What’s next for USB-C

The Verge's Dieter Bohn dedicates this week's Tuesday episode to the fractious history and fraught future of USB-C. Guests include: CTO of ASTC Rod Whitby, who has worked with USB-C standards since its infancy Verge senior reporter Chaim Gartenberg, who explains the many variations of USB-C cables Ken Pillonel, a hacker in Switzerland who figured out how to replace his iPhone's lightning port with USB-C Relevant links: USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard You can now, technically, build your own USB-C iPhone EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Here at The Verge, one of our hardest weeks every year comes in January. It's CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and it's such an intense tech conference that we spend just a ridiculous amount of time planning out what gear we're going to bring. It's vital that we have tools that we can rely on. Our cameras, our phones, and our laptops, they all have to work. And if there's any way we can make the stuff that we stuff into our bags simpler, or more importantly, way less, we're gonna take it. So in 2016, I was very excited to have a tiny 12-inch MacBook and a Google Nexus 6P. The laptop weighed next to nothing, and the phone had a massive screen.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Both my phone and my laptop charged with the exact same cable, which was perfect. I was super ready for CES. Until, suddenly, in the middle of that hectic week, the single, solitary USB-C port on the MacBook stopped working. I couldn't plug my camera in, I couldn't sync files, I could barely get the laptop to charge. And it was all because of a faulty cable. My Nexus 6P did what it was designed to do when I plugged into the MacBook. It asked for all the power that it could get to fast charge. And so then the cable provided it, and that ended up frying the laptop's USB controller. When USB-C first started, the only way to know for sure

• 1:31Speaker 00

  that you were buying a safe and reliable cable was to follow a Google+ group and hope that you could come across the reviews of a single Google engineer who was running tests on everything that was available. According to the USB Implementers Forum, the official group that defines USB, there were only 61 certified USB-C cables at the time. The rest were just unlabeled junk. It was like playing Russian roulette with your laptop.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  It's five years later now, and you're not likely to fry your computer with a cable, but USB-C is still complicated. We have one plug that now does multiple things, from low-power charging and slow data to ridiculously high 240-watt power. You can also get super-high-speed data. There's Thunderbolt, there's monitors, there's audio. The dream of a single cable and plug is great, but it's also a little confusing. I'm Dieter Bohn, the executive editor of The Verge, and I'm really excited to talk through what's going on today with USB-C. We're doing a special run of more-focused Vergecast episodes on Tuesdays, and this week, as you can obviously tell, it's time to really talk about USB-C.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?", and "What sectors are on the move right now?". Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?", and "What sectors are on the move right now?". Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  So before we get into the variety of complications that USB C created, let's talk about what it actually is because there's even some confusion right there.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Let's just get down to the very, very basics. USB C is a 24-pin universal serial bus connector system. Universal because it works with everything in theory. Serial because that's a technical term for communication in computers for this kind of port. And bus, which is short for omnibus, which is a kind of transport. It's another computer term for communication. Anyway, one of USB C's big innovations is that it has a rotationally symmetrical connector, which means that you can plug it in upside down or right side up. You don't get it wrong every time you try to plug it in like you do with older flavors of USB, like USB A or micro USB. USB C was designed to replace data transfer connectors like USB A and also offer faster speeds, which these days could be as fast as 40 gigahertz per second.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  USB C is also meant to provide power to replace your power cable. The name for the main standard is USB PD or USB Power Delivery, which is a much higher power delivery standard than past USB connectors. It can range from standard phone wattage like 5 or 20 or 30 watts, up to 100 watts for laptops, or now with the newest versions, 240 watts. This standard allows the cable to power devices like gaming laptops and smart speakers, your Nintendo Switch, headphones, whatever, and communicate the appropriate amount of wattage and the current levels that are being delivered to the device. USB C cables also have the ability to transfer both video and audio signals, replacing cables like HDMI or the old 3.5 TRS headphone jack.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  It can also send video signals for monitors like, say, over DisplayPort. Add all that up and the dream is really simple. A single cable and plug that does anything and everything. You don't need multiple different cables. You can get everything you need onto your laptop or your phone with just a single one. Okay, so that all sounds simple enough, right? Transfers data, transfers power, can be used for video or audio. But the problems pop up pretty quickly. We're used to the shape of the cable telling us what the cable does. Only your power cable fits into the power plug or the HDMI fits into the HDMI. But with USB-C, the physical shape doesn't tell you what the thing does anymore.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  And it turns out, not every USB-C cable can actually support doing everything that you might want it to.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  The issue, I guess, is that the physical plug, the USB-C plug, is the same regardless of whether it just carries power or power and low-speed data, or power and high-speed data, or power and high-speed data and high-speed video.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  That's Rod Whitby. He's the CTO of a company called ASTC, the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  So I've been involved with USB-C and USB-PD, I guess, for eight years now. Worked with a number of silicon vendors, a number of OEMs, and have attended a number of USB dropability workshops during the early days of USB-C, when everyone was just working out how things worked with each other, or didn't work with each other, as the case may be.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  So he knows a bit about the intricacies of the standard and where the confusion comes from.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  When you start to have a single cable for all those different things, power, video, and data, then clearly, if you want to have cheap cables, they're going to be different cables that just carry power and nothing else, versus cables that can carry 4 gigabits per second of video and data.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Since there are different types of USB-C cables being made, you may own a cable that charges your phone but doesn't really support anything else. You may own another USB-C cable that charges your phone faster, and then another that's only able to transfer data. And they all look the same. At the heart of it, the universal USB-C connector, which is designed to simplify things, created a problem of cheap cables that don't do what you want and confusing tech standards. USB-C is on the way to making tech faster and smarter. Don't get me wrong, but right now, my cable drawer is still as messy as it's always been. Now technically, there is a process for clarifying all of these different cables. As you could probably guess, it's by labeling them on the packaging or ideally on the cable itself.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  But there's a problem there, too. There's weird naming conventions and different branding from different manufacturers. So it's not easy enough to know whether or not you've bought the right cable.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  There is branding that's meant to be put on the plug to tell you what's what. But of course, you know, some manufacturers put their own logo on instead of the branding. And so that doesn't help with people. And then on the side of a laptop, you know, there's limited space there to write what that receptacle on the laptop can handle. I guess it's a combination of humans making assumptions about what things can do, which are reasonable assumptions to make. You know, if it plugs in, you expect it to work. But of course, all the cables look the same unless you know what the logo means. And it's rife for confusion.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  All right, let's talk about the logos because the USB Implementers Forum, which is the organization that maintains the USB standard and its specifications, aren't really great at keeping a clear message for consumers on what the cables they buy can actually do. But my colleague at The Verge, Heim Gartenberg, is great at deciphering and explaining what all of these USB specs are and what the logos mean and what they're used for. So let's bring him into talk. Heim Gartenberg, you are Senior Reporter at The Verge, also the only person I personally know who is more obsessed with USB-C than I am. Welcome.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Good to be here.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  So we have talked a bit about the USB spec and how it works. But fundamentally, what we're really talking about here is lots of cables that theoretically can do different things, even though they look the same. So what kind of specs can actually be labeled on a USB-C cable?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  So broadly speaking, there's two types of things that a USB-C cable can do. There is data and there is charging. Now, most cables do both, but up until USB 4, which is new, you didn't have to actually do either of these things. You could make a charging cable that didn't do data. You could do a data cable that, you know, didn't meet certain charging specs. So USB-C describes the port, but there's a lot of things you can do with it.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Right. So let's stick with power to start. So what are the different labels we should look for, the different types of power that USB-C can do?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  So when USB C first started, there were a lot of different specs. There are still a lot of weird, different little proprietary fast charging specs. There are bigger fast charging things, but the most important one, and the one that's become the main one that virtually everyone uses in some capacity, is USB power delivery, or USB PD. Now, there are several versions of that. Newest is USB PD 3.1, which was announced in May. They started rolling out new logos and new documentation for it in September. And there are actually products shipped with it today. The new MacBook Pros that Apple just released do use USB PD 3.1 for the MagSafe ports. Not the regular ports, just the MagSafe ports.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Sure. And what does USB PD 3.1 get us?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  So USB 3.1 gets you all the benefits of USB PD, which is the different tiers of charging. It is designed that the two devices can kind of handshake and go, I need 10 watts. And your charger will go, okay, I can give you 10 watts. So it does all that, but it ups the wattage considerably. So USB PD 3, which is the one that came before this, was up to 100 watts and was sort of the bottleneck for adding USB C to laptops, higher powered laptops for charging, because the most you could get of it was 100 watts. The bigger laptops you have, Apple's old 16-inch literally was a 97-watt USB C charger, but you couldn't go past that. So this goes all the way up to 240, assuming you have a device, cable, and a brick that

