- You lose me at "toothbrush." I don't want personal care items that have internal batteries at all, because they'll eventually die on me while the device itself (brush heads notwithstanding) is otherwise perfectly functional. I'd much rather keep rechargeable AA(A)s on hand for that kind of stuff. (I still haven't found a good electric razor for this purpose, though, and have actually just gone back to manual for the foreseeable future.)
- I don't think I could live off just one charging port, but would rather just ditch USB-A entirely.
- I'm using wired earbuds, with a standard headphone jack, but with the number of full-sized cans that are using USB-C in some way it baffles me that there aren't more or them (or any, that I've been able to find) that also support using it for audio input, so you you can play them while charging.
It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.
That said, I have never had a Sonicare run out of battery either.
A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...
But what I'm more getting at is the other way around: that wireless headphones will already have USB-C for charging anyway. And that, particularly for larger ones (that have that port directly on the device, and not in a separate charging cradle), it really seems like a waste that more of them don't leverage that -- so that, again, you could use the headphones while you charge them.
Yes! And you could charge them off your phone!
If I could dream: wouldn't it be nice if you had headphones with charging cables attached to them so that you never had to worry about losing them.
And phones could have a convenient extra port for plugging such headphones into.
Ah, one could only dream.
My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc.
There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave").
I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars.
Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon.
Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit.
Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm, as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact.
People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to.
____
¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
I know what you're saying, but to be a little pedantic about it it's actually only USB 3.
(I wish there were mobile devices supporting USB4; it would bring them significantly closer to feature parity with larger devices.)
If you sell a 10 port USB-C charged someone is going to plug 10 MacBooks into it and complain it doesnt work.
The best I have seen for what you want is
https://ca.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-500w-desktop-charger
but is not cheap at all or something like
https://www.amazon.ca/Powered-Aluminum-Adapter-Computer-Prin...
For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…
Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge
Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.
For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.
Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.
Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.
With USB-C cables I tend to throw them out unless they are premium cables that cost upwards of $20, I mean I could keep the cheap ones around to charge this or that but cheap cables have this way of going bad, like they are supposed to work if you plug them in either way except they don't, you plug your cheap device in overnight to charge and it doesn't really charge, etc. No way I could trust my wife to handle it.
Personally I think USB got worse in a lot of ways in the 3.0 generation, like at 1.0 they designed a bus architecture that could enumerate 127 devices on a root hub. USB 3.0 doesn't promise anything and ff you start plugging in hubs to your laptop you will hit undocumented limits and find devices start dropping out randomly when you've plugged in several devices and it gives me the heebie jeebies because a mass storage device could drop out. I know mainstream filesytems today are pretty durable but still...
My only issues so far come from charging protocols rather than cables anyway.
Moreover, stuff like how many watts a cable supports are issues that happen regardless connector type.
This device let me categorize all my loose cables (and throw out the truly terrible ones). It was worth every penny.
That app is probably a good place to start but I wouldn't trust it fully.
Your chance is 100% because the charger for GBC is 2 AA batteries ;)
- Vacuum, $???, Xiaomi, okay (hard to clean filter): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-vacuum-cleaner-p30/ (gift from friends)
- Beard trimmer, $90, Manscaped, great (but I just got it): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H
- Shaver, $20, Xiaomi, great: https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20... (purchased at Xiaomi store in Manila)
- Front door palm reader lock, $299, Eufy, good (slow charge speed mitigated by second built-in battery): https://www.amazon.com/eufy-FamiLock-Smart-Lock-Recognition/...
- Lighter, 10 for $66 after negotiating, Shenzhen Vasipor Technology Co, good but needs USB-A-to-USB-C cable: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-Powered-Recharge...
It should be considered a defective design and recalled, I have been burned several times by this.
I recently looked at the connector and reflected on how insanely small it is. It's no wonder it took decades to get to this point, and it's a very neat physical design at a great price. 16 pins and 10A in that little thing. Amazing.
If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.
I was afraid this article was going to say one connector for everything when it said maximalist. If it had said to kill eSATA, SPF+, RJ-45, DisplayPort, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and a bunch of other ports it would have been far more controversial. I’ve seen people saying we don’t need card formats anymore because everything can just be an external USB-C flash drive. I’m glad this article wasn’t that maximalist.
Yes, you can buy adapters, but you end up w/device warts that don't work w/normal USB-C cords and my understanding that they are for the most part pretty dangerously out of spec
Magnetic coupling is an incredibly underutilized user experience tool
We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")
For sources, I basically have an INUI battery bank and a 100W wall adapter, then everything is a USB-C sink: Lenovo X1, Pixel 10, Nintendo Switch, Sennheiser headphones
what really gets me though is products that support usb-c and then don't support PD, so you end up charging at a glacial pace. The most upsetting incidence of this I've seen is a powerbank charging via usb-c but not supporting PD. So slow!
Devices like this usually come with an A-to-C cable in the box and that's a warning sign, but an even more twisted version of this is when they come with a C-to-C cable and a Type C charger that does not support PD. That's the only combination they tested, and that's your problem now.
I now carry enough adapter cables that I can deliberately take PD out of the equation just to work around these devices.
USB-C being "one standard" is a bit of a stretch. It is the Unintuitive Serial Bus, after all. Most will charge. Some faster than others. Some will supply data with 2.0 speeds, others 3.0, yet others will do more. Some will only work with the other devices they came with. Few cables will tell you which is which, unless you have a tester.
To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.
Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.
Shaver: I purchased this in-person at a Xiaomi store in Manila, very happy with it especially for the price ($20-ish): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20...; Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Skin-Touch-Waterproof... "Xiaomi Electric Shaver S200"
more of a trimmer but this had an alright replaceable blade set up and has USB c. if you need the rotating heads I haven't seen one just yet though
Someone's trying to talk about stuff they never used, experienced or googled ever.
But yeah game boy advance cable is $2.5 one day delivery here in Poland
Wait until they discover off brand usb cable with incorrect e-marker.
> Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.
In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?
[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/review-pebblebee-clip-unive...
[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4079
