I was looking for a new USB-c hub and came across this article. It’s an interesting write-up of what is on the inside of some popular options

  • @grue
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    1 year ago

    USB-C and Thunderbolt docks/hubs are a huge mess.

    USB itself – as in, the entire standard set of standards – is a huge mess. The people in charge of it totally lost the plot on what “universal” is supposed to mean somewhere around version 3.0. The whole point of USB was to replace a whole bunch of different types of cables with one kind of cable that you could plug in and know would do whatever you needed it to do. But now there are so many different speeds and Alternate Modes and various schemes for transmitting power that not only are we back to the Bad Old Days of having different cables with different capabilities and uses, but now it’s even worse because all the damn things look the same from the outside, so you can’t even tell which does what without resorting to using shit like this to query the device capabilities!!!