Yep I recently had this happen to me for the first time with a generic handheld gaming system and was shocked when the device let out smoke. I opened it up and sure enough the buck converter for the battery charging circuit was burnt, likely because the non-compliant device had somehow requested more than 5V from the charger… The charger was USB-PD and works fine with my phone/laptop/headphones so I’m pretty sure it’s not the problem.

That’s it re-stoking the internal combustion engine. It’s perfectly fine

Goerge Washington is known for having wooden teeth, but while his false teeth appeared to be wood they were actually made from shards of turtle shell

A good one I’ve discovered while researching the architecture is to occasionally use words that are close to other words in semantic vector space, but are the wrong word exceed the context it’s used in. Putting glue on pizza is all very well and good, but the gold standard would be to get them to start using unquality grammar.

Lithuanian, actually lots of languages, even Russian has a č sound.

At least Croatian, so I’d assume other balkan languages as well as potentially Czech and Slovak would use it. I think Latvian does as well.

In addition to what others have said, check my username. 🙃

czech

That fiction language Portuguese. /s

True, I appreciate the correction, the actual data transfer speed is determined by the USB version.

I passionately hate MTP and having to deal with a MTP device is a great way of ruining my day

How one would cut and paste videos from an android to a pc?

Wireless charging is nice for when you’re using your phone infrequently, such as at your desk while you’re working on something else. It sits there charging, you grab it to respond to a message then set it back down. No tail to worry about, it’s not getting tangled on other wires when you dare to move your phone, etc.

It’s really a feature I never cared about until I got a wireless charger as a gift

I’ve had several phone where the USB socket stops working reliably. At that point it’s easier to use a wireless charger.

Yes, it’s usually pocket fluff in the socket and it can be picked out, but it takes some time and care to avoid damaging the socket.

My latest case (Otter) also has a cover that is awkward to open to plug in the lead, so there’s that too.

As a bonus the charger works with Apple and Android so very convenient as my kids are Macolytes.

I guess from a consumer perspective, it can be more convenient (e.g. wireless charging in a car)

For me, I see it as a way to reduce wear on a charging port, or as an alternative if the port does fail.

I like it for the latter as I don’t like my devices to be inefficient but it makes me feel better that should the USB-C fail on my phone, it’s not game over for my phone.

Convenience. Decor. It’s much easier to slap a phone on a charger. The chargers also look better than a cable laying around unplugged.

It also is less energy efficient as running the juice directly through a cable of course is more efficient than creating a magnetic field that then induces juice on the other side to flow again.

It should be said that this is the principle of transformers, but they are built in an efficient way for it.

There’s the regular wireless charging where you need to put the phone on exactly the right position. That one is totally useless, since it’s even less flexible than cable charging. The only upside is that you don’t need to physically insert the cable. That’s pretty much worthless.

There’s another setup that allows you to charge over a larger area, e.g. a whole desk. That is expensive and/or much work, since it needs to be integrated into the whole area (e.g. desk) and it’s incredibly wasteful in terms of energy consumption that doesn’t actually end up charging the phone.

The only real upside I can see of wireless charging is that you can use it if your USB C port is worn out and doesn’t work any more.

I’m in Europe, but not in a EU country. In Norway we adopt most, if not all, eu laws and mandates.

The port chaos back in the mid 2000s was a mess! We’ve come a long way since then.

I’ve got a chinesium rechargable battery/tire inflator which only charges when plugged into some chargers because it clearly doesn’t support USB-PD

I’m glad I watched some video on this I vaguely recalled, as I may have accidentally thrown a shaver away because it wasn’t charging…

There is a special place in hell for those fuckers

Man I’ve nearly thrown things away because of this. Things where I would’ve been too lazy to pursue a warranty claim, but still pissed that they didn’t work.

Try multiple chargers and cables and it just won’t charge. Try USB-A brick with A to C cable and it starts charging. Fucking hell.

This is stupid. It’s around 0.3 cents worth of components to make it work properly.

I bought a cheap ish keyboard that would only charge with USB A - USB C cable that came with it. Nothing else worked.

My son lost the cable and that keyboard is now junk.

Things like simple microcontrollers with only USB 2.0 support are still the cheapest around plus they have other upsides over the stuff supporting USB 3.0 - namelly being simpler, less powerful and hence consuming less power, so for some things they’re the best option because you don’t really need the processing power of an ARM core - and then there are all sorts of hardware single purpose integrated USB 2.0 and even USB 1.0 microchips (which implement a single, hardcoded, part of the USB protocol), so it makes some sense for the cheapest devices to not have support for USB PD charging or other USB 3.0 functionality.

From my experience with Chinese suppliers (ages ago) it’s almost the opposite of what you say: the competition over there is crazy and almost always price based, so they’ll do crazy shit to shave some cents off the price of their hardware, hence all sorts of cheap hardware from China which comes with a USB-C connector but really only supports USB 2.0 or earlier charging, hence USB-C is realy doing stuff the same way as in the USB-A times.

Also a lot of small Chinese electronics manufacturers aren’t exactly sophisticated in their in-house design capabilities, IMHO: there are a lot of cottage factories over there doing simple electronics like keyboards or mice (or even simpler) were most of the complexity is in some easy to use integrated circuits that somebody else designed (and then right next to those guys there are others designing their own Single Board Computers or Smarthphones)

Or it’s just a very cheap item. I recently bought a rechargeable disposal cannabis vape while out of town for work, I asked the dude for the cheapest dispo they had, bought it and it had a fucking micro USB on it.

Some homeless guys problem though not mine, I probably only used 50mg of the 1g cart and didn’t have to recharge it, so gave it to some homeless dude before I left.

