The Vergecast - What’s next for USB-C

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

The Verge's Dieter Bohn dedicates this week's Tuesday episode to the fractious history and fraught future of USB-C. Guests include: CTO of ASTC Rod Whitby, who has worked with USB-C standards since its infancy Verge senior reporter Chaim Gartenberg, who explains the many variations of USB-C cables Ken Pillonel, a hacker in Switzerland who figured out how to replace his iPhone's lightning port with USB-C Relevant links: USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard You can now, technically, build your own USB-C iPhone EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here at The Verge, one of our hardest weeks every year comes in January. It's CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and it's such an intense tech conference that we spend just a ridiculous amount of time planning out what gear we're going to bring. It's vital that we have tools that we can rely on. Our cameras, our phones, and our laptops, they all have to work. And if there's any way we can make the stuff that we stuff into our bag simpler or, more importantly, way, less, we're going to take it. So in 2016, I was very excited to have a tiny 12-inch MacBook and a Google Nexus 6P. The laptop weighed next to nothing, and the phone had a massive screen.

Both my phone and my laptop charged with the exact same cable, which was perfect. I was super ready for CES. Until suddenly, in the middle of that hectic week, the single solitary USBC port on the Mac, backbook stopped working. I couldn't plug my camera in, I couldn't sync files, I could barely get the laptop to charge. And it was all because of a faulty cable. My Nexus 6p did what it was designed to do when I plugged into the MacBook. It asked for all the power that it could get to fast charge. And so then the cable provided it and that ended up frying the laptop's USB controller. When USBC first started, the only way to know for sure that you were buying a safe

and reliable cable was to follow a Google Plus group and hope that you could come across the reviews of a single Google engineer who was running tests on everything that was available. According to the USB Implementers Forum, the official group that defines USB, there were only 61 certified USBC cables at the time. The rest were just unlabel junk.

It was like playing Russian roulette with your laptop. It's five years later now, and you're not likely to fry your computer with a cable, but USBC is still complicated. We have one plug that now does multiple things, from low-power charging and slow data to ridiculously high 240-watt power. You can also get super high-speed data. There's Thunderbolt, there's monitors, there's audio. The dream of a single cable and plug is great, but it's also a little confusing. I'm Dieter Bone, the executive editor of The Verge, and I'm really excited to talk through what's going on today with USBC.

We're doing a special run of more focused Vergecast episodes on Tuesdays, and this week, as you can obviously tell, it's time to really talk about USBC. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. So before we get into the variety of complications that USBC created, let's talk about what it actually is, because there's even some confusion right there. Let's just get down to the very, very basics.

USBC is a 24-pin universal serial bus connector system. Universal, because it works with everything in theory. Serial, because that's a technical term for communication and computers for this kind of port. And bus, which is short for omnibus, which is a kind of transport. It's another computer term for communication. Anyway, one of USBC's big innovations is that it has a rotationally symmetrical connector, which means that you can plug it in upside down or right-side-up. You don't get it wrong every time you try to plug it in like you do with older flavors of USB,

like USBA or micro-USB. USBC was designed to replace data transfer connectors like USBA and also offer faster speeds, which these days could be as fast as 40 gigabits per second. USBC is also meant to provide power to replace your power cable. The name for the main standard is USBPD or USB power delivery, which is a much higher power delivery standard than past USB connectors. It can range from standard phone wattage like 5 or 20 or 30 watts up to 100 watts for laptops, or now with the newest versions, 240 watts.

This standard allows the cable to power devices like gaming laptops and smart speakers, your Nintendo Switch, headphones, whatever, and communicate the appropriate amount of wattage and the current levels that are being delivered to the device. USBC cables also have the ability to transfer both video and audio signals replacing cables like HTML or the old 3.5 TRS headphone jack. It can also send video signals for monitors like, say, over DisplayPort. Add all that up and the dream is really simple, a single cable and plug that does anything and everything. You don't need multiple different cables. You can get everything you need onto your laptop or your phone with just a single one. Okay, so that all

all sounds simple enough, right? Transfer's data, transfers power, can be used for video or audio. But the problems pop up pretty quickly. We're used to the shape of the cable telling us what the cable does. Only your power cable fits into the power plug or the HDMI fits into the HTML. But with USBC, the physical shape doesn't tell you what the thing does anymore. And it turns out not every USBC cable can actually support doing everything that you might want it to. The issue, I guess, is that the physical plug, the USBC plug, is the same, regardless of whether it just carries power or power and low-speed data or power and high-speed data or power and high-speed data and high-speed video.

