> But phones and tablets will gladly charge off the more powerful laptop type-C chargers. So there's another benefit: the type-C charger of your most power hungry gadget will charge all your other devices.

maybe in an ideal world, but this is absolutely not guaranteed at all. Some chargers only support the profiles they need and don't support the lower-voltage standards in between. Even apple does this sometimes, in fact.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/04/making-sense-of-the-oddities-...

https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/charger_nerdery

now of course the usb-c crowd is probably going "well apple needs to get its shit together!" but that's not an uncommon thing at all. Chargers are still designed for the specific device and don't necessarily support intermediate standards, just like motherboard ports end up being designed for specific use-cases and don't necessarily support the thing you're trying to do with them. Maybe that should have been a requirement, but it isn't, because USB-IF is shit and doesn't care about the consumer.

fully implementing the usb-c standard, to all its extremes and nuances, is expensive as fuck, and this is a cost-driven market so you can bet your bottom dollar someone is going to choose to swiss-cheese the standard and their charger will be $2 cheaper so that'll be the one you buy. Or else you're paying more for Anker and Apple stuff (whoops, maybe not apple for chargers, but their cables are still the best!).

and yes, it should always work at the lowest-common-denominator standard, and there should be a profile for the base USB 5v 1A if nothing else but... not all devices do. Laptops often don't support lowest-common-denominator charging, for example.

Just like Apple. Just like Switch. etc etc. At some point it stops being a problem with specific vendors and starts being just a badly designed standard. USB-C is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they want to be in devices for which $1 for a port or a controller chip is a big expense, but also scale to 40V/100W charging and 80gbps full-duplex data (with a 40gbps video channel and a 40gbps pcie link) and have everything "just work", and that's not really physically possible to implement in devices where every nickel counts.

Maybe there should have been some defined "mobile" and "laptop/desktop" profiles, that overlapped in some defined ways, so this wouldn't have been a problem. Your mobile standard can be cost-optimized, your laptop standard can be full-featured, both of them have some lowest-common-denomiantor requirements. Laptop 2.0 always supports everything Laptop 1.0 did, and Phone 3.0 always supports everything Phone 2.0 and 1.0 did.

But that's how USB-IF rolls, no need for nuance or delineation, just throw everything in one standard and let customers flounder. They do it on purpose, and people still defend them and love the product regardless, it's as mindless as people constantly (including here, ctrl-f any apple thread and search ‘mindless’ or ‘fanboy’) accuse apple fandoms of being. It's a bad standard and it's really just that simple, they could and should have done better and should not retain a government monopoly going forward, or else this will only continue to get more convoluted and complicated. Like we literally just got USB 4 2.0 and all, the leopard isn't changing its spots at this point.

But like, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome of the “one cable for everything” pipe dream people are pushing. Either cables/devices are expensive (thunderbolt), or each device supports some subset of the standard and end up with a confusing mess. But the “one cable for everything” fandom is insatiable.

Just one more profile bro. It’s gonna fix everything, I swear. One more standard and two more extensions. It’s gonna support PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 and it’ll charge your weedwhacker, just one more profile bro, please bro, I need this.