this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I feel like this is almost where Apple is ahead of the game. Despite the EU hating it, they've been using the same lightning cable design for a long old time because it works well enough, it doesn't suffer USB-A's put it in 3 times to figure out which direction is right, and people have a billion of them laying around at this point.
EDIT: Too many people to respond to individually but I do realize from a technical perspective it’s an inferior cable. Just saying the user experience was better for a long time before USB-C arrived and the fact they never changed it makes it easy to find a cable to use if you forgot yours etc. Yes it’s slow but I am not transferring stuff off and my iPhone regularly, no I’ve never had one die from the pins burning out (although I do know people that’s happened to).
As for USB-C, I agree it’s better on paper and was excited when I got a laptop with USB-C but my personal experience trying to buy a PD cable that would actually deliver the rated 100w it was supposed to was abysmal. Went through multiple cables from Amazon that didn’t work for some reason, including Anker, and finally gave up and bought a cable from Apple that did work. But the fact some of them don’t do what they say they will and the fact you can end up with multiple black cables that all do different things but are completely unmarked as to what they do has made me very irritated with USB-C at this point, even while I do enjoy the higher speeds and power they can deliver once you figure out which cable is which.
Well, I have no apple cables laying around, but plenty USB C. USB C has been used for many years as well.
USB C is the way to go. It works with most devices from most manufacturers. The only people left out are Apple users and cheap devices still using USB mini/micro
USB-C has its own issues with standardization though. Good luck telling if a random USB-C cable supports fast charging (or what level of fast charging). Some don’t even support data transfer, others are lightning quick.
Don’t get me wrong, I love USB-C and have a ton of high quality cables around my apartment despite being an iPhone user. But it still suffers from the same issue described in this comic. The one thing it solves is unifying the port, everything else is still chaos.
https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/
Xiaomi and Motorola are still out there making new phones that have usbc and use usb2.0 inside them
That comes to the issue of USB as a protocol. That information should be branded on the connector at each end.
I do miss the days too when the connectors were colour-coded.
I just only buy the best 240W USB4 USB-C cables. They have the correct markings on them – "40Gbps" and "240W". No issues identifying them.
I only buy nice (not just 3A 2.0) cables that have proper labeling on the cable. And then i can just assume that all unlabeled cables are simple 3A 2.0 cables.
If you're buying good cables, they shouldn't be unlabelled.