotational symmetry) AND not reversible - if the plugs were L shaped it would be clear by both feel and brief glance which rotation was correct
TL:DR; It was cheaper and they figured if it didn’t work you could flip it over and try again. So it’s mildly inconvenient to save a few cents on manufacturing each connector and to limited the number is conductors to 4, something it turns out was a bad idea anyway because newer USB standards use more than 4 conductors.
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That is one way to deal with the problem, but it comes with its own tradeoffs. In particular that reversible type-a is incredibly fragile due to how thin the plastic supporting the pins needs to be to fit within the housing. They could make the plug bigger of course, but now you’re adding more cost and decreasing the areas the plug can potentially be used in due to its increased size. Conductor routing also becomes more problematic as you need to cross conductors to opposite sides now. Additionally while that cuts down on conductors needed in the actual cable, you still end up needing 8 pins/conductors in the plug, one set of 4 on each side of the plug.
USB-A walked so USB-C could fly.
Usb-c gang
Naw, USB-A is much more secure. I plug that end into my power bank, throw it in a bag or my pocket, and it’ll disconnect maybe 1 time out of the 100 that the USB-C or Lightning end does. It is a little larger, though.
I hate USB-C because until now the standard didn’t require any markings and the standards themselves are hot garbage.
Go ahead, pull out a USB-C cable from your drawer and tell me what it does. I bet you instantly know which cable is VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, FireWire, or serial, but you’ll never know for sure what your USB-C cable supports.
You got reversibility but at what price?
I just wish they didn’t come with chips inside our cables.
You need that for power regulation. One of the reasons that you can use a USB-C lead with anything is because all of the devices that require different power will just tell the cable that and the chip inside the cable deals with it. Otherwise there would have to be different cables for different voltage requirements.
You don’t need it though. The power regulation is a decision between the load and the supply devices, the cable is an unnecessary third party. The cable should just be a multicore connection between two things, not a third device.
If I had to go out on a limb though, I’d say it’s because manufacturers were selling cheap cables that didn’t meet the specification, and people were using them with higher power devices, causing overheating. By including a chip in the spec for the cable, you can push some of the responsibility back towards the cable manufacturer, and they can limit the maximum current to whatever they’ve designed to. In which case, we already do have different cables for different voltages - if your cable isn’t rated for 100W, then it might force a lower power even if your device and charger can do 100W. However it would be better if cable manufacturers would just meet the basic design specification to begin with, rather than creating unnecessary overhead.
The cable has to carry the negotiated power safely. It’s not unnecessary, it’s absolutely critical. I’ve personally seen and diagnosed the result of when this fails.
For your low power applications there is no need and the spec allows for that.
It wouldn’t be critical if the cables were suitably rated for the specification. If you put a 0.5A cable in a 3A circuit, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you use a 3A or better cable, then you don’t need a cable chip to tell the actual devices to only work at 0.5A.
How do you have the cable correctly identify itself if you don’t put some smarts in it? Or are you saying we should only be able to buy expensive cables fully rated for 100W (or higher as the spec has been updated) — and how do you prevent an older cable rated for 100W from being abused in a newer 200W circuit?
Divider resistors are okay, but the IC is a better choice for future proofing and reliability.
It doesn’t make any difference either it’s between the supply and the device or it’s between the cable and the device it’s still two devices.
By pushing the responsibility onto the cable it allows you to operate the cable directly from a USB port. So you can have things like electrical sockets with USB connections and you don’t have to have chips in the sockets, because typically they’re just dumb electrical interfaces. It also means that the device delivering the power doesn’t have to be actually fully switched on, so you can recharge your phone from a USB port on your computer and you don’t have to power the computer on. As long as there is an open electrical channel to the port the cable will deal with it all itself.
Also it’s more efficient because you would have to have a control circuit in every single power delivery device, but this way you can have it in just the one cable, so now it is one chip for an unlimited number of power delivery devices.
So you can have things like electrical sockets with USB connections and you don’t have to have chips in the sockets, because typically they’re just dumb electrical interfaces.
If the supply is dumb and cannot negotiate power, then there is no need to negotiate power and it will fall back on regular 5V USB. The same if the load is dumb. In this case, there is no need for a cable chip.
It also means that the device delivering the power doesn’t have to be actually fully switched on, so you can recharge your phone from a USB port on your computer and you don’t have to power the computer on.
If the USB port has power to it, the computer is supplying it. The voltage would be on but open circuit. The computer would not have to supply the negotiation circuitry until a cable has been connected end to end and the voltage circuit is closed.
You’re trying to present this as the cable replacing one of the devices, but it doesn’t, it’s an extra 3rd device in the negotiation. All 3 devices must permit a certain charging level for that level to be used. It may have some benefit in ensuring that cable load capacity isn’t exceeded, but like I say it would be far better if the cables were reliably manufactured properly to handle the specified loads.
You can do cable detection with just a few resistors. Why make everyone use active cables just for basic functionality? Aside from exceptional rare circumstances, consumer grade cables should be passive devices IMO.
They don’t use cable ICs for basic power use. The IC in the cable (different ICs for different capabilities) is used for high power negotiation (ie the cheap thin cable won’t be able to do 100W, and the lack of chip ensures this safety requirement) and also for active equalization do you can get 40Gbps.
It’s a good thing, and cheap cables don’t need it at all. The system falls back safely.
Pull up resistors have solved the same problem much more simply for decades. Even with ICs, manufacturers can still make weak cables that lie about their capacity then burst into flames. The IC is not what making the cable safe, it’s the manufacturer. And if all else fails, the host can still directly measure cable resistance with some help from the client.
I mentioned this in another post, but yes, resistor dividers are useful and have been used for ages. However things like component aging/damage and simply having enough headroom between different options limits the number of discrete states you can convey with a resistor divider.
I’m usually not a fan of overcomplicated solutions, but these identity chips aren’t that.
Bill gates already put chips in my vaccines
Was it doritos? I hope it was doritos.
Spicy nacho cheese baby
A chip can literally just contain basic logic gates. Your aversion to them is based on pure Qanon fiction
My aversion to them is an aversion to unnecessary overhead. A cable is a cable, it shouldn’t be a third device.
No, the chip is a microcontroller with firmware. You can try to do it in pure logic but it’s a waste of effort and development resources.
“But what if they start putting fries in my ports? I can’t have fries without any ketchup!”
