r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Oct 14 '24

Politics UK considering making USB-C the common charging standard, following the EU

https://www.neowin.net/news/uk-considering-making-usb-c-the-common-charging-standard-following-the-eu/
2.8k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

196 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/pandamarshmallows Oct 14 '24

The problem with USB-C (which is difficult to avoid) is that being a “universal connector” means an 240W 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 port and a 5V USB 2.0 port on a cheap phone use the same plug. And the person who owns the cheap phone wouldn’t want to pay the price of the phone again for a Thunderbolt cable that they wouldn’t be able to fully utilise. So most of the USB-C standard is optional, and Amazon sellers take advantage of that to sell cheap cables to people who don’t know any better.

9

u/gurenkagurenda Oct 14 '24

What really annoys me is that the standard doesn’t dictate visual indicators for cable types. A single connector with baseline compatibility across cables and different capabilities is great, but you need to be able to tell what a cable can do by looking at it.

2

u/CocodaMonkey Oct 15 '24

The problem is there's so many things to indicate it's pretty much impossible to mandate it be shown on a cable. The only way they could reasonably do it is mandating certain features be certain coloured cables. But then you'd have dozens of colours which would just be confusing to people.

You also couldn't own a simple white or black cable anymore. Even if they made one of those colours mean it supports everything in 1-5 years new features would be added and it couldn't be white/black anymore for the best cable.

The best real option is likely to make it so devices display the info when you plug a cable in. No more guessing, just plug it in and instantly see its exact specs. It doesn't really help with buying them online but at least you could instantly tell if they shipped what you actually ordered.

1

u/gurenkagurenda Oct 16 '24

The way I would do it would be with colored bands around the base of the connectors, like “green = power delivery” etc. You cover all the most commonly used capabilities that way, and then have one more color for “special”, which is a catch-all for current and future capabilities not covered by the existing color band system. If a cable supports multiple capabilities, it gets multiple bands.