• 12:23Speaker 03

  can go that high.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Right. And so am I looking for USB PD 3.1 on the box or the cable? Am I looking for like a color code? How do I know that my device, my cable, and my brick are all capable of getting 240 watts through that entire chain?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  So the USB Implementers Forum, which is the group that comes up with all these standards, is not the best at naming and not the best at branding. They are trying a different tack with this generation of stuff, which is they now have bespoke logos that are supposed to appear on certified PD 3.1 devices and also certified USB 4 devices, which is not the same thing as PD 3.1.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Which we'll get to in a minute. And it's literally either a 240 watt, it'll be like a little sticker on your thing. This is a cable that is capable of going up to 240. It's like a little USB. It has a thing. You can see it on our site. And they also have one for up to 60 watts. So you'll know this is either, you know, a quote unquote, low power cable that's designed to charge, you know, lower power things, or this is a high powered cable that can charge your theoretical, you know, 240 watt gaming laptop.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  And for me, like the, the big thing with USB PD, and this was a problem early, early on with USB C is there, like you mentioned the proprietary like charging standards, like Qualcomm had one that was super weird. A bunch of Android phones were using wackadoo fast charging systems and not using standard USB PD. But by and large, it seems like we're in a place where most stuff is using the non proprietary standards based USB power delivery system. And it's just a matter of making sure that you look for the correct label on the box to make sure that your cable is capable of providing the power that your device is asking for.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so power could be worse. It's, it's definitely like, okay, for the most part, as long as you're keeping an eye on things. What about data? Because we also have new standards for transferring data.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  So data is where things get a little complicated because just because you have a USB C cable does not necessarily mean you're using the USB data transfer spec. And even if you are using the USB data transfer spec, it doesn't guarantee that you're using any particular version except for USB four, which in part was largely designed to fix a lot of these issues. There are many different USB specs. There are many different names. They have gone through various attempts to rebrand them. So we have all the way going through, you have USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.1

