Re. toothbrush, I have to take the opportunity to give Philips credit for the Sonicare electric toothbrushes they made ~15 years ago. That thing just keeps trucking, it’s incredible. I go on 2 week trips and don’t even bring the charger, and have no worries about it dying.

It must have been crazy overspecced, I expected it to be a 5-year disposable piece of non-serviceable tech.

Why haven't phones just moved to have two USB ports?

A slight convenience when you want to charge it in that you don't have to turn it around, you can have USB headphones and also charge, you could use more accessories...

For the vast majority of things I need to power or charge, dumb USB charging is fine, and I have a 10-port Anker “IQ” charger that works great for most of those things. Why doesn’t the equivalent USB-C charger exist? I don’t need 65W on each port. I just needs lots of ports for gadgets that can trickle charge for hours at night (4 kids, lots of devices). I mostly want to standardize on USB-C host cables, but no one makes a cheap device for doing that more than a decade after USB-C became a thing.

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If switching to a type-A charger fixes it, it’s probably the device manufacturer’s fault, not the cable. Many manufacturers that need the 5v standard you’d normally get from an old type-A charger screw this up.

For universal USB-C power support that works with modern power bricks, you need to tie 5k resistors to two pins of the port on the device. This tells the charger to use 5v. I can’t tell you how much cheap stuff out there omits these. They cost almost nothing but they still screw this up over and over, and people blame the standard or the cable…

I read about this so often, yet it's a problem I just never encountered. If I need super high bandwidth like connecting a display, I pick one of those annoyingly unlflexible fat cables. Easy. They even tend to feature the TB4 flash icon. Surely I would not expect any of the light and nimble ones to do that trick. When I need strong PD, it's also either one of those or one of the far more flexible but still quite thick braided ones. Often they have some hinge gimmick connector to prevent any hope for bandwidth one might be tempted to have. All other cables, I expect nothing but legacy USB. Yeah, and some of those won't do data at all (curiosly those are never the lightest cables in my stable, the lightest ones tend to do the legacy USB "gear not, some bits will eventually get through!" just fine)

  Especially my cheap consumer electronics. Sometimes they will charge, sometimes they won't charge

Buy yourself a handful of good cable for charging. (I quite like the silicone anker 643) And throw everything else away in a box.

For data transfer you can just pick up one or two thunderbolt 5 rated cables, they will do max transfer for USB4, or any other spec in the near future. The LTT true spec cables are fairly priced but there are other big brands that sell the same thing.

Keep a shitty USB-A to C for those devices that do not have the correct pulldown resistor to support 5v 2a charging.

> I don't like USB-C because they all look the same on the outside, but they're not all the same on the inside.

Many people don't realize that USB-C (USB Type-C) just refers to the physical connector. At minimum, speed and power ratings should have been required for any cable using USB-C at one or both ends. It's almost breathtaking to consider how the USB Implementers Forum has fumbled these kinds of basic issues over the years.

Usually they won't charge because they're not actually USB-C devices but are just broken and only pretend to be one (mostly due to missing resistors on CC lines, but there are other ways a device can be non-compliant too).

The thickness / durability of the cable is a pretty good indicator, if it's thin and flexible it'll only do basic charging if it's thick and durable it's because it's packing enough wiring to do power delivery, video etc, everything except probably Thunderbolt.

This is an acceptable failure mode. I'd be nice if there was a standardized LED flash or color that you could get so if your relative said something isn't working, you could ask, "Is it flashing three times?" or whatever.

The alternative is barrel connectors. If you plug in the wrong one, there's a decent chance that it a) won't work, or b) never work again.

Yeah I have some devices that expect the manufacturer charger (I guess it's pre-negotiated to 19V or something) and I'm not even sure what was the point in giving it a USB C connector.

Yeah maybe USB-D will get it right. But probably not. I had such high hopes for USB-C. Now I keep a couple USB-C to USB-A adapters lying around to force the charger (which is just a normal home outlet with a couple built-in USB-C ports) to speak old school USB-A charging instead of trying to negotiate PD with a shitty device that did not implement USB-C correctly.

