That said I have several cheap devices that refuse to be charged/powered by a PD charger like an Apple charger. For instance the Neo Geo Mini, only likes basic 5V 1A chargers for some reason (I guess looking at the MB charger it doesn't support 5V 1A). If the charger doesn't support what the device wants it won't work. My phone happily will charge with what the Switch charger puts out.

You missed my point entirely. The speed of the charging is not the issue here. It shouldn't matter what PD or fast charging protocol Nintendo or OnePlus would use, they should all be backwards compatible to legacy slow-charging and trickle charge from any type-C charger ever made, which is a lifesaver in an emergency and is why the type-C connector is a godsend.

Nintendo fucked up the pin-out on the connector making it completely non-standard and incompatible to any other type-C charger released. The speed of their charging protocol was not the issue.

Nintendo did more non-standard stuff with the dock port dimensions. Not so much pinouts. 3rd party docks fried Switches because of shit power management sending more voltage than the Switch needed.

EDIT: The problem seems to actually be that the Switch charger only supports 5V 1.5A whereas some phones require 2 or 3A and are not compatible.

The cable boxes’ USB-C power supplies do not charge my Sony USB-C camera. They’re on my stack of things I intended to look into one day, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Everything looking the same with zero indication of what does what is the USB-C issue. The answer here might be “your phone doesn’t have that capability”, but the fact that you have to dive into the data sheets of everything involved including all of the cabling just to figure out what the hell the outcome is supposed to be versus the observed outcome is all completely absurd.

That has always been the case - when phones had random 25 pin connectors some of them supported video out, some of them didn't, some of them let you connect and sync with your PC and some of them didn't. You couldn't tell by looking at them.

> phones had random 25 pin connectors

Well, that's not exactly how things worked. Back when phones used feature connectors, you'd be searching for cables for the specific phone type. Video was... almost never a thing, but let's take a data cable instead like you mention, for using the phone as a modem. Or a firmware update cable. So you were searching for, say, a "Nokia 9210 Data / Firmware Cable". If you found one, you were mostly certain that it worked. There were mobile shops that specialized in this stuff. Every large city had at least one store with a firmware unlock service, and they could tell you the exact cable you needed for firmware, or for modem data. The best I can look for right now is an Android-compatible USB C Dock with HDMI output. Hard to tell if it's any good.

I still don't know how int_19h knows definitively that the phone doesn't support video output.

And then, what about Ethernet? I've tried a few different solutions: this specific dock, then a USB C to USB A converter with an ancient 10/100 interface that even works on the Wii U and has been in the Linux kernel for over a decade, and also using that interface plugged into the USB C dock.

And finally, I also tried some simple keyboards - both with that USB C dock, and with C-A converters. None of them worked. Why wouldn't basic USB functionality like keyboards not work? Has the Android kernel dropped support for such exotic devices as keyboards? It does support bluetooth keyboards; and it's not like the kernel is wanting for memory with 4GB of RAM, or whatever is left of it after all the spyware Android devices run whether I want them to or not.

(I suspect it doesn't support being a USB host in general, which would explain why keyboards and mice didn't work for you.)

Most phone can charge off of the base 5V/3A profile, so it works for phone.

But many bigger devices don't. I think most laptop only charge off of 20V mode, so it won't work if the charger can only do 5V or 9V. Some tablet also only do 9V, refusing to charge on 5V.

But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices.

maybe in an ideal world, but this is absolutely not guaranteed at all. Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between. Even apple does this sometimes, in fact.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-...

https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery

now of course the usb-c crowd is probably going "well apple needs to get its shit together!" but that's not an uncommon thing at all. Chargers are still designed for the specific device and don't necessarily support intermediate standards, just like motherboard ports end up being designed for specific use-cases and don't necessarily support the thing you're trying to do with them. Maybe that should have been a requirement, but it isn't, because USB-IF is shit and doesn't care about the consumer.

fully implementing the usb-c standard, to all its extremes and nuances, is expensive as fuck, and this is a cost-driven market so you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to choose to swiss-cheese the standard and their charger will be $2 cheaper so that'll be the one you buy. Or else you're paying more for Anker and Apple stuff (whoops, maybe not apple for chargers, but their cables are still the best!).

and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do. Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example.