• 14:59Speaker 03

  2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2, USB 3.2 Gen 1 by 2, USB 3.2, 3.2 Gen 2 by 2, and USB 4.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Wonderful.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Part of this is not as bad as it sounds because a lot of it is whenever they come up with a new standard. So when we have, you know, USB 3.2. USB 3.1 Gen 1 gets renamed to USB 3.2 Gen 1.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Same with Gen 1 by 2 and Gen 2 by 2. A lot of this is just backporting because the new standard has to include all the previous standards, so that if I get a USB 3.2 Gen 2 by 2 supporting cable and I plug it into, you know, my old headphones or my old computer that only supports the lower data transfer speed, everything still needs to work.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  And to a certain extent, you know, we're running through all the different names of all the specs over the years, but this is a problem you actually kind of want to have. I mean, you want to have clear branding, for sure.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  But you want your cables to get faster over time.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Right? You want, you want this to progress.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  The perfect opposite example is Lightning, which is the same cable, the same port, and hasn't updated its data transfer speed in, you know, half a decade at least, and transfers much, much, much slower than USB-C does.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  So this is a good kind of problem. It does lead to some confusion, and that in part is sort of what USB 4 is sort of trying to solve.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so why don't you talk about USB 4, what it's trying to solve, and what's good and maybe bad about it?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Okay, so USB 4 is the newest USB spec, and it does a couple of things differently than like the four versions of USB 3.2 that existed before. Which is, it is technically a superset of USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt 3, which went open source in 2017, so it was previously Intel's own standard. Now it's open source, and a lot of that is what the foundation of USB 4 is.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  A couple of things that make USB 4 different is you're no longer allowed to make USB Type A cables or USB B cables. If it is USB 4, it has to be USB-C.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Second, if you are doing charging, the charging has to support PD.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  So in theory, if you buy a USB 4 cable, you know that it will have certain minimums for charging and certain minimums for data transfer, and those will be consistent across anything that is USB 4 compatible.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Which is good, except it's not perfect, because when we mentioned before that you don't have to do both at the same time, so you don't have to do everything. So there's two different levels of USB 4 data transfer. USB 4 goes all the way up to 40 gigabits per second, but there are actually two sub standards. There's USB 4 20 gigabits per second, which, as the name implies, only goes up to 20 gigabits per second. And then there's USB 4 40 gigabits per second, which goes all the way to 40 gigabits per second. And there are also separate logos for those two things. So in theory, when you're looking at a USB 4 cable or charger, well, USB 4 cable for data transfer, you're going to look at the cable and it'll say on the box, you'll look

• 18:02Speaker 03

  for 20 or 40 and you'll have an idea of whether you have the slower or faster cable. And then 60 or 240, which will give you an idea of whether you have the slower faster charging.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  And part of the thinking here isn't just, oh, let's confuse people. It's that like making a full USB 4 40 gigabit 240 watt cable, it's just, it costs more, right? And so you could theoretically go buy something that only does 20 because you don't need the 40 because that's a lot. Or you could buy something that doesn't support all the way up to 240, you only need 100 or 15 or whatever, because you can save a ton of money. Buying a full spec top of the line USB 4 cable that supports everything is like buying an old Thunderbolt 3 cable.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  There's limits on its length and it's also costs a lot of money.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Right? USB 4 also does fix a couple of the other problems with the older USB C standards because it is built on Thunderbolt 3. So USB 4 by default will support things like audio and display port, which you did not necessarily have to bundle in before on USB 3. But it's also a slow rollout. Like to my knowledge, there are no 240 watt USB 4 cables that you can just buy today.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Except technically, I guess you could say maybe the MagSafe, although it's not for a gigabyte. MagSafe is just power.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  If you were to buy two MagSafe cables and cut the ends off and splice them together, you might have one, but please, actually, please do. If you spend $160 on this and on this mad science experiment and you don't electrocute yourself, let me know if it works.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, please, please be safe. We don't recommend trying this at home, but if you wanted to. So you briefly mentioned display port, alt mode and audio. So there's like standard data transfer, but USB C cables have also been used just for straight audio or for straight providing display via the display port standard. That was not necessarily included before, but part of the point of USB 4 is that all gets, that all has to be part of the spec now.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's sort of a trickle-down effect from Thunderbolt.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Because you have all these alt modes and these optional protocols that you can build in that you don't need to necessarily, or you didn't need to. If the logic sort of was, if I was building a pair of headphones or a battery pack, the battery pack doesn't need data transfer.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  For the most part, there are one or two battery packs that have firmware that you can update. But for the most part, most battery packs don't need data.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  My battery pack doesn't need a headphone jack.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Right, right. Okay, so you roll up to amazon.com or Best Buy or Walmart or whatever, and you see there's a USB 3.2 cable and USB 4 cable. Is it, is it reasonable that you might just want to spend less money and get the 3.2 cable? Is that a totally normal thing to do? Or should everybody be thinking, oh, I only want to buy USB 4 from now on if possible?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  I mean, as someone who likes to future-proof their stuff, I always try and buy the most, which is funny because now all my 100-watt cables are going to be worthless if I ever get a device that needs more than that.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  I mean, it depends a lot on what you're using it for. If you're looking for, you know, a one, a one-job-fits-all cable to hook your computer up to your monitor that'll do, you know, audio and the whole USB hub that's built into your monitor and display port and charging and everything, make sure that you're getting the cable that you need for that.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  And it can be easier just to get a USB 4 cable because you're pretty much guaranteed that that will work.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  If you want to avoid the hassle, that's probably your best solution. If you know what you're doing, if you, you know, just need something to charge your cellphone at night, you know, just want a long cable to stretch across the living room to, you know, charge your phone while you're watching Netflix, you're probably good with anything so long as it, you know, supports PD. And the thing to really keep an eye on, and this is the thing that, you know, you'll see on sellers on Amazon and in stores, look at what the wattage that it supports is. Because not all PD cables support 100 watts even. Some are 30 watts, some are 60 watts. I have personally run into when I've been charging with cables and realized, like, my laptop wasn't charging because it was only a 30-watt cable because it was really old.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Right. So this all sounds great. We've landed at USB 4 is the one that you can safely buy. But you've brought up Thunderbolt a couple of times.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  And now, Thunderbolt is Intel standard and it has, is using the same USB-C plug, at least with Thunderbolt 3. They open-sourced Thunderbolt 3, so that's now part of USB 4. But there's a new version of Thunderbolt. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's Thunderbolt 4. And the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 is Thunderbolt is proprietary to Intel. Not that other device, no other manufacturers can't use it. They show up on devices all the time. Again, Apple's new MacBook Pros are Thunderbolt 4 ports. But if you want to make a Thunderbolt 4 device or a cable, you need to go to Intel and Intel has to approve it and test it and make sure that everything works. Right. And Thunderbolt is sort of the idea that the USB 4 standard was sort of promising before, which is that it's just one cable. You don't need to worry about what you're getting or what you're doing or anything. If it has the Thunderbolt and a 4 on it, you can plug it into your Thunderbolt thing with

