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You won’t find these symbols on most devices though (certainly not on any macbook as the picture suggests).
I didn’t take the image to be showing a macbook, it could just as easily be my computer or probably many others.
It could be, but combine the color looking very much like Apple’s space grey, the slimness of it, particularly how slim the lid is versus the body, and what looks like the MacBook’s classic black, rounded rubber stoppers on the bottom, I think it’s safe to say that’s meant to be an MacBook.
Also certain MacBook models tried to go to a single USB C port about a decade ago, and it was on the corner like that.
True, my latest Dell laptop has 3 “usb-c shaped ports”, there is 0 symbol anywhere close to them or the underside cover, you’re on your own as to what it supports, you have to find the doc online somewhere I guess.
Tbf my work Dell Latitude 5440 has a USB A with a SS5, an A with a SS5 and charging indicator, a C with a thunderbolt indicator, and a C with a battery and a thunderbolt indicator.
So at least some of their laptops do in fact have the indicators similar-ish enough to what the infographic shows.
my 5680 has absolutely nothing. Checking online I found that the right one is a usb-c 3.2 and the 2 left ones are TB4. IIRC they all support DisplayPort and all support being used as the power input (165W charger), not sure for PD and fast charging a cell/tablet…
You’re going to find that the appetite for un-targeted advertising to be much lower than that of targeted. The ROI for un-targeted blast is much lower than a smaller more focused targeted campaign.
As such, you’ll either see even more ads on the same content (in order to obtain similar level of revenue for the publisher), or, as the other user suggested, free ad supported service be a thing of the past.
Neither of which are good for the mass audience. People already aren’t willing to pay $1 to remove ads on most free ad supported apps, you’re going to find small businesses collapse left right and centre as result of the change.
My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.
Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.
But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.
And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.
Nothing worth feeling bad for will collapse.
People are not willing to get ads into every orifice, just nobody’s asking them. Ad blockers are reactive.
Bigger businesses will feel more pain, I can promise you that. Smaller businesses do not benefit from this ecosystem, quite the opposite - it heats up those who pay more for advertising, or those who are partners with those doing advertising.
As of payments again - when you are getting ads into your face with a message that you can pay to use something without them, you naturally feel against it.
Opie did not say targeted advertising OP said get rid of all advertising I was responding to that
I discovered that my Thinkpad apparently supports charging from all of the (unlabeled) USB-C ports after I inadvertently started it charging from my cell phone’s (unlabeled) USB-C port.
I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.
So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…
Have the thunderbolt symbol on my HP Laptop.
With some devices, I assume that they’re trying to save a bit of money.
With the MBP, I’m pretty sure that they just don’t want to disrupt the designer’s vision of the aesthetic.
Why would you need them on a MacBook? They’re always* Thunderbolt.
Edit: Better explained by GamingChairModel below. I entirely forgot one series of MacBook, and also forgot when the older ones did have the Thunderbolt symbol on them.
No they aren’t. Only some are.
Okay, the old ones that apparently have both do have the Thunderbolt symbol on the ones that are, though, so what’s the problem?
The only devices that don’t have at least Thunderbolt 3 on all ports do use the Thunderbolt logo on the ones that support it, except the short-lived 12-inch MacBook (non-Pro, non-Air). Basically, for data transfer:
- If it’s a 12-inch MacBook, the single USB-C port doesn’t support Thunderbolt, and only supports USB 3.1 Gen 1.
- In all other devices, if the ports are unmarked, they all support Thunderbolt 3 or higher
- If the ports are marked with Thunderbolt symbols, those ports support Thunderbolt but the unmarked ports on the same computer don’t.
For power delivery, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop supports at least first generation USB-PD.
For display, every USB-C port in every Apple laptop (and maybe even the desktops) supports DisplayPort alt mode.
It’s annoying but not actually that hard to remember in the wild.
By removing the symbols they were able to shave the case down 0.0003nm, making it the thinnest and lightest laptop ever.
If they etched the symbol they could have reduced the weight of the laptop by 0.003g making it even better
But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.
How brave!
Courage!
Stunning and brave!
You know it’s a thunderbolt connection on a MacBook. They stopped using the USB symbol when they used the usb for thunderbolt and stopped using the mini display port.
It’s useful but it got me even more lost 😅
So many different standards my god.