Yes that's the fault of the manufacturer. But the wildly flexible spec for USB-C let it happen.

I wish there are easy ways to figure out the maximum current and wattage supported by a cable. So many cables don't label themselves except on the box!

Yeah, or you can just get a cheap retro handheld with similar stylings that will charge via -- you guessed it -- USB-C.

Yep, I will say it’s not as bad a old USB-mini connectors but I’ve soured on USB-C after too many of them have broken on me (among other issues this thread covers well)

Some years ago I may have cheered on the pushes to get iPhones to use USB-C, but at this point I think lightning is a superior connector in that sense. I’ve almost never had one break off.

Try the relatively recent Anker Prime cables, the ones that are both braided and soft. I haven't managed to break one yet, despite breaking several past Anker cables that also claimed to be durable.

It took that long because nothing it does now was ever a requirement. It was created as serial/parallel port replacement (fun fact - max speed parallel port is faster than USB 1.1, at ~2.5MB/s).

If we designed it now it would be up to 48V from the get go, USB-PD only (there is zero reason for static modes aside from fallback 5V for simple gadgets) and be just a PCIe transport . USB to HDMI could just be a single chip that does PCIe framebuffer device.

For many things, though, a barrel jack is sufficient and doesn’t require the additional cost and complexity of USB-C. Barrel jacks have their own problems (is it inner positive or negative, what current is required, what’s the diameter of the inner and outer rings), but after that it’s as simple as it gets, both electrically and mechanically.

> actually there are a few out there

Because the usecase of charging many (think 5 or more) devices at the same time for hours is pretty rare.

With a soldering iron and USB-CD PD trigger boards, I've successfully converted a few of this kind of thing.

The step I've taken is just purchasing USB-C to barrel in various voltages and labeling them appropriately.

I think that's changing too, my son got some cheap radio controlled boat a few weeks ago, the remote uses AA and the boat has USB-C as input (interestingly enough, it has a weird USB-C cable with a built in light to signal when charging is done).

I recently bought a very cheap RC car for my kids, and it was USB-C rechargeable but instead of having a port it just has a USB-C cable that comes out of it and plugs into a power brick. I love that.

As much as it still pisses me off reading the Surface product head's comment that if you love USB-C then you love dongles -- while shipping a Mini DisplayPort connector -- I also think it's a waste that they didn't contribute their magnetic docking to the upstream spec.

We could have had a USB Type-M. (Or, alternatively, Type-F -- for "magnets, how do they work?")

I'm curious, what amp is this? Is it for charging something? The end is TRRS, is there a DAC/ADC molded in the plug for audio interface purposes?

There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:

To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.

Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.

https://www.meridiangrooming.com/collections/trimmers

more of a trimmer but this had an alright replaceable blade set up and has USB c. if you need the rotating heads I haven't seen one just yet though

Trimmer: I purchased this from Amazon USA for $70 on sale, now listed at $96. I am happy with it, but haven't had it long enough to comment on durability: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQ1GZY7H "Manscaped Beard Hedger Men's Premium Beard Trimmer, 20 Length Adjustable Blade Wheel, Stainless Steel T-Blade for Precision Facial Hair Trimming, Cordless Waterproof Wet/Dry Clipper"

Shaver: I purchased this in-person at a Xiaomi store in Manila, very happy with it especially for the price ($20-ish): https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-electric-shaver-s20...; Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Xiaomi-Electric-Skin-Touch-Waterproof... "Xiaomi Electric Shaver S200"

To add insult to the injury, the charging port of Nintendo DS Lite was almost mini-USB, but not quite - with enough force and some metal bending it was apparently possible to make it work with regular mini-USB cable. Absolutely idiotic design, especially since that port was just 5V input anyway, anyone with soldering iron could tweak USB-A cable to work with the proprietary charging connector.