• 22:49Speaker 03

  the 4 on it and you will be guaranteed it'll support, you know, the 40 gigabits right off the bat. It'll support the multiple displays. It'll support, you know, PCIe data transfer speeds up to a certain thing. It'll work with Thunderbolt 4 docks, which will let you have more ports. The flip side is that Thunderbolt 4 cables and Thunderbolt 4 accessories are really expensive. So it's sort of your one-shot-fits-all thing, except you're paying for that privilege. Right. The other weird quirk is Thunderbolt 4 was built on the original batch of USB 4, so it's cross-compatible with that in a lot of ways. So it supports, you know, the USB 4 40 gigabit per second data transfer rate, which is the Thunderbolt 3.1.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  But USB 4 has a weird quirk, actually, where it is slightly better in theory in charging than Thunderbolt. Because Thunderbolt, right now, only does 100 watt charging because it has the old PD spec, because Thunderbolt 4 came out in July 2020, a full year before the USB IF actually introduced PD 3.1 with this 240 spec. Got it. So if you are buying a new, and at this point, nonexistent, if you're buying, you know, a laptop somewhere in the future and it charges at 240 watts, right now, a Thunderbolt 4 cable theoretically does not charge that, which is actually a quirk you can see, just to bring it up again, because it's the only device that's even a little bit using 3.1, PD 3.1. Right.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  On the 16-inch MacBook, the reason that you can only fast-charge the 16-inch MacBook through that MagSafe port is because that's the only one that uses USB PD 3.1. The other three are Thunderbolt ports and those can still only charge at 100 watts, which isn't the full 140 that that 16-inch laptop needs to fast-charge.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Right. So in theory, we could say that that MagSafe port is a USB 4 port, but it's not USB-C. It's not really even USB because it's just power. It's just sort of a...

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the MagSafe port doesn't do data. Like, you can't plug your MagSafe cable into a USB-C hard drive. And that's the perfect example of how you can use PD as a spec without necessarily using the USB 4 transfer and everything.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Okay. Lightning round.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Lightning round.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  If I have a Thunderbolt 4 cable, does it support everything that USB 4 does?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yes, except for the 240-watt charging.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Got it. If I have a USB 4 cable, does it support everything Thunderbolt 3 does?

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yes, but they are not entirely cross-compatible.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  All Thunderbolt 3 stuff should work with USB 4, but it's not necessarily backwards-compatible because Thunderbolt 3 came first. So like, if you have an older hub, it might not necessarily play well unless it's been updated, etc.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Got it. If I see a USB-C cable sitting on my desk, what can I trust that it will do? There's no label on it.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  You can't trust that it will do anything, in theory. It is probably a good bet that it will do data transfer at at least 5 gigavits per second, and that it will charge at, you know, at least 5 watts, which is the minimum data transfer rate of USB 3.1 Gen 1, which is the, you know, slowest and worst USB-C cable that exists. Anything past that, there's no real way to know unless it physically says on the cable has, you know, the USBIF branding that they've been encouraging people to use.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Or some other markings, you know, on the physical cable itself.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, which nobody's doing. I've never seen this mark on the cable itself in my life, except maybe I'll see like the Thunderbolts.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  I'll occasionally see the DisplayPort 1. Like, I have a cable on my desk that has a DisplayPort 1. There is, in theory, like, USB 4.20 and 41. Like, I have a nice picture of it from USBIF of what it could look like on a cable, but I've never seen it in person. But I also haven't seen a 240-watt cable yet, so maybe that's a new era.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Final lightning round question. Are you happier with this system than with having every single cable does something different? It has a different port and looks different, and you don't know if it, you know, you plugged it in the wrong way and whatever. Do you think we're better off with this USB-C plug and these, like, progressing standards on top of the same cable year after year?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  I actually do think we're better off because, at the end of the day, a lot of this does suck and is really confusing. But...

• 27:02Speaker 00

  I think we're better off because a lot of this sucks and it's really confusing. The Verge.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  I have a but. I have like a good, a good second half to this sentence.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  All right.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  If you are willing to, you know, play not entirely, play by the rules and play to the, the higher end and always assume the worst out of USB C. If you charge everything with an 100 watt PD charger, then I know that I can confidently travel with one brick and two cables and I can charge my laptop and my headphones and my Kindle and my switch and my battery pack. And I don't need to bring a separate charger for this and a separate charger for that. I don't need to worry about, you know, oh, did I bring the right USB cable? Did I bring the right thing? Everything works. And if I need to plug this into that, I have one cable that'll do that. If I need to, you know, sync an ebook that I bought, I can do that.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  So the benefits do still outweigh the negatives, especially because, and this has been true for a while and will hopefully continue to be true. Things are slowly getting better. The things are getting more consolidated. When I first bought a Nintendo Switch, like I couldn't figure out how to charge it with anything other than the charger it came in because the PD standard was very new and things were out. Battery packs were out, cables were out that didn't support PD. And PD chargers were actually pretty expensive at the time. Now every charger in my house is a PD charger and I can charge my switch with my laptop charger and, and vice versa. So things have been getting better. It's just been a slow march. There's a Kindle with USB C now, like that did not exist for a very long time.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  So it is a slow thing forward, but it is better. It's just still not great.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  And it's never going to happen on the iPhone.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  It's never going to happen on the iPhone.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  All right, well, there we go. Heim, thank you so much for coming on the Vergecast and explaining all of this to us. We will have more to explain about USB C, I'm sure, in the near future.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  I look forward to arguing about it then.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Okay, so you've actually got the right cable. You're transferring data at 40 gigabits per second. You're ready to charge at 240 watts. That's great. Congratulations, you bought a cable. Unfortunately, that's still just the beginning. You still need the right ports on your actual devices and you still need a charging brick that can support all the wattage that you want. And there are still a lot of devices that just haven't adopted USB-C yet. There are laptops with barrel plugs, gadgets with micro USB, and of course, the iPhone still uses Apple's Lightning connector. See, for a lot of companies, it doesn't make sense to change over