Just like Apple. Just like Switch. etc etc. At some point it stops being a problem with specific vendors and starts being just a badly designed standard. USB-C is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they want to be in devices for which $1 for a port or a controller chip is a big expense, but also scale to 40V/100W charging and 80gbps full-duplex data (with a 40gbps video channel and a 40gbps pcie link) and have everything "just work", and that's not really physically possible to implement in devices where every nickel counts.

Maybe there should have been some defined "mobile" and "laptop/desktop" profiles, that overlapped in some defined ways, so this wouldn't have been a problem. Your mobile standard can be cost-optimized, your laptop standard can be full-featured, both of them have some lowest-common-denomiantor requirements. Laptop 2.0 always supports everything Laptop 1.0 did, and Phone 3.0 always supports everything Phone 2.0 and 1.0 did.

But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. They do it on purpose, and people still defend them and love the product regardless, it's as mindless as people constantly (including here, ctrl-f any apple thread and search ‘mindless’ or ‘fanboy’) accuse apple fandoms of being. It's a bad standard and it's really just that simple, they could and should have done better and should not retain a government monopoly going forward, or else this will only continue to get more convoluted and complicated. Like we literally just got USB 4 2.0 and all, the leopard isn't changing its spots at this point.

But like, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome of the “one cable for everything” pipe dream people are pushing. Either cables/devices are expensive (thunderbolt), or each device supports some subset of the standard and end up with a confusing mess. But the “one cable for everything” fandom is insatiable.

Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.

Yeah we don't live in an ideal world. But this has been a low enough encounter for me (actually never so far) to not overshadow the masive advantages type-C standardization has brought into my life. The fact that my phone and gadgets can all charge from the same plug that's now obliquus everywhere in the world is a godsend that people love to overlook every time they want to shit on the type-C standard because Nintendo screwed up.

>But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder.

Do you have a better solution? Were the older days of millions of constantly changing cables and ports from every phone and gadget manufacturer better? I feel not. And what we have today, while far from perfects is miles better that the past.

Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either.

>Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.

Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is. Yeah, extra profiles won't work if you don't have the right cable, which could be confusing for the consumer, but let's not halt technological progress in the right direction by constantly making perfect the enemy of good.

I love, and I think everyone else will agree, that now we have a single cable coming into the laptop instead of a huge octopus spaghetti monster from every port that needs to be plugged and unplugged individually for every peripheral every time you want to leave your desk. I'm sure there will be people who prefer the octopus spaghetti monster, but I don't want to go back to those days, so the disadvantages of the move to type-C are massively overshadowed by the advantages.

Better in some ways? Yes. Not better in other ways? Also yes.

Where someone stands on the spectrum depends on how you feel about uncertainty. That is, previously you were certain about what did work (i.e., the cord + charger that came with your phone) vs what did not.

Now, there's more compatibility yet at the same time we've taken on uncertainty.

I generally feel we're better off. But there are also enough times where I think, "Sure, maybe jetpacks was too much to expect two decades into the 21st Century, but connector + cable being a no-brainer isn't. FFS why do I have to think so much about something that should be so simple?"

Yeah, it's not binary.

Yes, I literally said it in my post: instead of a "profile" being "20V@2A" it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities. You can always add more capabilities, if you have 3.0 data but only 2.0 charging, that's fine, but, you have to advertise that as 2.0.

Desktop/laptop ports are required to carry video and pcie, mobile standards don't have to... or maybe higher versions of the standard should start requiring it.

If that means motherboard makers have to start advertising that their ports only support the "mobile" connectivity levels because they didn't want to put video/pcie on the port... tough, that's information the consumers need to know.

> Even with standard connectors like the 3.5mm jack there were tons of variations, some had a mic input, some had input for buttons, some could even charge through them, etc. and not every cable could do basic audio reliably if it was cheap/poorly manufactured. Things weren't perfect back then either.

