Source: https://xkcd.com/927/.

Not posting with alternative text is like missing half of the xkcd.

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Yeah, in such a situation you should always try to compare the standards, look at the userbases and suddenly there are only very few that actually make sense. If everyone just does this, one standard will eventually crystalise as the one to use (or at least depending on the situation). Character encoding is an interesting example, because nowadays (almost) everything just uses UTF-8, despite there having been many.

Yeah, thats the positive thing.

I don't want a single application that just works for a few cases but doesn't work for tons of other cases. With such a world we would have a Windows OS where you need to use Face-ID for everything you want to use and sometimes just crashes and restricts the usage of something simple stupid because you don't have the magical Windows Battlepass or smth.

This of course ignores all the other times a new common standard succeeded

I finally got a proper USB 3.012542 cable.

You should have just linked to the page. It would have embedded the image, right?

I feel like this is almost where Apple is ahead of the game. Despite the EU hating it, they've been using the same lightning cable design for a long old time because it works well enough, it doesn't suffer USB-A's put it in 3 times to figure out which direction is right, and people have a billion of them laying around at this point.

EDIT: Too many people to respond to individually but I do realize from a technical perspective it’s an inferior cable. Just saying the user experience was better for a long time before USB-C arrived and the fact they never changed it makes it easy to find a cable to use if you forgot yours etc. Yes it’s slow but I am not transferring stuff off and my iPhone regularly, no I’ve never had one die from the pins burning out (although I do know people that’s happened to).

As for USB-C, I agree it’s better on paper and was excited when I got a laptop with USB-C but my personal experience trying to buy a PD cable that would actually deliver the rated 100w it was supposed to was abysmal. Went through multiple cables from Amazon that didn’t work for some reason, including Anker, and finally gave up and bought a cable from Apple that did work. But the fact some of them don’t do what they say they will and the fact you can end up with multiple black cables that all do different things but are completely unmarked as to what they do has made me very irritated with USB-C at this point, even while I do enjoy the higher speeds and power they can deliver once you figure out which cable is which.