I can’t imagine my life without USB-C at this point. There’s lots to love about this widespread connector standard. For the most part, I can plug any two things with USB ports or cables into each other, and something useful will happen.
The problem is that, more often than not, the “useful” thing that happens is different from the thing I needed to happen, or it’s a worse (but functional) version of the thing I needed. In its attempt to be everything to everyone, USB-C has become a bit of a mess, and I’m not exactly sure if it can even be fixed at this point.
Not every USB-C port can do the same things
What’s going to happen when I plug this in? It’s a surprise!
The biggest problem with USB-C is that the connector itself gives you very little information when it comes to what a device does or what port can actually do. You can have two laptops, as one example, that both have USB-C ports which look absolutely the same. Yet one might be the latest, fastest, most powerful version of USB4 with Thunderbolt to boot. The other? It could be USB 2.0 for all you know!
Nothing exemplifies this better than the MacBook Neo. A low-cost laptop released to great acclaim by Apple. It sports just two USB-C ports alongside a headphone jack. The one on the left is a full-fat USB 3.1 port with support to run a high-resolution monitor. The one on the right is USB 2.0, good for charging the laptop and running a mouse and keyboard.
The technological gap between these two ports is literally decades apart, but you can’t tell just by looking. With USB-A, at least there was some attempt at establishing a color code. If the port was blue on the inside, you were looking at USB 3.0 or better, and if it was black, it was USB 2.0. In the end lots of manufacturers did what they wanted anyway (purple and orange? Sure, why not?) but there was some effort.
Some laptop makers try to include little icons to give you an idea of whether a port will run a monitor or if it has Thunderbolt support, but this is hit-and-miss and also not standardized.
- Brand
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Apple
- Operating System
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macOS
The MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro chip is Apple’s most affordable laptop yet, with all-day battery life and buttery-smooth performance in a thin and light profile.
USB-C cable labels are still a mess
They’re either not into labels, or way too into labels
So you’ve confirmed your ports have the features you want, but that’s not even close to the end of the ordeal. Next you have to ensure that the cable you have also supports the same level of features. Now, to be fair, the USB-IF has tried to create logos for the packaging that cables come in. These have changed in the meantime as the names of the different standards have been changed (which is a different complaint), but at least at the point where you buy the cable, you can tell what it can do.
After you’ve thrown the packaging away and the cable enters your general spaghetti of USB cables, good luck working out which of your cables will run your SSD at full potential, and which will throttle it back to the year 2000.
Charging speeds remain confusing
Shocking, we know
In defense of USB-C, you’ll almost always get some form of charging if you plug, say, a phone into a random USB-A or USB-C charger. The problem is that the lowest common-denominator charging speed that is negotiated between the charger, cable, and port on the device might be so slow that you’ll only have a full battery in a week, or perhaps never.
We have the official USB-PD standard, but there’s also a lot of proprietary stuff out there. A 100W charger doesn’t guarantee 100W charging. A high-end cable doesn’t guarantee maximum speed. Some devices charge at their full rated speed only with specific chargers, while others aggressively limit charging depending on battery conditions or thermal limits.
Honestly, I think the current power regime for USB-C is just too convoluted for the average consumer. I bet most people just don’t realize that their devices aren’t charging at the best rate, unless it’s so slow as to be unusable. The industry is getting away with it, because most of its users don’t know any better.
USB naming is somehow worse than ever
USB’s branding problem deserves an award for making simple things unnecessarily complicated. This is the naming fiasco I alluded to earlier, but seeing it in all its glory really makes my blood boil.
The standard that launched as USB 3.0 became USB 3.1 Gen 1. Later it became USB 3.2 Gen 1. Meanwhile, newer versions introduced names such as USB 3.2 Gen 2 and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. The speed differences between these standards can be enormous, with each successive generation doubling the bandwidth in some cases. In the world of Wi-Fi or PCI Express, they have the decency to just give each major bump in performance a whole generational number. Instead, we get a series of fractional USB 3 versions, and then USB4. I give up.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