• 29:41Speaker 00

  to the newest tech standard for a variety of reasons. If you have a hardware design that's been built around something like micro USB, it costs a lot of money to change that. And if you don't need to redesign your product or it wouldn't necessarily benefit from what USB-C has to offer, it doesn't really make sense to spend all of that development money to remake your product just to put a new port on it. Now, Rod Whitby, who we spoke to earlier, has seen USB-C from its infancy. He was there at the very start of making new kinds of data speeds and power standards work. So I asked him, is the adoption rate for USB-C just taking way too long?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I think it has taken longer than I expected, but I'm not surprised.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  How come?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  You know, doing USB-C properly and supporting these 100 watts charging or 240 watts charging in the future, you need to put a chip in there for a start, right? Just to do 100 watts instead of 60 watts, you need to have a chip in the cable and you need to have chips at either end that can do this negotiation. To do high-speed data, you know, the 40 gigabits per second, well, these days, even inside a new laptop, just to get from the processor, which is sitting in the middle of the laptop, to the ports on either side, you need extra chips to re-drive the 40 gigabit signal.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  I mean, if you remember the first MacBook that came out with USB-C, it had the USB-C on one side only, right? There's a reason for that.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  And it wasn't that they hate having ports on both sides?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  It's because if you want to have ports on both sides, then you need to put extra chips in there to re-drive the signal the further distance to the other side.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  That's amazing. That's like less than a foot, but still.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  When you're going at 40 gigabits per second, then 10 centimeters matters.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  So you can see that this is way more complicated than you assumed. It's not just, say, Microsoft resisting putting USB-C on the surface because they're worried people will get confused about whether or not they should use their phone charger to charge their laptop. It gets down to centimeters within the device itself. Even Apple, who led the charge for USB-C on laptops, had this problem where they didn't want to spend the extra money to put extra ports all the way on the other side of the laptop. There are still technical limitations to this technology, which have hindered adoption. Rod says that once you start going past two-meter cables, for example, you start to stretch the boundaries of the technology and you start thinking about putting repeaters into the cable. But hey, you know, we've got USB-C ports on both sides of the MacBook now, so progress.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Anyway, speaking of Apple, as we mentioned before, MacBooks have fully incorporated the Thunderbolt 3 standard into USB-C, and newer iPads have USB-C on them, and that's great. But again, the iPhone doesn't. And it seems more likely that the iPhone is going to end up with no ports before it ends up with a USB-C port. But that hasn't stopped our next guest from adding USB-C to the iPhone himself.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  I could see like how that could possibly be done, and I saw that nobody was doing it. And so just one day, I thought, oh, maybe I'm the guy who's going to do that.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  We're going to take a quick break for some ads, but when we come back, I talk to Ken Pionell, a hardware hacker in Switzerland, about how he opened up an iPhone 10 and figured out how to replace the Lightning port with USB-C.

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• 35:42Speaker 00

  Okay, we're back with the Vergecast USBC special. I'm about to talk to Ken Pionell, who cleverly built USBC directly into his iPhone.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  So I guess if we could start with, can you tell me why you decided to pursue this project of getting USBC working on an iPhone?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I think there's a lot of reasons, like the first one, that's maybe the most relatable one, is that like as a consumer, you know, I think it was in 2015, Apple came out with like the MacBook and they really sold it as having courage and like going all in with this Type-C port that is going to be the port of the future and that we only have this one connector to rule them all. And I was really like sold by that idea, you know? And then the years went by and for some reason, this lightning port just stuck around and it didn't want to go. And don't get me wrong, I'm a super fan of Apple, like I like what they do. But I never could be like full on into the ecosystem because there was always this thing that was bothering me.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  So I always had like an Android phone. And after a while, like I started to gain more skills and I could see like how that could possibly be done. And I saw that nobody was doing it. And so just one day I thought, well, maybe I'm the guy who's going to do that. And I just, I just went for it.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  So you built a sort of an outboard, you know, thing for it so that you could just test to see that it worked. And you were, you know, tracing all the leads and whatnot. And you were pulling off little chips from Apple's own board and transferring it over. What was that process like? Did you sort of have a hunch it would work? Or was it, was that part of the process of, well, let's see if this thing will even work, even with a, you know, big giant Frankenstein thing attached to the side of the phone?