I can’t even find a decent PCIE USB/Thunderbolt card (one that support VFIO would be nice and actually has a Linux kernel driver, so ASM and Renesas are both out…)
The superiority of german aryan ports proven once again.
(this is a joke, nazism is evil and I hate it)
Additionally, USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 labels provide no information on the speed. Rather, “Gen 1” means 5Gb/s, Gen 2 means 10 and Gen 2×2 means 20Gb/s. These “Gen” labels are seldom found on products however.
So for example USB 3.2 Gen 1 is 5Gb/s while USB 3.1 Gen 2 is 10Gb/s
Additionally, USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 labels provide no information on the speed
Correct.
USB X.X is the name of the technical whitepaper that describes the standard.
For a long time, USB had three transfer rates. The first legacy speed (slowest) was hardly ever used. The Second was called “Full Speed” and the fastest was called “Hi-speed”. Because people could not remember which if these two were faster, they referred to the whitepapers in which they were introduced.
When later versions of USB were introduced people have tried to continue this mental “shortcut” and have caused themselves nothing but confusion.
All so sales people can slap on a 3.2 sticker over the 3.1 that was on top of the 3.0 sticker…
Do people care? You just plug in your thing and it works, fast enough in most of the cases.
Why can’t I tether my phone to my laptop with two out of three of my cables?
I have an Android phone with a USB-C port and a laptop with (several) USB-C ports.
I have three cables that I carry with me: a USB-C-to-USB-C cable, a second USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and a USB-A-to-USB-C cable. None of these are charging-only power cables, and I’ve used them for data connections.
One of the USB-C-to-USB-C – an unmarked cable – permits for USB tethering to be used.
The other two do not.
The other USB-C-to-USB-C cable even has USB 3.1 symbol.
I don’t know why.
Looking more-closely, it looks like the other two don’t have a data connection established between the Android phone and the laptop from the laptop’s perspective. They’ve let me do so with other devices.
Checking what data transfer rates a given cable supports electrically
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to query the “e-marker” on a USB cable from Linux today; I found a comment from someone saying that kernel support is still being worked on. You can use
lsusb -tto show the negotiated speed between two devices, so can use them to infer the speed, as long as you have fast-enough devices at both ends of the cable.https://lemmy.world/post/18014298
What USB PD rates does a USB cable or power consumer or charger support?
I don’t know of a good way to determine this from a user standpoint. Note that this is a matrix of voltages and currents, so it isn’t just “I support up to rate X”. Also, not all devices display the rate of power that they are providing or consuming – in fact, most don’t. My Android phone, a reasonably-sophisticated device and one with a display and capable of both providing or consuming power, doesn’t show the rate of power consumption or provision, just “slow” or “fast”, without additional software. I understand that that software doesn’t work on all Android hardware.
I have – had – a laptop that just won’t charge if a charger doesn’t support a certain USB PD profile, which its provided charger did but not all charging devices did.
When I plug in two devices that both support USB PD, which is the consumer and which the provider?
When I’m in my car, I typically I have three devices that have USB PD ports and can either provide or consume power – a large powerstation, a laptop, and a phone. I eventually learned a few facts:
First, the direction in which power is being provided via USB PD is independent of which device is operating as a USB host or device using USB OTG ports; it’s possible for the direction to be different from the direction of power provision.
Second, apparently the direction of host/device order is random, and devices just remember the host/device direction for a certain amount of time, so that if you plug two USB OTG devices into each other and the direction is not what you want, the idea is that you can figure it out from one or more of the devices indicating this and then unplug them and plug them in again to get transfer in the other direction.
Third, as best I can tell empirically, USB PD does the same random thing.
This creates all kinds of fun if one device powers off and then on again or something; my laptop can start draining its power to my powerstation (generally not what I want), or my phone to my laptop, since all the USB PD ports in question support USB PD in both directions.
Which end is which on an active USB cable?
I have an active optical USB cable, which I obtained so that I could put my computer in a closet, a long way from the rest of my devices; USB on copper has very limited range at present-day speeds without a repeater. It functions in only one direction in terms of data transfer (and obviously can’t move power). That particular manufacturer labeled it, though there’s no standard for labeling that.
In sum
USB does have reasonably good fallback, so most cables and most devices tend to sort of do something to some degree – they move some amount of power and some rate of data, though some devices have hard demands on what they need and there isn’t a great way to assess what a cable or device supports in most cases from an end user standpoint. But it definitely could be a lot better from my standpoint.
