My point is - the standards might be back and forward compatible. But the cables and ports definitely aren't - and your average consumer has absolutely no way of knowing. They look absolutely identical on the outside and when they don't work it's for completely non-obvious reasons.
Apple don't make a "USB-C data" cable - they make a USB-C charge cable, or a TB3 cable, and the TB3 one has the thunderbolt logo on each end.
They also refer to it specifically as "USB-C Charge Cable", everywhere.
IIRC it was a deliberate decision by USB-IF to not enforce any additional labels on USB cables and connectors beyond the USB logo.
1. the same connector is used for a wide variety of capabilities, and it can get confusing knowing what you can use together.
2. the names of these connectors is confusing.
You're complaining about the first, and that's a very hard problem. There are huge advantages to using the same connector and cables that can support 100W of power, 5K displays and also support peripherals that retail for less than $1 and be backwards compatible with peripherals over 20 years old. The disadvantage is the confusion you mention.
The complaint in the article is about the second, the stupid naming. There's no good excuse for that. It really exacerbates the confusion from the first issue.
But now it's on us and journalists just to not use the stupid naming. They've provide "marketing" names that aren't silly, so everybody should just use them, even if it's awkward. IOW "Superspeed USB 10Gbps", not "USB 3.2 gen 2".
This, quite honestly, sounds wasteful. I am fairly certain that manufacturing these connectors that are much better is more expensive than either the old, less sophisticated, connectors or simply new lower performance connectors.
Well In your example the Connector and Cable, specifically cable will have to be an expensive PD 100W Cable for it to correct, if the cable were designed for the $1 peripherals it wouldn't work with the 100W and 5K Display.
The sentence would have been correct without the word cable, but without it the argument wouldn't stand. Because you just can't find a Cable with the same Connector and expect it to work with 5 / 10 / 20 years peripherals because the cable didn't support it.
I should be able to tell by looking at a connector:
* If it's claiming to be a certified cable/device or not.
* The USB standard it conforms to (version)
* The speed of data transfer it supports
* The maximum wattage it supports
* The maximum voltage it supports
* (the connector type, but this is obvious based on shape)Physical connector technology and signaling protocol are entirely different things. I'd be fine with literally everything using the same physical connector, but knowing that I can't and shouldn't plug my 5VDC battery-charger into a 110VAC outlet.
I still have speakers that are connected by stripping a lampcord pair with my teeth, pushing a little button, jamming bare copper strands into a hole, and releasing a little button. I think you're asking for too much. Everything using one reversible connector that almost always guarantees 5VDC in a fallback mode is better than what we have today.
Can you tell by looking at it what speeds it supports? Is it USB-3 or USB-2? How about the power delivery aspect, how much power is it cable of transferring?
You might be able to tell some of those things from modern cables, if they're bragging about a speed factor, but otherwise it isn't clear.
(I think the question you meant to ask is why the MacBook can't drive an external 4K Thunderbolt display using its included cable, which is more interesting—IIRC, it can do so through an HDMI adapter plugged into the USB-C port, but it cannot do so over a USB-C cable. This still isn't about the cable, though; you can take the MacBook's cable and use it to connect an MBP to a Thunderbolt display just fine. Instead, it's about the MacBook's combined Thunderbolt/USB-C controller not supporting the recent-enough version of Thunderbolt to have the bandwidth over the wire required to feed a 4K@60Hz display. When an HDMI dongle is plugged into the USB-C port, you're taking a direct GPU->controller->HDMI path, which avoids the anemic old-Thunderbolt bottleneck path.)
Less extreme example is how the OnePlus USB-C charger won't charge the Nintendo Switch, even though they are both USB-C certified devices.
Edit: sorry, I just realized that I could have been misunderstood. I forgot that "MacBook" is a device that exists. Obviously(to me) by MacBook I mean the MacBook Pro.
In fact, with USB the situation should be better, since all cables except the slowest ones are supposed to have a built-in chip describing how fast they can go. So in the MacBook example, in theory it should be able to detect the issue, switch to a lower resolution, and present an on-screen warning telling you what happened and why.
(The monitor should have a compatible cable bundled with it though. There's some major cable length limits and shielding when it comes to the highest speed stuff like monitors and eGPUs with USB-C.)