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I thought if it works with the big Frankenstein thing, then there is no reason that it won't work if I redo it myself smaller. It's just a matter of time and dedication and like fixing the problems. But in theory, if you see it work here with your own eyes and it's big, I know for a fact that there's a lot of stuff in here that are not useful, like the lightning connector, I can remove it, I can replace it with wires and things like that. So I knew then that I could get it done eventually. I just didn't know how long it would take.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  One of the really surprising things to me, I mean, maybe not surprising, but just something I hadn't thought about is that you, without working in a big company or whatever, you can go out and design a board and design a PCB and like have it manufactured for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process? Because, you know, I was like, how do you fit the electronics in there? And like, I would have wires everywhere. It would never have occurred to me like, oh wait, I could just go into CAD, I could actually make a thing and have somebody manufacture it for me.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  So it's not too complicated. Like you said, you go into a CAD software. I think here the most difficult part was choosing the shape of the board because like my board bends 90 degrees two times. And so you really need to have some kind of like spatial awareness of like where it's going to go inside the phone and really imagine it. And once that's done, it's really like a flat surface. And then you place the components where they are. And then you like run little like traces, it's like little wires on them. And then you get like a file that you send to, here it was a company in China, and they might manufacture it for you, and then they send it to you, and then you can solder things on it.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  And yeah, it's pretty amazing what, like before you couldn't do that. But now for the last few years, there's really a lot of companies, like low cost companies that came into the market and that proposed the services. And like for the do it yourself community, it's really like awesome. You can do things you couldn't do before.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  It really is incredible. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to ask, why did you pick the iPhone X? Was it just that it was like not too expensive? Or was, do you think that there was stuff on newer iPhones that would have made this project more complicated?

• 39:43Speaker 04

  So first I started like more than a year and a half ago, almost two years ago.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  So I think back then it was like the iPhone 11, the latest iPhone. And it was just, I didn't want to pick the latest one because it was the most expensive. And I went with the iPhone X. And also now looking back, because I was thinking maybe I could port it to another iPhone, like the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 or something like that. I'm not sure I'll be the person to do that because there's with like the repair community, they have kind of like a war with Apple on authorized repairmen and unauthorized. And now they're really like putting serial numbers on parts. So you can't just like you could before buy a screen and swap it up yourself.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  And so that kind of annoyed me. I thought if I, if I break something, which I did in iPhone X, I broke the screen, I broke, I broke a few things that I had to change multiple times. If I need to have those specialized tools just to change my screen once, it doesn't make sense, right? And the iPhone X didn't have those problems. So also it made a great fit for this project.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When you managed to get USB in and working, you got everything working. Do you know if you were able to get, I don't know, faster data speeds? One of the problems with Lightning is it's, it's data speeds are slower. I'm assuming that it's just, you know, it's the same interface internally with the board you made. So it, it basically still had USB two or whatever Lightning speeds are. But I'm wondering, were there any other functional differences that you noticed once you switched it over?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  So that's a question I get a lot. I think so first about data, there's a limitation inside the iPhone where the connection to the main board only has, you could say, two wires, two data wires. And that's the limiting factor. Like I don't see myself being able to change that. That would take.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  You'd have to replace the whole main board to be re-architecting the whole thing. Yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  So if you want to get into faster data transfer. USB three, for example, then you need multiple pairs of wires. And USB two only had one, so they're called D plus and D minus, data plus and data minus signals. And so in the iPhone, all the iPhones until the latest ones all have this one pair. And so that's the limiting factor. You can't, you can't change that. So yeah, the project is stuck at USB two.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Then about accessories, can you plug in a USB C hub and then put HDMI? Sadly not, you can't do that in, in this mod. Simply because the accessories Apple use all have a different chip inside the accessory. So the way I see it at least is if I wanted to include all those accessories, I would have to include like a this little chip inside my special board and then have some kind of logic, like I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying it would take me maybe an extra two years to add other, other, other accessories. So then I, I thought charging and data is already pretty good. Uh, then if I have more time, I'll do something, I'll probably add something else.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've wondered if it'd be possible to take, say, the, the USB connection off an iPad, like the new iPad mini. And if take those parts and plug them into an iPhone, if it would just, you know, somehow work, but it sounds like it probably wouldn't. It'd be a lot more complicated than that.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought about this in the beginning. So in the iPad, I think what changes is that there is a software change. So iPadOS knows it's directly talking a USB language. And so what's useful in, inside the iPhone, like the hardware, would just be the little connector. But the little connector, I can order it for $2 off any website. It's, it's no different than the others. So the thing in the iPad is that it's, the software already knows it's talking USB and then goes through the USB connector. Whereas here, if I would want to do something like that, I would have to change the software on the iPhone. So that it knows it talks USB and, and not Lightning.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  But that would change completely the scope of the project. It would be like jail, jailbreaking the iPhone or something like that.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Whole thing.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  And so here it was only a hardware hack where we took the chip that does the conversion in the cable. And we integrated it inside the iPhone so that it does the job for us without having to worry about software or anything like that.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Were you surprised at your ability to, I don't know, fit the larger USB C plug at the bottom of the phone? You know, you did a really clever thing to mill out the space, finding the space inside for your adapter. Were you concerned early on, like, oh, wait, Apple goes with Lightning, they must have to because it's thinner. There's no way this could work. Or just from taking apart iPhones, did you know, like, come on, this is, this is actually possible?

• 44:31Speaker 04

  So it worried me a little bit at the beginning because it does look bigger when, well, it is bigger because I had to drill out the hole. But when I went to choose actually the connector that I was telling you about, like actually order it on a website, just that little connector metallic piece. Every time you order those components, there is like 2D drawings with the dimensions. And so I went through maybe like 50 of them or something like that to look at their dimensions and compare them with the Lightning connector. And I was trying to find one that could actually maybe be smaller than the Lightning connector. And I did, in the end, I did find one that was smaller. So the connector where you plug in the cable is bigger,

• 45:14Speaker 04

  but from the outside, like the volume that the connector takes, the one I chose is actually smaller than the Lightning connector. And so that gave me some extra room to then do a little 3D printed bracket that holds the connector so it doesn't, when you plug in the cable, it feels strong.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  So yeah, I think that's, that's pretty funny to know about that in the end is that my connector is actually smaller than the Lightning connector.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  And so you put all this on GitHub. And there was a step where you had to get like, you had to order some extra parts. Can you talk about the process of sort of putting your process out there in the world so that anybody might theoretically be able to redo what you did?