I’d also add that while I have rarely had problems with it – only came up with one USB-powered analog audio mixer that had less-than-amazing power circuitry and bled noise from dirty power being provided by USB through into the audio signal, and where I put it on a dedicated charger – USB power can be stupendously dirty. I was watching some guy with an oscilloscope investigate various devices, and all those sensitive devices are accepting all kinds of craziness in terms of power. I’m surprised that USB power sources aren’t required to provide some hard guarantees on what they can do in terms of load and response.
The dear people at the USB Forum should be rewarded with the Nobel prize in namology for their clear, superior and non-confusing naming scheme and naming process that even the nerdiest of nerds can’t follow.
This has already been fixed by the forum FYI, the new spec is to just put clear text labels that denote the capability of the port. I can’t find the article I read but this one has an example of the new user-facing branding.
clear text labels
The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know it.
The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there’s more push for using symbols, which…can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.
Maybe “STOP” or “ON” and “OFF” or something aren’t that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. “ON”, “OFF”, “STOP”, “YES”, “NO”, “CANCEL”, “POWER”, “ERROR”, “RESET”, “UP”, “DOWN”, maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has “CERTIFIED”, hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?
Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that’d be for the US market. Okay, it’s easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can’t recognize a single Chinese character.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I speak English. I’d rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don’t feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.
Behind the scenes, here’s what those labels correspond to:
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USB 5Gbps: USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1
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USB 10Gbps: USB 3.1 Gen 2, 3.2 Gen 2×1, and 3.2 Gen 1×2
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USB 20Gbps: USB 3.2 Gen 2×2
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USB 40Gbps: USB4’s initial version as currently shipping
That’s cool. But even though it finally adds simplicity, it’s still yet another renaming of the same things.
Here’s a snippet from an article from 2019:
The upcoming 20 Gb/s USB 3.2 connection, which offers twice the speeds of the previous iteration, will be known as ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2x2’. Its predecessor, ‘USB 3.1’ will be rebranded to ‘USB 3.2 Gen 2’, while ‘USB 3.0’, which ran at 5 Gb/s speeds, will be termed ‘USB 3.2 Gen 1’.
Reading that I want to shoot myself, and even the latest change, which probably is a good one, drives me slightly mad due to the history of renaming everything so many times.
the history of renaming everything so many times.
Every time a new USB spec comes out the version number goes up. A new spec comes out because they add more features. The spec is a whitepaper that explains all the features. It’s a “The King is dead, long live the king!” situation.
If you just never used the version numbers to mean something that they never meant (transfer speeds) then literally none of this is confusing.
They’ve officially renamed the transfer speeds one time after people made a big huff. here’s how they changed:
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USB SuperSpeed -> USB 5Gbps
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USB SuperSpeed 10Gbps -> USB 10Gbps
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USB SuperSpeed 20Gpbs -> USB 20Gbps
And If you can’t follow along with that, I’m really, really sorry. There’s not much I can do from a internet discussion board. XD
Yes, I am the only one confused. It’s not like half the tech internet blew a gasket over how confusing and bad the renaming of the generations were. Just me. I guess I should just read the whitepapers of every standard going forward, silly me.
Well if there’s anything I expect from the new-cycle masses, it’s rationality.
Heaven forbid, we try and do better!
I guess I should just read the whitepapers of every standard going forward, silly me.
You don’t have to read whitepapers to know the difference between Ethernet, CAT6 and RJ45 even if your grandpa doesn’t know the difference.
It’s not too much to expct the “nerds” to know the real names of PAN connections, too.
-
-
Every device I have just has a couple of blue ones and a couple of black ones, perhaps some orange ones and some USB-C ports, and good luck figuring out what they all can do. No symbols anywhere.
Black is USB 2, blue is USB 3, and Orange or Yellow are usually “always on” and/or 2.4 amp or some other kind of thing like that.
and Orange or Yellow are usually “always on” and/or 2.4 amp or some other kind of thing like that.
It’s the variety and surprise here that adds novelty and excitement to life.
https://www.usbmemorydirect.com/blog/usb-port-colors/
The blue USB port is also known as USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed (SS) USB. It was introduced in 2008 and offers a data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps, which is more than 10 times faster than USB 2.0. In addition, it can transfer data in both directions simultaneously.