3.5mm headset (headphone+mic) connectors were the closest thing I've ever seen to a bulletproof connector apart from VERY niche things like low-impedence headphones that required an amp. Not sure that's a good example either. I guess there's line level, but, go to best buy and pick a random device (any device) with a headphone port and a random pair of headphones and they work 100% of the time, guaranteed, I'll bet you money on this right now at my local best buy.

Ethernet? Displayport? Both of those pretty much negotiate seamlessly down to whatever capability they both support.

You can't make ethernet "optional" stuff, because ethernet does exactly one thing and it either works or it doesn't. My home network just works - go to best buy and pick a random switch and a random ethernet device and it works 100% of the time, and I'll bet you money on that too. Even things like crossover ports are dead now, the only real thing that matters even to nerds is stuff like MTU size that also transparently work unless you actively fuck with the settings.

It's really only USB-C that has turned into a trainwreck and it's specifically because USB-IF doesn't define meaningful profiles and just makes everything an optional feature, and since "it can do everything" that means most things don't do anything more than the bare minimum.

> Extra profiles are not there to fix things, they're there to extend the functionality of the type-C connector, which is what the end-game is.

Well, if you use profiles in that manner, don't be surprised when people are confused by your connector that has 57 different profiles and nothing supports anything.

Again: why can't a profile be "laptop 2.0" and my laptop supports that? Why do I have to know that my laptop needs the 40V/2.5A profile to charge and that I need X charger and Y cable?

That's purely down to USB-IF mismanagement and corruption. They should not have a government monopoly, they're working for the vendors, not for you.

Expense was pretty much a foregone conclusion at the start of the thunderbolt "one cable for everything" experiment, and now people want to do that with usb in general. Sure, that'll be great, but it's going to be expensive, including in places that don't need those capabilities. If you allow deviations from the standard, then you are back to things being incompatible with various devices/cables/chargers. They allowed that with power profiles (in particular) and video capabilities and now it's a mess.

Framing profiles in terms of device use-cases is my attempt at turning that soup back into something comprehensible for average consumers, while keeping the benefit. People approach this as "I want to plug my phone into the charger and have it just work", "I want to plug my dock into my laptop and do everything through one cable", etc, and those are actually use-cases and not feature profiles, they don't really care that the laptop needs 40V 2.5A or 25V 3A, they just want it to work. But of course a $10 vape pen (or phone) doesn't need 40V 2.5A charging. So you have a "phone profile" and a "laptop profile" and iterate those things as groups/featuresets and not as a bunch of profiles thrown into one enormous standard.

You can retain most of the "universal standard" juice without squeezing too hard on the "$60 cable" expense side of things. You could have one cable for laptop docks and one cable for phone charging and have a lot of overlap between, but still not have to use a $60 cable to charge your phone just because that's what a laptop needs, and yet not have a confusing free-for-all of "this charger doesn't do that".

I'm just a rando though so it's not like I have any say.

Sure, maybe the audio will work, maybe it will have static cause they're cheap since the manufacturer cut corners to save $.01. But does the mic on them work with my device? Or the buttons on them, will they work controlling the volume? IIRC, wired 3.5mm headphones had separate versions for iPhone and Android as the buttons on them worked different on each platform. So making 3.5mm an example of successful standardization across all platforms is laughable IMHO.

>it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities.

What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.

Yeah, the type-C flexibility is both a blessing and a curse.

Too bad you get it anyway? I don’t see why this is an issue. I already cannot buy a laptop that has exactly what I need. I’m sure that many people are in the same boat. You already make compromises and spend money on things you don’t want to get things that are a priority. And we spend far more money doing so already than the cost of a USBC controller.

At least this way I know exactly what I’m getting.

