The curse of the port is the 3 fold nature of it's design.
1) the form factor universality is both a strength and a curse. This one physical form factor is small enough it can live for a couple of decades, and can handle high current, high speed video and data in general as well as slow speed HID device attachment.
2) they allowed more than one protocol to co-exist inside the physical form factor. If Thunderbird was not USB-C there would be one less problem to deal with
3) acceptance demanded they make it easy to be USB3/2 and old form factor downgrade compatible, but they didn't stipulate packing density. Thus we have Macs which will happily talk to a USB-A connector in a dongle, but the physical spacing of the ports mean having two devices plugged in can be impossible.
There is a fourth thing outside their control: How licenced protocols like HDMI and Displayport want to play over this transport. I have Lenovo/Thinkpad badged dock, it says its conforming to spec. There are things I simply can't do over it, like run two displayports, despite having two display port holes on the back of the dock: Some selection of passthrough and downgrade (refresh rate? pixel count) gets in the way between Lenovo and my Mac. (I am using industrial strength high grade cables)
There is a fifth problem: The chipset inside the cable.
There is a sixth problem: Power draw negotiation protocols (pick one? two?)
ggm•1d ago
1) the form factor universality is both a strength and a curse. This one physical form factor is small enough it can live for a couple of decades, and can handle high current, high speed video and data in general as well as slow speed HID device attachment.
2) they allowed more than one protocol to co-exist inside the physical form factor. If Thunderbird was not USB-C there would be one less problem to deal with
3) acceptance demanded they make it easy to be USB3/2 and old form factor downgrade compatible, but they didn't stipulate packing density. Thus we have Macs which will happily talk to a USB-A connector in a dongle, but the physical spacing of the ports mean having two devices plugged in can be impossible.
There is a fourth thing outside their control: How licenced protocols like HDMI and Displayport want to play over this transport. I have Lenovo/Thinkpad badged dock, it says its conforming to spec. There are things I simply can't do over it, like run two displayports, despite having two display port holes on the back of the dock: Some selection of passthrough and downgrade (refresh rate? pixel count) gets in the way between Lenovo and my Mac. (I am using industrial strength high grade cables)
There is a fifth problem: The chipset inside the cable.
There is a sixth problem: Power draw negotiation protocols (pick one? two?)