I definitely have a number of devices that use newer-than-USB 3.0 and use blue.
The teal USB port is also known as the USB 3.1 Gen 1 or SuperSpeed+ (SS+) USB. Released in 2013, it supports up to 10 Gbps data transfer speed, which is twice as fast as USB 3.0. The color is similar to USB 3.0, but it will appear as slightly more green-toned than the classic blue of 3.0. This is the easiest way to differentiate USB 3.0 vs 3.1 ports.
I don’t think any of my devices actually use teal, regardless of what they support. Oh…hmm. Wait, I think my last desktop motherboard did that.
goes to investigate
Yeah, it has teal and blue ports.
My current motherboard uses blue or red for everything USB-A, so clearly isn’t using blue to indicate “USB 3.0”, and labels every port, blue or red, in English as “USB 3.2”. So it clearly isn’t using the port color to indicate purely speed.
The red USB port is generally classified as USB 3.2, which was released in 2017. However, it can also be used to indicate a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.
Another source of novelty and excitement.
Yellow USB Port Meaning
The yellow USB port is another color that can indicate either USB 3.2 or USB 3.1 Gen 2.
So much excitement.
The yellow USB port is more commonly found on laptops while the red USB port is more commonly found on desktop computers. This is because the yellow USB port indicates that it is always on, meaning it will continue to draw power even when the computer is turned off or in sleep mode. As a result, you can generally use it to charge other devices, such as smartphones.
Not on all vendors tho - coloring was an optional part of the standard. Dell often uses grey for USB3
It’s cool, the colors are just for aesthetics. Internally they’re all connected to the same USB controller chip anyway.
/s probably
Edit: it was a joke. I know blue means 3.
If they’re following the standard, which they often do but sometimes don’t, white indicates 2.0 and blue indicates 3.0+. I think there are more but I don’t remember the other colours.
I believe yellow or orange ports always deliver charging power regardless of device’s power state.
Meanwhile my thumb drive:
The best I can do is 20Mbps with the curve xy = 1
Mine is worse, it says it can do way more than 20Mbps, but once the buffer is exhausted, it hangs frequently. And this isn’t some random POS from AliExpress, I bought it retail at BestBuy.
If you’re ok with some bulk, go for an nvme enclosure. I have a sabrent one with a 256 GB crucial gen 3 drive in it, it’s a slow cheap drive, still substantially better than any usb key and you can put one together for under $100 cad including a longer high speed cable.
I just did a fresh install off of my usb key and wow, super slow compared to any time I’ve done off my enclosure
Good idea! I don’t need it very often (like maybe once/year?), but I’ll keep it in mind the next time I start looking for my USB drives again.
Like that guarantees quality.
It certainly doesn’t, but it’s understandable for users to expect that paying a premium at a place like BestBuy should result in getting a better product that picking up something on Amazon.
I generally do my research, but in this case, I needed it in a pinch to flash a Linux ISO to get my computer up and running because I couldn’t find any of my other ones. I expected to get ripped off, so I’m not too mad about it, but I was surprised at how crappy it was since I figured USB drives are largely a solved problem.
And this is why I largely avoid BestBuy and steer others from it, stuff costs more (though they do match if you ask), and they tend to carry crappy accessories and peripherals. It’s basically Walmart quality crap priced higher than better products at Microcenter, all because customers either don’t know better or don’t have any other retail options.
USB keeps changing their own standard every 2 years why bother learning it.
Pshh, speak for yourself. I’m ready for USB 3.2 gen 5 pro ultra max
We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.
And Knuckles
Was that the first one that had M Bison as a playable character?
But will that be better or worse than USB 3.3 gen 2 extra super speed?
Will USB 3 get an update now USB4 is out?
Eh, USB4 is basically what USB 3.3 would’ve been, but with fresh branding. I expect it to have the same naming issues after a few updates…
Wasn’t USB4 based on Thunderbolt 3?
Sort of? It borrows a lot of the high speed protocol bits from Thunderbolt 3, but I think it does DP a little differently (at least it supports different DP standards than TB3). So it’s closely related, but not necessarily the same thing.
Both, of course.
I mean, they update the standard to add new things. Is that bad?
They also change existing terms for no good reason.
The don’t.
But give me an example of what you’re talking about. I’ll explain.
