We Are Cursed to Have More Connector Standards and, Also, Articles About Connector Standards

In short.

In long:

Ten years ago, the USB Implementers Forum finalized the specification for USB-C 1.0, and the world rejoiced, for it would free us from the burden of remembering which was the correct orientation of the plug relative to the socket. And lo, it was good.

And then we all actually got around to using USB-C devices and realized this whole thing is a little bit messy. While there was now a universal connector, the capabilities of the cable can range from those which support only power with maybe a trickle of data, all the way up to others which carry data at USB4 speeds. But that is not all. It might also support various Thunderbolt standards — 3, 4, and now 5 — and DisplayPort. That is neat. Again, this is all done using the same connector size and shape, and with cables that look practically interchangeable.

Which brings us to Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic — a requisite destination for intellectualized lukewarm takes — about his cable woes:

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters — and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. […]

Reader — and I mean this with respect — I am only too willing to bore you to tears with another article about USB-C. Bogost is right, though. The original USB standard unified the many different ports one was expected to use for peripherals. It basically succeeded for at least two of them: the keyboard and mouse. Both require minimal data, so they work fine regardless of whether the port supports USB 1.1 or USB 3.1. Such standardization also came with loads more benefits, too, like reducing setup and configuration once necessary for even basic peripherals.

Where things got complicated is when data transfer speeds actually matter. USB 1.1 — the first version most people actually used — topped out at 12 Mbits per second; USB 2.0 could do 480 Mbits per second. Even so, the ports and cables looked identical. If you plugged an external hard drive into your computer using the wrong cable, you would notice because it would crawl.

This begat more specs allowing for higher speeds, requiring new cables and — sometimes — new connectors. And it was kind of a mess. So the USB-IF got together and created USB-C, which at least solves some of these problems. It is a more elegant connector and, so far, it has been flexible enough to support a wide range of uses.

That is kind of the problem with it, though: the connector can do everything, but there is no easy way to see what capabilities are supported by either the port or the cable. Put another way, if you connect a Thunderbolt 5 hard drive using the same cable as you use to charge new Magic Mouse and Keyboard, you will notice, just as you did twenty years ago.

Bogost, after describing his array of gadgets connected by USB-A, USB-C, and micro-HDMI:

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. […]

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. […]

If the ultimate goal is a single cable and connector that can do everything from charge your bike light to connect a RAID array — do we still have RAID arrays? — I think that is foolish.

But I do not think that is the expectation. For one thing, note Bogost’s correctly chosen phrasing of what the E.U.’s standard entails. All devices have unified around a single charging standard, which does not demand any specialized cable. I use a Thunderbolt cable to sync my iPhone and charge my third-party keyboard, because I cannot be tamed.¹ The same is true of my laptop and also my wife’s, the headphones I am wearing right now, a Bluetooth speaker we have kicking around, our Nintendo Switch, and my bicycle tire pump. Having one cable for all this stuff rules.

If you need higher speeds, though, I would bet you know that. If the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 matters to you, you are a different person than most. And, I would wager, you are probably happy that you can connect a fancy Thunderbolt drive to any old USB-C port and still read its contents, even if it is not as fast. That kind of compatibility is great.

Lookalike connectors are nothing new, however. P.C. users probably remember the days of PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which had the same plugs but were not interchangeable. 3.5mm circular ports were used for audio out, audio in, microphone — separate from audio in, for some reason — and individual speakers. This was such a mess that Microsoft and Intel decided PC ports needed colour-coding (PDF). Even proprietary connectors have this problem, as Apple demonstrated with some Lightning accessories.

We are doomed to repeat this so long as the same connectors and cables describe a wide range of capabilities. But solving that should never be the expectation. We should be glad to unify around standards for at least basic functions like charging and usable data transfer. USB-C faced an uphill battle because we probably had — and still have — devices which use other connectors. While my tire pump uses USB-C, my bike light charges using some flavour of mini-USB port. I do not know which. I have one cable that works and I dare not lose it.

Every newer standard is going to face an increasingly steep hill. USB-C now has a supranational government body mandating its use for wired charging in many devices which, for all its benefits, is also a hurdle if and when someone wants to build some device in which it would be difficult to accommodate a USB-C port. That I am struggling to think of a concrete example is perhaps an indicator of the specificity of such a product and, also, that I am not in the position of dreaming up such products.

But even without that regulatory oversight, any new standard will have to supplant a growing array of USB-C devices. We may not get another attempt at this kind of universality for a long time yet. It is a good thing USB-C is quite an elegant connector, and such a seemingly flexible set of standards.