All devices now have chips that do a handshake with the charger, exchanging information about supported standards and charging using the best common option. So I charge my prohe with a 90W laptop charger, even when it is unable to use the whole wattage
The point is that it is unclear which USB C can do what.
It also doesn’t actually matter at all. You just plug it in and it works. How well it works really doesn’t matter in 99% of cases.
And as time goes on the absolute minimum you will come across only goes up and never doesn’t work.
So unless your casing the absolute newest feature set where you absolute need say thunderbolt 4 not 3 or 2. Then it doesn’t matter.
For wattage you can just read the brick. Its required by law to have that information right on it. For the cable if it doesn’t work go but a new cable and retire your old one. Iv had two replace my main USB c to c cable once ever because it wouldn’t handle the wattage i needed it to.
Its just a seriously non fucking problem for 99.99% of people.
The minimum feature and watt spec of every cheap piece of shit is well past the point normal people care.
Wattage is not the issue.
I mean, it’s not 20 of them like the picture suggests - it’s like 2 or 3 depending on what yoou have. And I have laptop chargers everywhere, and a good powerbank, so I’m covered. And I also have a GaN universal hub with several plugs, so I can plug in US or EU and have a lot of watts coming onnthe other side. So I feel like the chargers war is over and now we can just use stuff.
That’s right, it goes in the USB-C hole!
I heard the voice
My favorite fucked-up thing from the past was the Macintosh circa 1990. The disk drive on this thing had no eject button – to eject a disk, you just did the oh-so-fucking-intuitive thing of dragging the disk icon over the trash can icon. But they did very conveniently place the big knobby power button for the whole computer (which looked exactly like an eject button) right above the disk drive. I spent a year constantly powering off the computer every time I wanted to just eject the disk.
Apple has always been an excellent example of how not to design a UI.
I would love to chain up some Apple UX/UI designers and force them to watch my 90 yo mother try to use her fucking iPhone.
Fun fact. The ADB Apple Desktop Bus connector had four pins. Power, ground, one for the power button, and one for all other functionality. That’s daisy chained keyboards, mouses and drawing tablets. All data in one single pin. And one for the power button.
Ahhh yeah, that’s the good shit right there.
It is still cool. Cooler because of its age. It’s the OO. They even named it something funny, tossers.
And a good place to look if you want simultaneous audio. Snyone hard of hearing can have a separate audio stream.
I thought that galvanic isolation was pretty much toslink’s only true advantage nowadays? Don’t see why you can’t have dual audio with traditional wires.
Oh, idk. Sounds like you know more than I do.
I just know. I’ve had good luck plugging headphones into them and not having the audio “switch” to that as the sole audio out and disabling the speakers.
Just a hobbyist haha I ain’t gonna try to convert you to some other standard like some kind of audiophile. If it works for you it works right
As with all standards, cheap manufacturing and poor labeling has ruined its perception.
Honestly, were it not for Hanlon’s Razor, I’d think tech companies are trying to sandbag open standards compliance so that standards fail and they can fall back to proprietary.
Not entirely sure I don’t think that anyway.
If you plug in the wrong one of these, you can kill any drives attached.
EDIT: Ask me how I know. Seriously, the plugs on each end should define the pin-outs. If it fits, it should not be possible for it to destroy anything, fail gracefully at most. That used to be one of the major reasons for different plug types.
There seriously needs to be a cable Geneva convention for bs like this, it’s like the PC-building equivalent of the trench shotgun
I can’t find it now but there’s a reddit thread of someone who fried his Volta era enterprise GPU because dell shipped him the wrong cable that was incorrectly labeled as a Dell riser cable and not EPS (12v pins are flipped), so it burnt a hole though the card lol.
I see this as an absolute win.
Obsolete win?
I remember getting a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card for my laptop to use my enormous external DVD drive. The only DVDs I had at the time were X-Men, Star Wars Episode 1, and Nothing But Trouble.
Nothing but Trouble
Absolute CINEMA.
I have a soft spot for what most people consider objectively bad movies. Battlefield Earth, Waterworld, Soldier. Some of my favorite movies from my teenage years.
What feels like a lifetime ago, my mates at the time would watch what were considered awful movies.
Two of my favorite films are dross like Nothing but Trouble and Ultraviolet.
Remember having to park your hard drive before turning off the computer?
Toslink is not dead yet. It still is the standard for sound systems. And IMO that’s not even a bad thing as it just. always. works.
Eh, HDMI is largely replacing it, even when it just carries audio and not video.
Yeah, TOSLINK is only really necessary if you’re trying to ground-isolate your audio system. Depending on how your power is set up, you can get a ground buzz between two audio devices. Literally an audible buzz at whatever your local AC frequency is, caused by a difference in potential across the two devices’ ground connection. So probably 50 or 60Hz, depending on where you live. But since TOSLINK is optical and doesn’t have a conductor to carry a ground connection between the two devices, there is no risk of a ground buzz.
It is also great if you want to split it up/duplicate it, so have multiple outputs on one source signal. Just a cheap splitter will do just fine, and I can simply only turn on the device I currently want to use without any interference or noticable delay whatsoever. No need to tell the duplicater which device I want to use. I tried the setup with aux/chinch y-cables and it was just horrible. It is even fast enough to have the TOSLINK duplicater, then a TOSLINK to chinch splitter, than use that as input for my good old 5.1 system. The other TOSLINK channel parallely goes to 5.1 headphone sender.
Scart is missing. Well i’m not sure anyone misses that jank
Understandable omission. It was only really in use in PAL regions.
Plugging that in by touch was always good for a laugh.
Oh such a crisp picture though, when compared to the rf coax.
SCART is the most glorious analog video connector ever devised. No one can convince me otherwise. When I was a kid, it really put this idea in my head that we can actually do some pretty damn neat shit here in Europe. 🇪🇺
Ahem. Remember this?
I think your tuning sponge needs replacing
Despite all its problems, USB and especially USB-C have been a blessing.
Seems to be missing some ports I distinctly remember, like USB B, IR, mini Toslink, dual PS/2, dual e-SATA/USB A, powered USB A, mini coax, BNC, and a few others. Not to mention proprietary crap like HP LifeDrives.
Edit: Mini and Micro HDMI also missing.
Also a ton of SCSI connectors