• 45:53Speaker 04

  So when I was trying to reverse engineer this little connector that Apple builds for their cables, right? I saw that it was kind of, it wasn't impossible to do, but it was kind of hard to do because they make it so it's hard. They make it so people don't go put their nose in that cable and see how it works because then maybe someone in China will make a fake connector and then sell it on their website and then they lose revenue. For those accessory sales. And then I thought if I continue pursuing this connector, then it's first, I don't think I'll be able to make it open source. Because if I do, then I'm basically putting out the layout of what Apple builds.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  It's kind of like I put the plans out there, how to remake what they do, right? And then here I would definitely get in trouble.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, regardless of whether or not you are right for the, you know, various DMCA style rules. Apple would not be afraid to go after you and you don't want to deal with that hassle, even if you were in the right.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Uh huh, uh huh. So I knew, I knew from the beginning, if I did that, I would get in trouble. And then I, I started, I was doing some research on the connector. And then one day I stumbled across an article that was saying, hey, actually, someone did what you want to do already, someone hacked that cable. And they're selling fake cables on the internet for cheaper so that you can charge your iPhone or your, your AirPods with that cable and it won't give you an error message saying this cable is not original. Then I, it like clicked in my mind, hey, maybe I can hack them, I can hack the hackers. And so then when I post my plans online, I'm not posting the plans of what Apple did.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  I'm posting the plans of the people who hacked Apple. So it's not, I'm not really doing anything wrong, right?

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's great. And why did you post the plans? I mean, you know, you could have been like, look, look what I did. Uh, but like, was it important to you to put this up on, on GitHub instead of, you know, just like a blog post or something else?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Well, here, you know, there's files, right? There's this schematics for the electronics and I thought probably some people will want to contribute to that. And then they can actually add their own files to it. Of course, I need to look into it, see if it's good and then I can add it. But then if it's like a hub, well, it's called GitHub, but if it's like a hub for this project, then people can go on it and maybe they can download their own files and then make their own version of it, modify it however they want. I think that's very interesting.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Are you using the iPhone that you modded as your phone?

• 48:23Speaker 04

  I've used it for a few days just to see that it wouldn't burn in my hand. But no, I'm using a Samsung phone as a daily driver.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  If you could just speak briefly, what do you think of USB C itself as a spec, as a standard? Do you really like it? I know Apple was evangelizing it early on, but do you think it's a good plug? Do you think it's a good standard? Or is it just that it's the thing that everyone's using and that's why you wanted to get it going on the iPhone?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  I think it's an aspect that's sometimes not talked about too much and why it would be interesting to have only one connector. Like you can't save things only when they go your way. Like you can't stop including a charger in your iPhone in the box and say it's to reduce waste. And then for other things like the connector, you act the complete opposite. You know what I mean? So I, yeah, I think it's important to be consistent with what you say and with what you think. And I think that's an important aspect to talk about.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Do you think it's worth the trade off of having the same plug? Given all these extra like complications and things you need to know about? Because in the old world, every plug was a different shape. And so you knew what the plug would do based on its shape. Do you think that we're better off having all the plugs have that same USB shape? But you need to understand what the cable or the, you know, devices are capable of.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  I think we're better off if it's safe. So I mean, if the worst that can happen is that you're charging MacBook very slowly instead of the, at the normal speed. I think, I think it's worth it.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  But I do think that in the mid to long term, there needs to be solutions to that. And I think that's things that I will explore in my channel. If I, if it's something that is of interest to people. And I know it's of interest to me because I'm here talking to you about this right now. I'll definitely do some more research about that and maybe propose ideas that are mine or not mine. And get people talking about the subject.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Well, cool, man. It's a, it's a really fun project. I'm really glad you did it. It's, it's really nice, if nothing else, to be able to point to it and be like, yep, see? Like nothing, nothing exploded. The world didn't come to an end. The phone still works fine. Nobody, nobody got hurt. It still fits. So if nothing else, congrats for showing everybody that it's, it's absolutely possible.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  So now Ken probably has the only iPhone in the world that has a proper USB C port on it outside of Apple's labs and I am, I have to admit insanely jealous. So, look, we know that Apple doesn't want to put USB C on an iPhone, but if they want to keep ports on it in general, they might actually be ordered to make the switch.

• 51:06Speaker 07

  The EU Commission is proposing common USB C charging ports for all new smartphones, iPads, tablets, cameras and headphones.

• 51:16Speaker 08

  In terms of waste, this is significant because this measure will allow us to save 1,000 tonnes of electronic waste and 2,600 tonnes of raw materials per year. There is also the impact on CO2 emissions. It will save 180,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  So the European Union may speed up the process of forcing companies to adopt USB C, but speed up is a relative term because the European Union has been talking about charging standards for devices for around a decade or so. In fact, one of the reasons that a bunch of phones switched over to micro USB from all of the proprietary charging standards was the European Union tried to force that as the standard and now we're moving on to USB C. So now they're pressuring Apple to switch the iPhone over to USB C and in theory that could happen, but the reality could turn out to be much, much different. And actually, I also talked to Heim Gartenberg a little bit about all this.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  So the proposal is mandatory USB C on all devices for smartphones and other electronics, common charging port. The goal here is to cut down on e-waste by letting people reuse their existing chargers and cables so that you don't have to get a new charger every time. Devices won't have to include chargers in the box anymore, which is a trend we've already started to see with companies like Apple and Samsung. And it notably would only apply to wired ports, not wireless ones. So this is, as you said, it's really the culmination of like a decades-long process. The EU actually did have a similar thing where they had required micro USB, but that original voluntary thing was less strict and also allowed the loophole

• 52:55Speaker 03

  of you could include an adapter in the box.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Which Apple did for a while when you bought an iPhone in the EU, it would come, in addition to a lightning cable, it would include in the box like a $15 little freebie of a lightning to micro USB cable, so that you could use your existing chargers and plugs with that device, which is really the thing that the EU is looking to try and cut down on. Under this proposed rule, you would not be allowed to sell a device, if it has a form of wireless charging, it has to have USB-C. So for example, Apple, in theory, could make an iPhone EU edition that had a USB-C port and a lightning port, but in theory, under the rules, it would not be allowed to just offer a lightning port.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Would they be allowed to offer a phone that has only wireless charging?