There’s good and bad. Every few months the EU tries to ban encryption without backdoors again for instance, because “oh dear, think of the children!”.

Lucky for you, you can get around with English in most places.

Ireland didn’t leave the EU, so that’s an option.

In most big cities you can get around just fine. In some you can actually live very comfortably.

As far as laws go, as an EU citizen one is entitled to communication with any public institutions one may come across in their preferred “official language”. Stuff like paying your utility bills, registering health insurance, similar bureaucratic stuff, as well as getting stopped by the police. You can insist on doing it in any one of 28 languages, including English.

Usually that’s a bit overkill, and whoever you’re dealing with will be happy to speak to you in English or find someone else who does if they don’t. I assume the same goes for non-citizens. German and French are also quite popular, but English is by far the most ubiquitous.

They did have one heavily English speaking country, but those guys peaced out a few years back. Now it’s just Ireland and Malta (where English is an official language).

I think the Netherlands has the highest amount of L2 English speakers.

In the Netherlands, the English language can be spoken by the vast majority of the population, with estimates of English proficiency reaching 90%[1] to 97%[2] of the Dutch population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_the_Netherlands

It’s not the official language though so all documents and legal stuff would be in Dutch.

I’m moving to Sweden soon, just about everyone there speaks English! And also Swedish is such a a pretty language I’m really excited to be immersed in it

Ireland speaks mostly English as far as I know.

Ireland, but housing is shite right now.

Any Scandinavian country should have a population ranging from proficient to fluent in English.

A mechanical cover would have been good. Hell, even a rubber dust boot attached at one end would have been useful.

I keep a little deox-it around and use wooden toothpicks dipped in it. Pocket lint, and dust seem to collect on the left and the right on the ports and make them feel like they’re loose.

I had one the other week that was really bad I ended up digging it out with a dental pick. The phone had gotten wet and it was slowly making diy concrete down in there. But yeah much better to rely on air or not conductive tools, any to scratch off the protective plating

It wasn’t better, but it was readable. I don’t want to go back, I want them to fix what we have now to be readable.

Yeah. It was already happening circa USB3. It’s not because of the connectors, but the broadening spectrum of requirements of client devices.

Maybe USB-C was a missed opportunity to address it, but it certainly didn’t “start the fire”.

It was extremely easy to determine if a cable carried data. If there were four wires/metal strips at the end it had data. If it was only the two fat ones it was power only.

that means I try to charge something that either takes forever or never charges.

That’s a pretty significant failure IMO.

I don’t want to go back, but I want shit be labeled and work. You go to bed and wake up to a 7yo on a trip with a dead device, you’re going to have a bad day.

I’ve had exacrly 5x more failures of USB C ports than I’ve had of micro that is 5, and 1), and I’ve had way more micro devices over a much longer period (and still have some). It may technically be a “better” port, but my experience doesn’t reflect that.

I have to label cables and chargers because some C devices today still don’t support all charging specs, so I have to verify a device charges on a charger to know for sure.

At what point shouldn’t a device be able to negotiate down to the lowest charge capability, instead of not charge at all? That the spec permits this to happen is a major failure.

It’s fantastic that C is the convergence standard, but let’s not act like it’s close to perfect. I have to verify with every device I use if the charger actually works for it, and not just “is the charger powerful enough”, but “does it actually charge even though I know it should because it supports all the capabilities as the device”.

I’m looking forwards to when my in-laws upgrade their phones and no longer get to use their “superior” lightning ports

I saw that one back in the day. Never seen any of it in the wild yet.

Would be nice to get TB/DP on there too.

https://caberqu.com/home/20-43-c2c-caberqu-746052578813.html#/27-with_or_without_case-with_case It’s not awful for price but there are more complete testers like treedix: https://treedix.com/

What bothers me is all these testers assume you are a USB hardware wizard and know which pin combo supports which USB standard.

I want something that tells you how fast and how much power the wire can handle.

The newer cables have chips to talk to chargers to not exceed the power ratings. Why can’t these chips or testers also tell you how fast the wire can handle?

Would have been nice for some kind of forethought on a labeling system.

But there’s so many combinations now of power, data, audio, and video, and sup glasses of thunderbolt, display port, HDMI. Even if you put a 4-digit code on every cable listing exactly what they support people would never be able to understand and track down backward compatibility.

I’d be surprised in the next port change if we don’t end up with some fiber optic in there.

Well, that covers my phone, but then 45 watts won’t run my laptop, and if I plug in my phone and my laptop, they only get 22 watts each.

Then the cable: Can it be used for data transmission? What speeds does it cover? Will it transmit data through a DisplayPort or HDMI? If I unplug it from the power and plug it into the USB-C on my monitor, will I get video?

There are so many features, and it’s not like you can just go ohh I’ll get this USB-4_g cable and know what it does. Even the webpage for the Rundhult has no mention of what features are supported other than 100w.

The whole spec is complicated AF. You could spend $100 on a brick/cable that can do either 100W or high speed, but if you only need part of the equation, you can spend $30 on a brick and cable. What they support is almost never enumerated, even on the packaging.

Funnily enough, USB c can also do that.

Let’s not skip Mini USB-C along the way

In all seriousness, this would make the most sense in terms of progression in design. It already sorta’ is just that, but it’s been stepped on.

Hah! Just hit me, if I’d seen a USB-C plug back in the day, my first thought would’ve been “oof, someone isn’t playing bootleg cartridge games for a while!”

It would be hilarious if they made it exactly like a headphone jack, but the USB-D slot wouldn’t support headphones.