I think the confusion, expense, and e-waste from having 57 different profiles is worse than a hypothetical about some new class of device that demands drastically different capability sets from the existing ones. The answer is... USB-IF should define Laptop 2.0 such that that doesn't happen, and if there is some drastically new class of device that merits a new profile, we make VR Headset 1.0 or whatever. If there's some new USB 5.0 standard that everyone is going to want... then we release a new Laptop 3.0 standard with that included.

and if you are making a netbook or something that doesn't need super-powered 100W charging then... market it as Laptop 1.0? what exactly is the problem?

It's a hypothetical edge case that is completely and trivially solvable if it ever comes up, and doesn't merit throwing away the whole USB-C standardization idea.

> Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

because that's the whole point of USB-C, to eliminate redundant cables and move towards standardized devices/chargers, and the entire point is lost if you allow vendors to play silly buggers with current/voltage profiles.

Like, basically what you're saying here is you don't like the idea of USB-C at all and want a more granular set of capabilities. That would be great! Just have one standard that covers audio, and another one or two that cover video? We could hypothetically give them all different cables, so no device has to use any cable that's any more expensive than it must be, and give them all different connectors so there's no consumer confusion about what plugs into what, right? Sounds good to me.

The harm from "device profiles" is... manufacturers would have to market that device as "Laptop 2.0" or "Laptop 2.0 With 40gbps Data" or whatever the extension ends up being. Laptop 2.5, if you will. Having to be more specific in advertising is much much better than allowing massive consumer confusion and e-waste due to incompatible chargers/cables/etc.

Even if there end up being a lot of "Laptop 2.5" devices, there is a huge value-add from having that "Laptop 2.0" standard - we eliminate an entire class of "my charger works with 40V 1A but not 25V 3A" problems, because the laptop needs to support at least laptop 2.0 to be advertised as laptop 2.0, it's a guarantee that it works at least that far. Same for chargers/cables/etc - it's a fixed target for them to work against, whereas right now with 57 different profiles it's a free-for-all.

The problem of course being - USB-IF will never do any of this of their own volition. They work for the OEMs, not for you.

> What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

> It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.

You seem to be trying to have it both ways here: isn't this precisely the concern leveled against having multiple different connectors? The counterargument is that having one cable/charger for everything eliminates a huge amount of waste and redundancy, even if it's significantly more expensive to implement fully. Each cable may be more expensive - but you don't need 5 different cables, because you plug into your dock with one cable and you get video/pcie/data.

Having Desktop/Laptop and Phone profiles is the same USB-C concept taken further: instead of allowing manufacturers to still do inane shit with voltage/current profiles and video/pcie capabilities that render various cables/devices incompatible despite physically plugging, we say "if you want to advertise a 'laptop' standard connector, it must support at least this set of capabilities". And we pick some reasonable sets of capabilities, whatever those end up being. If you want to go further, fine, if you need a new class of profile defined, fine, but most devices will fit into those bins and we will define new bins if necessary.

If you want to reduce cost for devices that don't need the full set of capabilities on every single port, then stop trying to shoehorn USB-C into everything and let me have a physical displayport and a 3.5mm headset. Done. If you're going to force this USB-C shit on me, it needs to be consumer-friendly enough that you don't need a PHD to determine whether your laptop charger will work right with your tablet.

Nobody wants to go back to every phone having a different connector, but, that's not really going to happen at this point.

How does that generate huge amounts of e-waste?

You're drawing a huge amount of strawmen by cherry-picking niche scenarios of "wrong cable to wrong product" incompatibilities and promoting that as being the norm for everyone using usb-C everywhere, as an argument of why usb-C sucks. Sure, there are cases where this may happen and it sucks, but realistically, that's not been the case for me so far since 2016 when I made the switch and you're ignoring the massive amount of compatibility that already exists and also works just fine for everyone else, including in our office where we have a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops and docks plus 3 brands of android phones.

You're also ignoring the huge amount of e-waste prevented by having a single charring conector for all phones for the last few years allowing you to reuse older chargers on new phones across different brands and even different devices, albite at lower speeds sometimes, depending on fast-charging standard used. But still, in an emergency, I'd rather be able to charge my dying phone slower using the bartender's charger than not being able to do that at all because he's phone has one of the other 12 charging connectors we used to have. This standardization has been a huge win for consumers and the environment despite the issues from having 57 profiles which are mostly in the PC/laptop space.