USB3.2 gen 2, USB3.2 Gen2x2
The consumer facing names for those transmission specs are and have always been:
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SuperSpeed 10 Gbps
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SuperSpeed 20 Gbps
Unless you’re designing your own circuits you don’t need to worry about signaling rates (ie “Gen”) or lane configuration (Z×Y).
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white P inside a black D
yet all I needed is a “this side up” symbol …
Word
Honestly, I didn’t really have an issue with USB type A ports. They worked fine, and it was only a minor inconvenience to orient them the right way. I cared far more about capabilities of the port (speed, power delivery, etc) than I did about the actual port.
That said, micro-USB sucks in every way. The awkward “is this the right way?” thing is way worse than with USB-A, it’s not meaningfully smaller than mini-USB, the port is incredibly hard to clean (and it always gets dirty), and the connector seems to break all the time. I would’ve been totally fine with moving everything to mini-USB instead. The connector was less flimsy without being that much bigger, and it had room for more wires.
I do like USB-C though, I’m just not sure the added complexity is worth it.
Honestly, I didn’t really have an issue with USB type A ports. They worked fine, and it was only a minor inconvenience to orient them the right way. I cared far more about capabilities of the port (speed, power delivery, etc) than I did about the actual port.
I believe that the reason that the smaller USB variants showed up was because some devices were just too small to physically accommodate a USB-A plug. Think MP3 players and later – very importantly – smartphones.
For the vast majority of consumer electronics, USB-A is fine. But for things that are as thin as possible, usually to fit into a pocket, it starts to bump up against limits.
That said, micro-USB sucks in every way. The awkward “is this the right way?” thing is way worse than with USB-A, it’s not meaningfully smaller than mini-USB, the port is incredibly hard to clean (and it always gets dirty), and the connector seems to break all the time. I would’ve been totally fine with moving everything to mini-USB instead.
Mini-USB put the tensioners – the bit that wears out over time, is the bottleneck on the lifetime of the thing – on the (expensive) device rather than the (cheap) cable. Micro-USB and USB-C didn’t make that mistake.
Like, I think that there was a legitimate reason to fix that one way or another.
I think that maybe having two similar lightning bolt symbols that mean different things wasn’t the best design decision that the USB guys could have made.
best design decision that the USB guys could have made
lol the whole history of usb is full of design fuckyous
I mean, they fixed that with USB-C (after introducing one small USB port, mini-USB, that wasn’t reversible, with the tensioners that wear out on the expensive (device) side and and then introducing micro-USB which fixed the tensioners but still wasn’t reversible).
I’d personally kind of like to have magnetic breakaway connectors or similar so that I can’t damage devices if they fall, especially given that micro-USB and USB-C aren’t the most-physically-robust of connectors. Adapters with proprietary ways to do this exist:
https://www.amazon.com/MoKo-Magnetic-Adapter-Straight-Thunderbolt/dp/B0CGLM6PYN
But they aren’t part of the USB spec. If they ever switch to something like that, we’re gonna have another phase of incompatibility.
USB-A: the 4 dimensional port.
Brother, now that thunderbolt 4 has been introduced it’s even more confusing. Some of these labels are already out of date
The ‘Thunderbolt’ symbol is Intel’s proprietary technology. Apple and Intel made it. First apple registered Thunderbolt as a trademark but later they transferred it to Intel. The lightning bolt icon which supports fast charging phones or other devices when connected to the laptop is different and developed by the USB guys.
One should note that though Thunderbolt over USB-C offers the same speed and connectivity as a native thunderbolt cable, the native cable can be 40m long whereas the USB-C implementation is max 2m
Things are muddied a bit though because USB 4 has built in support for thunderbolt
Everything defined in the Thunderbolt 3 spec was incorporated into the USB 4 spec, so Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 should be basically identical. In reality the two standards are enforced by different certification bodies, so some hardware manufacturers can’t really market their compliance with one or the other standard until they get that certification. Framework’s laptops dealt with that for a while, where they represented that their ports supported certain specs that were basically identical to the USB 4 spec or even the Thunderbolt 4 spec, but couldn’t say so until after units had already been shipping.
That is not what I’m suggesting. I’m not saying charging only cables shouldn’t exist. I’m saying what everything does should be clearer.
“Universal”
My dick fits into all of them
Seems pretty universal to me 😎
I legit have never seen the battery used at all. They often use a plug, a lightning bolt confusingly, or don’t even label it at all.
Thanks for succinctly explaining what thunderbolt is