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Only wireless charging would be allowed.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  The exception here includes the fact that it only applies to a common wired port. If a device doesn't offer wired charging, it is not required to fall in. It doesn't have to abide by that rule.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  I see.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  The proposal is right now also just a proposal. It still needs to pass a vote in the European Parliament. And then if it is actually adopted as law, device manufacturers like Apple will then have two years to comply with the new rules. So there could still be a fair amount of time before this actually impacts. Don't necessarily expect the iPhone 13 to suddenly have a USB-C port.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So how do you think it's going to shake out? I mean, it took us this long to get to the proposal that Apple is strenuously fighting. I know you're not an expert in European law, but do you foresee Apple like saying, sure, you know what? You're right, we're changing our mind.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  On the one hand, there's not a lot of wiggle room in this proposal, which would require either Apple will have to ship a USB-C iPhone. It could limit it geographically, it could only sell them in the EU. It could take an approach similar to the bundled-in adapters that it offered at the time. I assume Apple, as a company, will be doing everything it can from a lobbying and legal side to make sure that this doesn't actually become law. It also could try and jump to a proprietary wirelessly charging iPhone. The issue there is sort of getting the genie back in the bottle because Apple can sell a wirelessly charging iPhone or a wireless protocol iPhone, but it already supports CHION, its stuff, which is a universal charging standard. It's actually the first and really only

• 55:17Speaker 03

  cross-Apple universal charging standard that you can use to charge an iPhone and something else.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there are ways to transfer data wirelessly right next to each other. Like, there have been phones, the failed Essential phone, that actually literally had a little near-field wireless USB thing. So you could attach things to it and it would communicate over a relatively slow. But it was there, like wireless USB. So these things are possible. We just have no idea how aggressively Apple is pursuing them.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the other issue is is that there's no real wireless solution that exists yet that's better than wire charging. There's a reason we use wired charging for things, which is transferring data wirelessly is not as fast as transferring it wired. Transferring power wirelessly is not as efficient. And even if Apple can circumvent those two issues and come up with a super-fast, super-power-efficient way of doing power and data transfer, it also then has the trap of its own argument, which is switching away from lightning to something else will generate a huge amount of e-waste. And it'll inconvenience customers. Switching from lightning to a new proprietary magnetic wired thing with a dock and a cable and everything will generate a huge amount of e-waste and generate more waste than just switching to USB-C would.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  OK, we have learned a lot here about USB-C, its advantages, its disadvantages, and the wacky things it makes us do in a confusing tech market. So here we are. But where are we going? What's next for USB-C? How will the technology advance? I asked Rod Whitby.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  I think the next thing will be higher data rates. As we've seen the power go from 100 watts to 240 watts, the data rates go from 5 to 10 to 20 to 40. I expect you'll see 60 gigabits per second with a Thunderbolt 5 or something. I've got no internal information, of course, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to disclose it. But that's, but that's just what you expect. People always want faster data, always want bigger video screens, which means more data being transferred across the cable. So I think at the moment, the research is there to be able to send more data across the same cable. And the spec is now there to be able to send higher power across the same cable. So I think we'll see a 240 watt, 60 gigabits per second data cable as the next step.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  See, this is why I keep bringing in Rod, because he's got me excited for the near future. But he also makes me take a step back and realize how we actually got here with USB C.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  The emphasis, I guess, is there is a lot of work that happens through a lot of engineers in a lot of different companies to make sure that when you plug a USB cable into a computer, that it actually does something. And it's incredible the number of ways that it could possibly not work. But somehow through all this hard work, usually, you know, 98% of the time just does work.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Here's how I deal with all of this confusion. I just make sure that I know which of my USB C cables are good and can do the things that I need, and I e-waste the bad ones. For me, I know that the cables that I get from Apple and Google tend to work better, and they also happen to be white cables. So I keep those cables around for when I need a good USB C cable. But for the cheap stuff, like charging earbuds or cameras or whatever, I have a bunch of cheap cables that happen to be black. And if I need something truly reliable, like the main cable I plug in my laptop with, Thunderbolt cables usually have a little lightning bolt on them. So I keep an eye out for that. Is that a perfect solution?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  No, not even a little. But is it better to have fewer cables? Yes, actually, it really is. And as we're going to see in this series of special Tuesday Vergecast episodes, new standards and technologies do solve real problems, but they don't solve them quickly, and they do bring up new problems of their own in the meantime. And the truth is, we live in the meantime. It's always the meantime. Thank you for listening to this USB C spectacular. We brought the term back. See what I did there? You're welcome. I'm sorry. This episode of The Vergecast was made by Andrew Marino, Liam James and me, Dieter Bone.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Special thanks to Heim Gartenberg, Ken Pionell and Rod Whitby, who gets a second extra thanks for working on WebOS internals back in the day. Thank you to all of them for lighting us along this journey. The Vergecast will be back on Friday and my Tuesday episodes will return next week.

• 1:00:00Speaker 09

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• 1:00:40Speaker 10

  First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over 40 years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com/innovation to learn more.