You didn't need a focus group to tell you this (though I'm glad they did one). Just look at every single comment thread on HN about USB branding, at this point it's a meme.
[1]: Sony WF-1000XM3 are AirPods competitors, but you’d never tell your friends about your Sony WF-1000XM3
[2]: Except Apple and a handful others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_physical_layer#Naming...
The newer USB transfer speeds are basically using the same sort of line code as the Ethernet standards anyway. So doing something similar with USB would result in...
1.5BASE-UT (USB 1.1)
12BASE-UT (USB 2.0 FS)
480BASE-UT (USB 2.0 HS)
5000BASE-UT (USB 3.0 / 3.1 Gen 1 / 3.2 Gen 1)
10GBASE-UT (USB 3.1 Gen 2 / 3.2 Gen 2)
10GBASE-UT2 (USB 3.2 Gen 1 x2)
20GBASE-UT2 (USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2)
What does UT stand for?
I'm not that colorblind, I see traffic lights, fruits between leaves and other things others have problems with, basically everything except resistor rings and distant lighthouse colors (yes, the colors on a map make sense, but trying to decode them IRL is as hard as resistor codes.)
If it's not that. Call it something else. LEET, PHAT, BIGPORT.
I really don't understand. Universal Serial Bus... in 10 different formats make's it no longer universal.
Lots of people need reasonable cables to charge their phones.
I do agree though, as you and many other people have in the comments, just getting a numeric Mbps rating would be way better than the 3.1 x2 gen 4 nonsense.
The all-time prize has to go to the German wine producers, though, who regard a wine named "2001 Selbach-Oster Wehlener Sonnenheur Riesling Spaetlese Feinherb" as very precise and helpful.
It is a dry (feinherb) white (Riesling is a white wine berry variety) wine that has been harvested late in the season (Spätlese), making it have a higher alcohol level. Wehlener Sonnenheur is a geographical vineyard location (should probably read Wehlener Sonnenuhr, which is semi-famous and located at the Mosel, near Bernkastel), Selbach-Oster is the name of the winemaker, and 2001 is the year of production.
I fail to see what is complicated about that. But then I am German.
At a bare minimum, you'll get vintage (year), winemaker, and grape varietal, possibly with some additional qualifiers, e.g. Reserve as above, or late-harvest. Riesling in particular is such a widely used grape that can be either dry or sweet, so breaking out "dry Riesling" is not atypical.
[0] https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/reserve-merlot-...
I think your point is relevant to USB, though! The USB folks know what all the words mean. They know what a USB 3.4 Gen 2 cable is, and what a PD cable is, and what a SuperSpeed cable is. Because they are the experts. It's not complicated to them, just as the wine description is, truly, not complicated to you. But your average person who just wants to connect their monitor to their laptop is left adrift.
P.S. that wine (well, the fruchtig version, not the feinherb) is one of my very favorites.
However, there are lots of laws called things like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and I don't know which level of German language proficiency you need to be able to read that fluently, but probably one of the higher ones. Even native speakers sometimes struggle with lengthy concatenations and I feel that German legalese is a whole different level of crazy. So perhaps the crown for the most opaque naming scheme should go to the German Bundestag?
> the Ethernet over USB4 interdomain protocol, also known as USB4NET enables two USB4 PCs to establish a network connection between each other when connected using a USB4 cable, akin to connecting an ethernet cable between network cards on two PCs.
I wrote about this a month ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714807 it gets confusing because the USB4 protocol uses the word "routers" for hosts, devices, hubs which of course is used by Ethernet for something totally else.
It really ought to be as simple as file transfers from a PC to a phone - plug the cable, each side gets a prompt on whether it wants to provide access, and once you confirm, the other end shows it in the drive/device tree in Explorer.
> I do not quite know what happens if you were to plug three hosts together via a USB4 hub. As my post above details, USB4NET properly travels over the hub but which hosts pair, I can't even guess.
Can't wait to see people trying this and reporting!
This new branding initiative may be on the right track, encoding the two axes most obvious to end users of cables: speed and charging strength. (If cable makers move to the new branding. They don't have to. That's the real confusion that USB should fix but can't. Branding is a suggestion, not a requirement.)
Spec lines like USB 3.x and HDMI 2.x are meant to be interoperable sets of ever-increasing options, not an upward climb of mandatory minimum capabilities.
