Expense was pretty much a foregone conclusion at the start of the thunderbolt "one cable for everything" experiment, and now people want to do that with usb in general. Sure, that'll be great, but it's going to be expensive, including in places that don't need those capabilities. If you allow deviations from the standard, then you are back to things being incompatible with various devices/cables/chargers. They allowed that with power profiles (in particular) and video capabilities and now it's a mess.

Framing profiles in terms of device use-cases is my attempt at turning that soup back into something comprehensible for average consumers, while keeping the benefit. People approach this as "I want to plug my phone into the charger and have it just work", "I want to plug my dock into my laptop and do everything through one cable", etc, and those are actually use-cases and not feature profiles, they don't really care that the laptop needs 40V 2.5A or 25V 3A, they just want it to work. But of course a $10 vape pen (or phone) doesn't need 40V 2.5A charging. So you have a "phone profile" and a "laptop profile" and iterate those things as groups/featuresets and not as a bunch of profiles thrown into one enormous standard.

You can retain most of the "universal standard" juice without squeezing too hard on the "$60 cable" expense side of things. You could have one cable for laptop docks and one cable for phone charging and have a lot of overlap between, but still not have to use a $60 cable to charge your phone just because that's what a laptop needs, and yet not have a confusing free-for-all of "this charger doesn't do that".

I'm just a rando though so it's not like I have any say.

Sure, maybe the audio will work, maybe it will have static cause they're cheap since the manufacturer cut corners to save $.01. But does the mic on them work with my device? Or the buttons on them, will they work controlling the volume? IIRC, wired 3.5mm headphones had separate versions for iPhone and Android as the buttons on them worked different on each platform. So making 3.5mm an example of successful standardization across all platforms is laughable IMHO.

>it should be "laptop 2.0" and laptop 2.0 includes a mandatory selection of power/data/video capabilities, with 3.0 being a strict superset of 2.0 capabilities.

What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.

Yeah, the type-C flexibility is both a blessing and a curse.

Too bad you get it anyway? I don’t see why this is an issue. I already cannot buy a laptop that has exactly what I need. I’m sure that many people are in the same boat. You already make compromises and spend money on things you don’t want to get things that are a priority. And we spend far more money doing so already than the cost of a USBC controller.

At least this way I know exactly what I’m getting.

I think the confusion, expense, and e-waste from having 57 different profiles is worse than a hypothetical about some new class of device that demands drastically different capability sets from the existing ones. The answer is... USB-IF should define Laptop 2.0 such that that doesn't happen, and if there is some drastically new class of device that merits a new profile, we make VR Headset 1.0 or whatever. If there's some new USB 5.0 standard that everyone is going to want... then we release a new Laptop 3.0 standard with that included.

and if you are making a netbook or something that doesn't need super-powered 100W charging then... market it as Laptop 1.0? what exactly is the problem?

It's a hypothetical edge case that is completely and trivially solvable if it ever comes up, and doesn't merit throwing away the whole USB-C standardization idea.

> Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

because that's the whole point of USB-C, to eliminate redundant cables and move towards standardized devices/chargers, and the entire point is lost if you allow vendors to play silly buggers with current/voltage profiles.

Like, basically what you're saying here is you don't like the idea of USB-C at all and want a more granular set of capabilities. That would be great! Just have one standard that covers audio, and another one or two that cover video? We could hypothetically give them all different cables, so no device has to use any cable that's any more expensive than it must be, and give them all different connectors so there's no consumer confusion about what plugs into what, right? Sounds good to me.

The harm from "device profiles" is... manufacturers would have to market that device as "Laptop 2.0" or "Laptop 2.0 With 40gbps Data" or whatever the extension ends up being. Laptop 2.5, if you will. Having to be more specific in advertising is much much better than allowing massive consumer confusion and e-waste due to incompatible chargers/cables/etc.

Even if there end up being a lot of "Laptop 2.5" devices, there is a huge value-add from having that "Laptop 2.0" standard - we eliminate an entire class of "my charger works with 40V 1A but not 25V 3A" problems, because the laptop needs to support at least laptop 2.0 to be advertised as laptop 2.0, it's a guarantee that it works at least that far. Same for chargers/cables/etc - it's a fixed target for them to work against, whereas right now with 57 different profiles it's a free-for-all.

The problem of course being - USB-IF will never do any of this of their own volition. They work for the OEMs, not for you.

> What if for me as a consumer, or me as a manufacturer, don't need the full Laptop 3.0 capabilities in my ideal product, and my product just needs Laptop 2.0 capabilities with only a couple of Laptop 3.0 functionality to make me happy? Why make a needlessly more expensive product with features the target customers don't need, by having such coarse and inflexible standardization with little room for movement?

> It might not matter for a $2k Macbook where you could throw the kitchen sink in there, but for a $200 phone or a $500 laptop, it does. both in terms of cost and size.

You seem to be trying to have it both ways here: isn't this precisely the concern leveled against having multiple different connectors? The counterargument is that having one cable/charger for everything eliminates a huge amount of waste and redundancy, even if it's significantly more expensive to implement fully. Each cable may be more expensive - but you don't need 5 different cables, because you plug into your dock with one cable and you get video/pcie/data.

Having Desktop/Laptop and Phone profiles is the same USB-C concept taken further: instead of allowing manufacturers to still do inane shit with voltage/current profiles and video/pcie capabilities that render various cables/devices incompatible despite physically plugging, we say "if you want to advertise a 'laptop' standard connector, it must support at least this set of capabilities". And we pick some reasonable sets of capabilities, whatever those end up being. If you want to go further, fine, if you need a new class of profile defined, fine, but most devices will fit into those bins and we will define new bins if necessary.

If you want to reduce cost for devices that don't need the full set of capabilities on every single port, then stop trying to shoehorn USB-C into everything and let me have a physical displayport and a 3.5mm headset. Done. If you're going to force this USB-C shit on me, it needs to be consumer-friendly enough that you don't need a PHD to determine whether your laptop charger will work right with your tablet.

Nobody wants to go back to every phone having a different connector, but, that's not really going to happen at this point.

How does that generate huge amounts of e-waste?

You're drawing a huge amount of strawmen by cherry-picking niche scenarios of "wrong cable to wrong product" incompatibilities and promoting that as being the norm for everyone using usb-C everywhere, as an argument of why usb-C sucks. Sure, there are cases where this may happen and it sucks, but realistically, that's not been the case for me so far since 2016 when I made the switch and you're ignoring the massive amount of compatibility that already exists and also works just fine for everyone else, including in our office where we have a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops and docks plus 3 brands of android phones.

You're also ignoring the huge amount of e-waste prevented by having a single charring conector for all phones for the last few years allowing you to reuse older chargers on new phones across different brands and even different devices, albite at lower speeds sometimes, depending on fast-charging standard used. But still, in an emergency, I'd rather be able to charge my dying phone slower using the bartender's charger than not being able to do that at all because he's phone has one of the other 12 charging connectors we used to have. This standardization has been a huge win for consumers and the environment despite the issues from having 57 profiles which are mostly in the PC/laptop space.

Yeah it's far from perfect today, and it could be better, and hopefully things will improve with time, but standardization will always be a long and hard battle when you have so many parties with different interests and ideas, and still, compared to what we had in the past, I'd rather take this route instead of scraping all this progress by letting perfect be the enemy of good.

I've bought three different docks for my laptop. Only the third actually works at all, and only with the laptop I since replaced.

I'm not going to bother with my new one.

There's already people on this thread using the solution of ditching the cable that came with your device and replacing everything with known high quality cables.