The physical form factor of the “type C” connector is great but that a good example of how broken things are is that anyone can stick that type of connector on pretty much anything - might be usb 1, might just be power delivery, might be usb 3.2, might be real thunderbolt, might be thunderbolt-esque paie framed over usb 3.2 messages, this is before even getting into the wild world of hdmi 1.4 and display port over usb 3. This mess is assuming that the vendor implemented things correctly or is using a compliant controller chip, reality just gets even worse.
A simplistic interpretation:
Because the consortium wanted to get everyone on board, they allow pretty much any part of the spec to not be complied with. In theory there are various profiles the should be adopted but in practice that hasn’t happened.
What happens when I plug in a c-type plug? You just can’t say… and I mean you REALLY just can’t say. Will high power delivery and hdmi work (I’m looking at you broken Nintendo switch usb-c implementation), will you get thunderbolt packets wrapped over usb 3.2? Will you even get high speed? Is the cable active or passive? Will this cable give me high speed data? Will this >3ft cable give me high speed charging or just silently stay at 5v and ~1amp because the resistance on the middle pin is too high on that particular cable.
To placate many vendors who wanted to because to produce cheap crap and flood online stores, many parts of the spec do this all without active protocol handshaking and simply fail silently.
>The physical form factor of the “type C” connector is great
At least for phone charging, I find it worse than lightning. It's way too loose (whereas lightning is snug), and I'm always worried about the plastic bit sticking out on the female side is going to break.
Before I standardized on the cables below, I had USB-C cables in my laptop bag that:
- were power only up to 100W. But couldn’t do data.
- could do power up to 60W and data at USB2 speeds. But they couldn’t do video over USB-C. I have a USB-C powered portable display that can do power and video directly from my laptop.
- a USB-C cable that can do power, video, and data. But I’m still not sure how much data and power it can deliver.
- a few smaller USB-C cables that came with my Beats headphones and my Anker battery. I don’t know what they can do.
I finally threw away all of my cables besides my MagSafe cable and standardized on these for mobile devices (cheaper and not as thick).
A simplistic interpretation:
Because the consortium wanted to get everyone on board, they allow pretty much any part of the spec to not be complied with. In theory there are various profiles the should be adopted but in practice that hasn’t happened.
What happens when I plug in a c-type plug? You just can’t say… and I mean you REALLY just can’t say. Will high power delivery and hdmi work (I’m looking at you broken Nintendo switch usb-c implementation), will you get thunderbolt packets wrapped over usb 3.2? Will you even get high speed? Is the cable active or passive? Will this cable give me high speed data? Will this >3ft cable give me high speed charging or just silently stay at 5v and ~1amp because the resistance on the middle pin is too high on that particular cable.
To placate many vendors who wanted to because to produce cheap crap and flood online stores, many parts of the spec do this all without active protocol handshaking and simply fail silently.