Source: https://xkcd.com/927/.
Not posting with alternative text is like missing half of the xkcd.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Wow, somehow this escaped me all these years. I feel like I’ve got a bunch of fresh XKCD to read now.
For the uneducated: On a mobile browser you just press and hold the comic (long tap). On a computer you hover over the image and the alt text will appear next to the cursor.
The alt text in this one was:
spoiler
Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
Wasn't the standard USB-C? Maybe we should just create the Universal USB, the U-USB.
With their naming standards, it would probably be called "U^2SB, Universal Super Fast Serial Bus"
USB One X
It's USB-C.
I thought I recognized the original Alt text
I'm very glad this comment is finally obsolete.
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One of my favorites
This of course ignores all the other times a new common standard succeeded
Doesn't that almost always require a significant government intervention/regulation.
Phone and laptop chargers converged from numerous standards to just a few all on their own I think, no?
Yes, but under treath of lawmakers mandating a single standard. And the EU has now forced a single standard anyway on smartphones, tablets, etc.
Although I agree that there are quite a few examples of a "naturally emerging" single standards without lawmaker intervention, but this is not really one of them...
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I feel like this is almost where Apple is ahead of the game. Despite the EU hating it, they've been using the same lightning cable design for a long old time because it works well enough, it doesn't suffer USB-A's put it in 3 times to figure out which direction is right, and people have a billion of them laying around at this point.
EDIT: Too many people to respond to individually but I do realize from a technical perspective it’s an inferior cable. Just saying the user experience was better for a long time before USB-C arrived and the fact they never changed it makes it easy to find a cable to use if you forgot yours etc. Yes it’s slow but I am not transferring stuff off and my iPhone regularly, no I’ve never had one die from the pins burning out (although I do know people that’s happened to).
As for USB-C, I agree it’s better on paper and was excited when I got a laptop with USB-C but my personal experience trying to buy a PD cable that would actually deliver the rated 100w it was supposed to was abysmal. Went through multiple cables from Amazon that didn’t work for some reason, including Anker, and finally gave up and bought a cable from Apple that did work. But the fact some of them don’t do what they say they will and the fact you can end up with multiple black cables that all do different things but are completely unmarked as to what they do has made me very irritated with USB-C at this point, even while I do enjoy the higher speeds and power they can deliver once you figure out which cable is which.
Well, I have no apple cables laying around, but plenty USB C. USB C has been used for many years as well.
USB C is the way to go. It works with most devices from most manufacturers. The only people left out are Apple users and cheap devices still using USB mini/micro
Well, y’all are in luck because they’re switching to USB C for iPhone 15
Only because they had to.
No it’s because they promised to support lightning for 15 years, that’s the level of trust partners can put into apple which can’t be done for any other oem, especially shitty lagdroids
especially shitty lagdroids
Thanks for transporting me back to 2013 for a second. I didn't realize anyone was still doing the iPhone vs Android flamewar nonsense lmao
they promised to support lightning for 15 years
Citation needed - couldn’t find a single source corroborating that
And honestly who gives a fuck about iPhone vs Android in 2023? It’s just a phone…
In September 2012, Apple announced the Lightning connector with the promise of being a “modern connector for the next decade.”
They specified 10 years (and I believe they said this because of the huge backlash of switching from the 30 pin connector) but I don't know if they were truly saying it was going to last 10 years. Either way I'm glad they're switching and I'll probably turn in my 12 Pro for USB-C even though this phone is fine as is. Just hate carrying extra cables when I go on vacation and such.
Also don't get the iPhone vs Android "war". When I tell people I've gone from Android to Apple to Android and settled on Apple people think I'm crazy.
Lmao that definitely sounds like a completely binding agreement and definitely not equivalent to one that companies routinely walk back
“Don’t be evil” “Netflix: love is sharing your password” etc.
Exactly, but I do wonder if the huge backlash from before was maybe a thought in the back of their mind. But I would bet it's mostly getting licensing fees from MFi.
USB-C has its own issues with standardization though. Good luck telling if a random USB-C cable supports fast charging (or what level of fast charging). Some don’t even support data transfer, others are lightning quick.
