Technology

#It’s 2022, so why is USB-C still so damn complicated?

“It’s 2022, so why is USB-C still so damn complicated?”

If you have two similar-looking USB-C to C cables, chances are that you might not be able to tell anything about their capabilities by just looking at them. The USB-C standard can handle a lot of things: charging, data transfer, and audio and video streaming. But not all USB-C cables are made alike.

When I bought my M1-powered MacBook Air, I was excited about carrying only one charger to juice up all my gadgets. I put the stock USB-C Apple charger in my bag, and expected it to charge my laptop, phones, power bank, and earbuds.

My colleague Napier has beautifully captured how the USB-C standard has changed the gadget life. But the simplicity ends with having a USB-C port.

Choosing the right cable and knowing what kind of port you really have is another ball game.

As such, given the complexity of USB standards, you might have to buy a lot of different cables to do everything you want to with your devices. Plus, you have to know if the USB-C port on your device supports all that. Because there’s no mandate for a USB cable/port to do all the things mentioned above.

USB-IF (USB-Implementers Forum) is an organization that looks at standardizing USB for hardware manufacturers worldwide. We talked to them about how they maintain labels, and why companies don’t really care about putting them on their products.

The complexity of USB-C

USB-C is confusing, because for each capability — power, data, and video — there’s a specification you need to know. You can’t just pick up any USB cable and expect it to do all these things.

So how the heck would you identify a cable or a device’s USB capabilities correctly? There are two parts to that story. First, you can look at your cable’s packaging or the cable itself to see if there are any USB-IF approved logos, that’s the way the overseeing body wants things to be.

However, not everyone in the industry follows this convention, and just wants to include different specs for data, power, and display in the device’s spec sheet.

Before we talk about the clash between these two ideologies, I want to talk about the mindfuckery the is the array of data and charging standards within the USB-C standard itself, and why you’d probably need a degree just to identify cables correctly.

Data

Data is probably the most complex standard given how it’s named (or numbered). USB-IF has recommended logos and labels for three versions: USB 2.0, USB 3.2 (which also includes the old USB 3.1 standard), and the new USB 4.0 standard.

But since most companies don’t care about following them, you’ll still see discrepancies, like USB 3.1 listed in new products’ specifications — when ideally it should be USB 3.2. Then there are other complexities.

For instance, the theoretical data communication speed of USB 2.0 is 480Mbits/sec (60 Mbytes/sec). However, with USB 2.0, data can only flow in one direction, so you’ll actually get maximum transfer speeds of 30Mbytes/sec.

When someone mentions USB 3.2 (or 3.1) on the datasheet without additional information, it could mean transfer speeds ranging anywhere from 5Gbits/sec to 20Gbits/sec. Take a look at the table below for more info. Don’t worry if you can’t remember it. No one can.

Yeah, good luck remembering this shit