USB 3.1, now with Type C reversible connectors

The USB 3.1 spec continues to be developed, and the latest announcement is a new plug Type C. The interesting bit is that it's reversible like the Apple Lightning connector. Even better, Type C is for both ends of the cable. Computer side ports can be Type C instead of Type A.

This comes along with the other additions to USB 3.1, such as 10gbit link speeds, and up to 100watt (20v at 5 amps) power capacity.

Also a good comment from John Gruber on this.

Standards certainly have their place. But it frequently takes someone not caring about standards to push things forward in a meaningful way. Sometimes it doesn't pay out. Other times, it helps push everyone forward eventually, including the standards folks.

Somehow I feel compelled to comment here...

USB has been a near train wreck of design by committee mis-steps all along the way. While some may be impressed by how much better USB is than what came before, the innumerable connectors, versions, speeds and configurations make your head spin.

Maximum 500mA USB original current draw spec when external portable hard drives of the era needed at least twice that? Sure, just create a non-standard three headed USB cable!

USB B connector too large to fit into a peripheral? OK, we will make a whole series of non-interchangeable derivatives. Mini USB B, Micro USB B, 5-pin Mini, MHL video USB, and so on.

Then there is A, Mini-A, Micro-A, etc, not to mention USB On-The-Go

USB 3.0 grafts a whole other connector alongside the existing peripheral connector, for better backasswards compatibility. Again, in multiple connector sizes.

How shall we name the cable speeds?
Low-Bandwidth
Full-Bandwidth
Hi-Speed
Super-Speed
SuperSpeed+

How to tell which existing USB cable will work with which new-to-you device? Not so easy...

USB chargers? Multiple 'standards' to indicate charger current capacity, plus Apple's method. Charge a Motorola phone using that Nokia USB car charger? Maybe not...

So now we shall have;
I am sure users will have no trouble sorting out what cables go with what devices for what purposes... /s

I am one that is impressed compared to what came before. I'll take the current situation over having to juggle com ports, bit rates, parity bits and jumpers manually. And I'm glad to have a serial link win out over parallel. Some of those crazy parallel cables were getting unwieldily.

I do wish though that USB had stayed as a low speed interface mostly for keyboards and such. For a while it seemed like that was going to be the plan, with Firewire filling the need for a higher speed interconnect. It is a shame it took USB till 2008 to catch up to the benefits of Firewire.

Maybe the Type C plug and connector will catch on everywhere, and we can at least simplify that aspect.

I suppose I'm still overall an optimist with this stuff. It is getting better IMHO. Even if it is a design by committee disaster. I think part of the reason I don't see it as terrible is due to stories from my current boss. He had to deal with design by committee issues at a past job in the auto industry. Sorting out regulatory demands from countries around the world while balancing systems that are in a multi ton hunk of metal hurling down the road is difficult and stressful, which is why he's not at that job anymore.

I fear a plentitude of adapters, variations and confusing limitations.

Up to 100 watts of power! Oh boy...

I can't wait for the first batch of dodgy USB chargers that are equipped to fry any connected USB interfaces when things go wrong

Gah. I'm still seething that the USB connectors up *until* now weren't reversible. They had the perfect chance to make reversible connectors with Type A and I have no idea why they didn't.

It's not just that they're not reversible, but that they're typically so hard to tell which way is which, even in the mini and micro variants. I could probably watch a nice film with all of the time I've spent throughout the years trying a cable one way and realizing I had it upside down.

I see this as Apple doing a good thing for the world. People want simple, thin, reversible. They want high-wattage charging. They want cables that are the same on both ends. And they want them to be standardized and cheap.

Apple only got some of these things right. USB 3.1 seems to be *finally* getting all of them. My guess is the standards people were given huge piles of shit over the fugly design of Micro USB 3, and resolved to do it right. Really right.

The question, of course, will be whether they still managed to screw something up. I'm also curious whether they're trying to replace Apple's Thunderbolt connector. They've got enough bandwidth in the new connector that it could potentially do video.

I have not yet seen any depictions of the Type C or how many variations and adapters it will spawn.

On the surface it looks like they have already stepped into it with all those variations for PD (Power Delivery) aware cables and multiple power levels. And the power can flow either way, host to device or device to host. I am sure the user documentation will be easy to understand... /s

And the daft SuperSpeed+ naming. Seriously, the marketing people are still very much in charge it seems. It must have everything, do everything. It shall indeed be SUPER !

I've got another connector gripe: MagSafe.

Oh, don't get me wrong, MagSafe is a godsend technology that's saved my laptop and connector ports many times, but Apple's notebooks have gotten so thin that they had to release "MagSafe 2" complete with dongles to adapt from MagSafe to MagSafe 2 (but not in the other direction.) OK, whatever -- they should have seen thinner laptops coming and designed the original connector to be thinner, but even if you give them a pass for that, the really annoying thing I realized when I recewived my Late 2013 Macbook Pro is that the connectors have gone back to the straight-in style instead of the nice 90 degree angle connector they had with the more recent "MagSafe 1" cables. So when the laptop is sitting on your lap, instead of the cable coming in from in front of you, it's going across your leg, and the fat connector gets pushed away from the port constantly instead of harmlessly riding along the side of the machine.

WTF, Apple?

My understanding is that the right angle MagSafe, which I also prefer, would not reliably release from the laptop if the cable was tripped over or yanked hard from behind the machine.