Don’t get me wrong, I love USB-C and have a ton of high quality cables around my apartment despite being an iPhone user. But it still suffers from the same issue described in this comic. The one thing it solves is unifying the port, everything else is still chaos.
That comes to the issue of USB as a protocol. That information should be branded on the connector at each end.
I do miss the days too when the connectors were colour-coded.
Xiaomi and Motorola are still out there making new phones that have usbc and use usb2.0 inside them
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It's also a closed system that no one else is allowed to use. Apple is far from everyone.
Except it's a proprietary piece of junk stuck on USB 3.1 (and I love my thunderbolt connectors too much to let it slide), that can't offer proper power delivery because of power pin literally burning out.
The only thing they did good is fixing the need to check cable orientation before inserting it (yes, you don't have to try three times, you can just actually use your eyes, USB-A connector's orientations can easily be told apart just by two square thingies on each of it's sides).
But as USB-C came out two years later, it wiped the floor with lightning. Anyone saying otherwise is either insane, didn't read the specs or purposefully misleading you. And only now Apple is switching over. Freaking 7 years later. Though, not because they realize how inferior their connector is, but because they were made to.
Speaking as an Apple user - I am heavily invested in their ecosystem - I am extremely happy that Lightning is on death’s door. I fully agree with the EU and I am very grateful to them for forcing Apple’s hand.
That being said, your point about USB-A falls apart when you consider any situation where your vision is even partially obstructed. Such as; back of the computer, back of your monitors, a dock unless you’re holding it, etc etc.
What I’m hoping will happen:
- Apple sells only USB-C to USB-C cables
- Apple users start requesting more USB-C ports on motherboards / desktop computers
- Mouse/Keyboard manufacturers produce USB-C alternatives of their products
- Motherboards move even more to USB-C
- GOTO 3 until USB-A becomes as legacy as VGA or PS/2
- We hopefully never see another single orientation external cable ever again.
A lad can dream…
You don't need to check female port orientation, it's always the same, pins inside the port are looking at the board the connector is soldered to. Of course, unless manufacturer decided to do something funny, but no standard is protected from that.
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I mean, sure, it works... But USBC would also just work. They already use it on their laptops (with them being huge proponents of thunderbolt and USBC), and iPads.
There’s an argument to be made that by maintaining the Lightning connector, Apple can control and profit from the ecosystem of accessories that support their devices. This includes licensing fees from the Made for iPhone (MFi) program, which manufacturers must join to produce Lightning-compatible accessories. While user experience may be a consideration, Apple’s decision also likely has financial incentives.
If its so great then why don't they make it available for everyone to use? They don't care about standards in the slightest.
Even Apple is gradually changing to USB C which also works on all directions, plus sometimes my lightning cables only work in a certain direction
They don't even have same cables on their laptop
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Yeah, in such a situation you should always try to compare the standards, look at the userbases and suddenly there are only very few that actually make sense. If everyone just does this, one standard will eventually crystalise as the one to use (or at least depending on the situation). Character encoding is an interesting example, because nowadays (almost) everything just uses UTF-8, despite there having been many.
UTF-8 is absolutely magical in how it's backwards compatible with ASCII. Windows still uses UTF-16 which makes supporting Unicode filenames and stuff a huge pain compared to linux. At least pretty much the entire web is UTF-8.
This is the reason I was super hyped by the synergy of the fediverse, all the support and use of activity pub. And god I hope Facebook doesn't ruin it. This community has grown so rapidly and organically, I just wanna see it continue to thrive.
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I finally got a proper USB 3.012542 cable.
It's bad when the actual naming scheme is more ridiculous. See USB 3.2 gen 2x1. Hopefully usb 4 simplifies things, but let's be honest, it probably won't...
You should have just linked to the page. It would have embedded the image, right?
Ahh this was the one they talked about on the WAN show
Yeah, thats the positive thing.
I don't want a single application that just works for a few cases but doesn't work for tons of other cases. With such a world we would have a Windows OS where you need to use Face-ID for everything you want to use and sometimes just crashes and restricts the usage of something simple stupid because you don't have the magical Windows Battlepass or smth.
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