Comment by netsharc
4 years ago
Ah USB. In the old days it was different cables for different things, nowadays it's 1 connector for everything but beware, the cable might physically plug into the socket, but whether you'll get the functionality you want?
Seems it is going backward to me too.
At one point I remember hooking up a computer being like one of those shape puzzles we give children. If you can match them they'll work. No two of my devices used the same cable or port, but if it fit it'd work.
Keyboard switched to PS/2 so those and PS/2 mice were confusing, but eventually they standardized on colours.
USB came out and you could just plug it in wherever. This was great.
And now? 20 combinations of cable features with the same socket but all do something else. I can only imagine what the return rate will be for stuff like this.
Just how many devices do you meet that regularly hit those edge cases? Outside 4K+ multimonitor connections?
(It's really popular and easy to bash on USB on this forum, but it turns out that in real life your USB-C device will "just work" for pretty much all setups outside really fringe high performance ones. And even those will usually just negotiate lower rate.)