Yeah it's far from perfect today, and it could be better, and hopefully things will improve with time, but standardization will always be a long and hard battle when you have so many parties with different interests and ideas, and still, compared to what we had in the past, I'd rather take this route instead of scraping all this progress by letting perfect be the enemy of good.

I've bought three different docks for my laptop. Only the third actually works at all, and only with the laptop I since replaced.

I'm not going to bother with my new one.

There's already people on this thread using the solution of ditching the cable that came with your device and replacing everything with known high quality cables.

Apple chargers follow the USB PD 2/3 spec which doesn’t include a 12v profile, which appeared in the original PD 1 spec. There’s good technical reasons for swapping the 12v profile for the the 15v profile, as 15v is far more useful for actually charging devices, but the rug pull spec change is certainly a pain in the arse.

Good third party PD chargers will support all historical USB PD profiles, and Programable Power Supply (PPS), which allows a device to request any arbitrary voltage. But many first party charges seem to strictly implement only PD 2/3 with PPS occasionally.

The USB forum have really messed up the labelling of these specs, but manufacturers like Apple are making perfectly compliant PD chargers, and implement everything USB PD 2/3 requires.

> and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do.

Every USB charger does support 5v 1A. That’s what you get from a USB port before you start the USB PD handshake. The resistors on the USB-C CC pin indicate passively what the port will provide without a full PD negotiation.

> Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example.

Of course laptops don’t support 5v 1A charging. It’s a complete waste of time. By the time the laptops power control electronics have finished converting into a useful voltage for internal power rails, you’ll have used up most of the 5W of power provided, and turned it into heat. There’s practically nothing useful a laptop can do with a 5v 1A supply. It’s not a meaningful amount of power, and it’s not a voltage that can be efficiently utilised for anything a laptop needs.

USB-C and its associated standards are still in their infancy. For all its problems today, USB-C provides an excellence technical base, over the next decade we’ll see rapid convergence on a standard set of charging features and data features that will be implemented at scale with dirt cheap dedicated silicon. That final feature set will be far beyond anything we’ve had before, but we’re ultimately waiting for the standards to stabilise enough that the IC needed to implement the really useful features can become cheap and common.

I thought every USB port supported basic USB charging, but aren't there chargers with permanently attached cables that only support higher voltages? I believe the Nintendo Switch charger is like this?

I'm able to charge my ThinkPad T14 (1st Gen AMD) using my 25W PD 3.0 Samsung phone charger (EP-TA800). Does it really deliver 20V if needed?

Here it definitely doesn't. I have at least 4/5 cables / usb-c ports combos in my home which aren't able to perform this apparently basic feature ; the phone's charging icon will activate but it will still loose battery

Just out of curiosity, will the device charge if you

1. Let the device drain mostly if not fully

2. Start charging

3. Turn off the device

4. Continue charging with the device continued in a turned off state

5. ... wait (this might take a day or a week)

6. Check if the battery managed to fully charge

That is, I am wondering if there is some shenanigan in that the device somehow refuses to be slow charged. I have never heard of it but if that is happening, I would like to learn more.

The "fasgear" brand on amazon have worked well for me and they actually have 3-meter cables that do full 100w charging, right angle connectors for laptops/etc, and they have a usb 4-compatible lineup (that I have not tried). A 2m charge cable is $7 a pop and 3m is $11 (they run coupons on both frequently that take it down another 10% or so) but whatever, that's just kinda what it costs to not have to worry about it.

cables that come with things go into a baggie in The Bin Of Solitude where they shall remain untouched until my descendents clean them out after I pass. "But what if I really really need a low-spec charge cable at some hypothetical point in the future!?!? you never know when it'll be 2012 again, buddy."

gonna suck when 140W or whatever comes out and my cables won't do it but... I guess they'll still work at 100W. Hopefully. I guess it's not guaranteed either, thanks USB-IF.