A small anecdote (side note- I seem to be turning into the old guy yells at cloud meme), though I'm a tech guy at heart it had been many years since I'd needed to know anything about USB's tech capabilities. Just over 15 years ago I was bit-banging over USB with an AVR device to retrofit some legacy DB-25 hardware / software into Windows / USB. So I figured I learned enough about USB to last a lifetime. Boy oh boy.

Since then though I got lazy, fell behind in my knowledge, and was comfortable just being able to plug stuff in to charge / transfer data / whatever. It seemed like a solved problem so I went about my work without considering the ins and outs of a simple cable. I mean, it's just USB right? Different connectors, some carry more current, faster speeds over time etc, what more to know?

Then mainly during early Covid when I was often switching between working from home vs in offices, I got sick of how many cables I needed to plug and unplug each morning and when I got home.

I was inspired to solve this problem after one office I worked at had a USB-C dock that magically supported 2 displays, ethernet, etc. So I thought brilliant! I'd get one of those...

Only they don't seem to exist / be in stock anywhere anymore, at least not without a long shipping delay from overseas. So after talking with a sales assistant at the local office supplies warehouse I grabbed something similar (and expensive for what essentially amounts to a fancy USB hub) off the shelf that had video support, and was saddened when it didn't work. That's when I read the instructions that were packaged with the device and apparently it only supported the USB-C with the little lightning bolt icon. Cue hours of reading and research to get up to speed on what all the different little icons I'd never noticed in the injection-moulded plastic meant.

Okay my bad, I should have spent more time keeping up with technology and less time watching netflix.

At least the dock worked for everything else, it wasn't ideal but I could deal with just 2 cables to swap out.

But why then did the dock at the office work?

I grabbed the model number and did some more research and lo and behold it has a built-in graphics adapter. So rather than outputting frames from my still quite capable GTX1070, some cruddy generic display chip was doing all the work through USB and some proprietary display drivers. I tried a couple of games as a benchmark and yep, FPS was woeful. That wouldn't do for my home office at all, so I nixed any hope of getting true video out via USB-C from this device.

All told it was probably less than a day of actual time spent, and a hundred dollars so no big deal for me. But this experience led me to seriously consider that if someone like me with a strong interest and experience in tech gets sent for a spin by something that should be simple and "universal", I don't really understand how the average consumer is supposed to navigate it all. Sure, it's simple once you know, but it is niche knowledge, most people want to learn things about people, their jobs, stuff directly relevant to them and not memorize a grid of cable standards. So I'd wager most people don't read too deeply into it and either a cable/device "works" or is "broken / shit."

Thinking of all the time wasted and frustration people must have swapping devices and cables, the sense that finding a magical combo that works creates a cargo-cult type mindset around brands and devices, as if it's all witchcraft voodoo. I wonder how many perfectly good cables and devices get returned or trashed each day because people think they're "broken."

Anyway old guy has finished yelling at cloud for the day.