Apparently Apple values the self-release capability more important than the tidy 'tucked out of the way' right angle arrangement.

I would prefer to have a choice, as I value tidy and out of the way more highly.

100watts is an insane amount of power. My laptop's power supply is only 100watt, it would have to double in size to support only one USB 3.1 port.

Interesting. It always released fine for me when I tripped over it, and I did it embarrassingly often.



Yeah, well, Apple's never been known for offering a choice if they can herd people into a single design. Wish there was a third party option, at least.

Can you use the MagSafe 2 adapter with an original right angle cable?

Yeah, but the dongle is pretty wide, so it still gets disconnected a lot. At least the battery life is excellent on the newer laptops, so I can unplug a lot more than I used to.

I love geek humor.

Plus, lightning was created for some very specific reasons; it needed to be small, because the antenna folks hated us sticking a honking 30 pin connector in the middle of their antenna cavity. It needed to be very robust - hence the liquidmetal housing with embedded PCB - and it had to have great retention characteristics in a clean, hole-free design (unlike micro/mini usb, which collect even more dirt due to the sharp bits on the connectors) - hence the "flattened 3.5mm jack" side profile which allows for really strong side springs.

Still love being able to plug stuff in "the wrong way round". Was a bitch to implement, however

There is one downside of the lightning plug/socket though. The socket it so open that the bottom of it slowly fills up with lint/fluff, which gets compacted at the end of the socket every time you plug it in.

Over a few months it builds up and stops the plug from seating properly, meaning you start to have to jiggle the plug to get it to charge. Or at least that is what happened on my iPhone 5, it hasn't happened yet on my 5s so maybe they made the socket deeper.

I had to fashion a tool out of a paperclip that I used to clear the fluff out when it started doing it.

Probably not an issue for someone who doesn't keep their phone in a front jeans pocket all the time (it seemed to be lint from the cotton pocket fabric).

Liquidmetal - interesting.

Are the third party MFi Lightning cables and adapters also using Liquidmetal?

I wonder what Amazon does. Their "Amazon Basics" lightning connecter is way better than Apple's.

Interesting about the lint. My 5 is more than a year old and nothing is in the socket. It may be the type of clothes drier that we use here, it sucks all the lint off of clothes. I did notice when I lived in Taiwan and Singapore that my pockets did collect lint.

I like the lightning plug. I just have three problems with it:

1- Proprietary
2- Expensive (but I grant it's for good reasons)
3- It's not as well supported by Apple themselves

That last one is the one I find most frustrating. My wife loved having a dock for all her previous iPhones. Every time she upgraded her phone, she'd immediately buy the adapter for the universal dock. Even when she'd buy a case she would be swayed by manufacturers who supplied universal dock adapters for their cases.

But now there are no docks. Correction: there are no good docks. Apple doesn't make one, and most of the ones I see on the market are either pieces of plastic that route a lightning cable through it, or they're built into some speaker or alarm clock.

I can understand the inherent difficulty in making a dock (different case sizes, making sure the connection is safe), but I would think that if anyone could do it it would be Apple...

I guess docks aren't that popular. I'm not sure why not, as someone who uses their phone as an alarm clock and has no landline, I love them...

Possibly if they're using genuine apple parts. That might be a requirement for MFi labeling.

Anyone who remembers the cheap end of the UK kitchens industry in the 1990s will be amused by the recommendation "to ensure it fits properly, make sure it's labelled MFI".

Peter

Perhaps something like the Elevation2 Dock would be of interest.

Oooo, pretty. At $90, it might have to wait for the next big occasion. I think it's a little late for this year. I'm not saying it isn't worth $90 (though considering it's a block of aluminum, part of me thinks it isn't), but it's a little too pricey for me right now.

For my own phone, I'd love a similarly high-priced dock. That'll have to wait too

WOW! That one is going onto my Christmas list! Thanks for that!

FYI, new artist renderings from Foxconn of USB 3.1 connectors.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/2/5573680/first-images-of-the-reversible-usb-cable

Hopefully nobody will make anything with A or B and every device will have C in it. That would be fantastic.

My only concern is that it would look too much like the current micro USB, and we'll see people jamming these new cables into the bottom of their phones, breaking their connectors.

What are the chances that the new USB C connector and Apple's Lightning connector are inter-jamable?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Exte...C_specification
I wonder what the PD Aware versions of the new Type C cables will look like?

This has the potential to be another multi-version USB C cable mess...

Looks like not at all, based on this rendering:


That's good at least. A Type-C to Lightning cable would have been really frustrating had they both gone with exposed pins on the plug side.

Yeah, I'm sure there will still be PLENTY of people who try it and screw up their electronics, but those folks are going to mess things up no matter what any company does.

I hope the module takes up significantly less space on a motherboard than the old ports did. It would be great if we could fit 3 ports where there was once only room for 1 or 2.

One might hope that every "type C" cable will be "PD-aware", but you never really know. On the other hand, the market seems to survive with several variants on HDMI cables (did you want yours to support Ethernet?) and multiple categories of Ethernet cables.

Those wattage numbers are fantastic, though. That's enough to charge most "ultrabook" laptops, if not the bigger gaming models. Certainly, you can see these cables leading to the rapid demise of cheap wall warts for external USB hard drives and other such devices. If we're lucky, they'll make a big logo/branding thing out of future USB 3.1 hubs to make it clear which PD variants they support.