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by vokep 1845 days ago
Unless I'm mistaken, there is a license to call a port a USB port, though goods are commonly sold without that. In theory the solution is simple: only buy products that have the actual USB logo and ensure certification, and the USB-IF should retain the right to significantly fine any manufacturer advertising being to spec and using the logo who is in fact not.

In practice, people aren't going to stop buying nintendo switches, unfortunately.

Still, its not entirely necessary to support all specs or have that be entirely clear, what does need to be clear is if you can expect safety specs to be followed. If I plug in my nintendo switch to a charger thinking it'll charge at lightspeed but it takes hours, oh well. If I plug it in and it destroys the device then that should be pretty much an unforgivable problem. Personally I'd be happy to abstain from buying such a device due to that, though also personally I did buy one, expecting no issues, and only found out months later when seeing it mentioned somewhere online. Ideally research is done on every product to ensure things like this aren't the case, but again in practice, that doesn't always happen.

I'm not sure what the fix is, other than outright making USB not so universal by requiring a license for any and all vendors using the design, if the license is cheap enough, maybe that could work? I don't know the legalities so much but maybe a free license could be required for any implementation, which would only have the spec of "make sure it doesn't brick charger or device, and make sure it doesn't catch on fire"

2 comments

> only buy products that have the actual USB logo

I just took my Samsung A50 out of the case, no USB logo anywhere on the device. There's the Samsung logo, some recycling logo and a CE logo, and that's it.

One solution could be to require different connectors for different protocols and power delivery.

I'm beginning to suspect The Great Filter is Jony Ive's minimalist design influence: any sufficiently advanced culture will annihilate itself before it discovers interstellar travel when someone connects two devices together that aren't compatible with the equivalent of a One True Connectorâ„¢ USB cable.

I like to imagine there's an alien species zipping around in FTL space ships, and the only difference from us is they picked one endianness and ran with it.