Vendors who didn't use SuperSpeed nomenclature before might have been doing so because it was clunky, but also might have been doing so because they didn't want to go through the effort of being certified against a profile (and in some cases, had nonconforming products)
This is simpler naming, but it remains to be seen whether implementors will suddenly care about certification. Those motherboards with the "USB 3.2 2x2 USB-A" red ports on the back are AFAIK un-certifiable and even non-conformant. No amount of marketing push for simpler names is going to help if vendors feel they get more value from just making stuff up.
So you have to either use marketing names that don’t mean anything by themselves, or numbers that naturally increase.
Since 3.2 it was pretty simple:
- SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps
- SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps
- and so on.
However, to use, those vendors must send devices for testing and compliance. Many just don't do certification because they don't want, and some don't do that because they're making straight up non-compliant: SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps a.k.a. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 can only come in USB-C form.
USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 which has the same speed as USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, but it only comes in USB-C unlike USB 3.2 Gen 2x1. When you see a motherboard with USB-A ports and those specs - those are not certified.
Then Super Speed branding tells you nothing about Power Delivery.
> it’ll now also have to list a charging speed like 60W or 240W.
Ah, no more trying to do determine what dielectric the cable is using: they’ll label the cable with how fast the charge can propagate through the cable. A significant blow for consumer choice!
The whole thing is a goddamn mess, and it's a mess because the alliance is a cartel, not an actually useful technical standards group. They're a bunch of fat swine contributing little to nothing but extorting licensing fees from everyone.
If a charger outputs X W and a device needs Y W, for any X > Y it is guaranteed to output the voltage and current combination the device requires.
Every <=15W charger supplies 5V @ 3A, every 15-27W charger additionally supplies 9V up to 3A, every 27-45W charger additionally supplies 15V up to 3A, every 45W+ charger additionally supplies 20V up to 5A. A higher-power charger is therefore always a superset of a lower-power one. A charger may offer a variable voltage, but this variable voltage may not exceed the highest fixed voltage it offers. With the right cable, it may offer currents above 3A for lower voltages.
Devices are required to be able to charge from any charger providing at least the device's power rating, and it should even provide a similar user experience. It is not allowed to depend on the optional variable voltage or higher current a charger may offer.
Really, the USB PD specifications are fine. There is nothing wrong with them - except perhaps the fact that they are over 650 pages long. If you run into issues with USB-C charging, it is almost always caused by either the device or the charger manufacturer simply not following the damn specs.
I think things have quieted down since. Of course that is due to the limited choice in chipsets (cartel? Or just bc nobody wants to design a complex, low margin part?). But nowadays dodgy mfrs can compete on who can electrocute or set alight the customer to save a couple of pennies, but the protocol conformance will be outsourced.
I wonder how they'll screw up that branding...
USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 “consumer” name is^W was "SuperSpeed USB 20 Gbps" that is what USB-IF been suggesting since the beginning. However, to use that name, they have to submit to testing and compliance. Otherwise, they can use whatever name they want.
As long as there are no two different standards that are capable of the same wattage and speed—everything is good.
There are. USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 and 3.2 Gen 2 are both nominally 10Gbps but use different signaling.
So they invented a universal serial bus. And now we've got 218312893 variants of it with different connectors, speeds, etc.
(Java guys in the corner: "Why can't they just increment an integer like we do?")
- USB Coke Zero
- USB House of Dragon streaming exclusively on HBO
- USB Crypto.com
Consumers, Devices, and cables could continue ignoring it all but at least the consortium could have a new revenue stream.
HDMI Pepsi: Same great taste, no matter where you are.
Still better than the Washington Nationals' Terra/Luna branding. [1] But like, not much.
[1] https://blockworks.co/unparalleled-luxury-nationals-still-pi...
sobs in mountain dew
Oh your computer only has USB Avengers Endgame, but I’m afraid this device needs at least USB Better Call Saul Season 6.
40gb
20gb
10gb
5gb
is in actuality
More like
2x 20gb
2x 10gb
1x 10gb
2x 5gb
1x 5gb
Just specify exactly what the port/cable does. That's all you need to do. Version numbers mean nothing to me.
USB IF is the only party responsible for making version numbers meaningless. They are _extremely_ useful for other hardware products - HDMI, DisplayPort, WiFi, etc.
There are scenarios where they would be useful. But USB IF decided to make them meaningless on purpose.
Everything about their history related to version numbers seems anti-consumer to me. Intentionally obfuscating capabilities and confusing consumers was a terrible idea.