That's Rod Whitby. He's the CTO of a company called ASTC, the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company. So I've been involved with USBC and USBPD, I guess, for eight years now. I worked with a number of silicon vendors, a number of OEMs, and have attended a number of USB addrobability workshops during the early days of USBC when everyone was just working out how things worked with each other or didn't work with each other, as the case may be. So he knows a bit about the intricacies of the standard and where the confusion comes from. When you start to have a single cable for all those different things, power, video, and data,

then clearly if you want to have cheap cables, they're going to be different cables that just carry power and nothing else versus cables that can carry 40 gigabits per second of video and data. Since there are different types of USBC cables being made, you may own a cable that charges your phone but doesn't really support anything else. You may own another USBC cable that charges your phone faster and then another that's only able to transfer data. And they all look the same. At the heart of it, the universal USBC connector, which is designed to simplify things, created a problem of cheap cables that don't do what you want and confusing tech standards. USBC is on the way to making tech faster and smarter.

Don't get me wrong, but right now, my cable drawer is still as messy as it's always been. Now, technically, there is a process for clarifying all these different cables. As you could probably guess,

it's by labeling them on the packaging or ideally on the cable itself. But there's a problem there too. There's weird naming conventions and different branding from different manufacturers, so it's not easy enough to know whether or not you've bought the right cable.

There is branding that's meant to be pulled on the plug. to tell you what's what. But of course, some manufacturers put their own logo on instead of the branding, and so that doesn't help with people. And then on the side of a laptop, you know, there's a limited space there to write what that receptor on the laptop can handle. I guess it's a combination of humans making assumptions about what things can do,

which are reasonable assumptions to make. You know, if it plugs in, you expect it to work. But of course, all the cables look the same, unless you know what the logo means, it's rife for confusion. All right. Let's talk about the logos because the USB implementers forum, which is the organization that maintains the USB standard and its specifications, aren't really great at keeping a clear message for consumers on what the cables they buy can actually do. But my colleague at the verge, Hyam Gartenberg, is great at deciphering and explaining what all of these USB specs are and what the logos mean and what they're used for. So let's bring them into talk.

Hi, I'm Gartenberg. You are senior reporter at The Verge. Also, the only person I personally know who is more obsessed with USBC than I am. Welcome. Good to be here. So we have talked a bit about the USB spec and how it works, but fundamentally what we're really talking about here is lots of cables that theoretically can do different things, even though they look the same. So what kind of specs can actually be labeled on a USBC cable? So broadly speaking, there's two types of things that a USBC cable can do. There is data and there is charging. Now, most cables do both, but up until USB 4, which is new, you didn't have to actually do either of these things. You could make a charging cable that didn't do data. You could do a data cable that, you know, didn't meet certain charging specs. So USBC describes the port, but there's a lot of things you can do with it.

Right. So let's stick with power to start. So what are the different labels we should look for, the different types of power that USBC can do? So when USBC first started, there were a lot of different specs. There are still a lot of weird, different little proprietary fast charging specs. There are bigger fast charging things. But the most important one and the one that's become the main one that virtually everyone uses in some capacity is USB power delivery or USBPD. Now, there are several versions of that. Newest is USB. PD3.1, which was announced in May. They started rolling out new logos and new documentation for it in September. And there are actually products shipping with it today, the new MacBook pros that Apple just released, do use USBPD 3.1 for the MagSafe ports, not the regular ports, just the MagSafe ports. Sure. And what does USBPD3.1 get us? So USB3P.1 gets you all the benefits of USBPD, which is the different tiers of charging. It is designed that the two devices can kind of handshake and go, I need 10 watts and your charger will go,

okay, I can give you 10 watts. So it does all that, but it ups the wattage considerably. So USBPD3, which is the one that came before this, was up to 100 watts, and was sort of the bottleneck for adding USBC to laptops, higher powered laptops for charging, because the most you get of it was 100 watts, the bigger laptops you have. Apple's old 16-inch literally was a 97-watt U.S. USBC charger, but you couldn't go past that. So this goes all the way up to 240, assuming you have a device, cable, and a brick that can go that high. Right. And so am I looking for USB PD3.1 on the box or the cable? Am I looking for like a color code? How do I know that my device, my cable,

and my brick are all capable of getting 240 watts through that entire chain? So the USB implementers form, which is the group that comes up with all these standards, is not the best at naming and not the best at branding. They are trying a different tack with this generation of stuff, which is they now have bespoke logos that are supposed to appear on certified PD3.1 devices and also certified USB4 devices, which is not the same thing as PD3.1. Okay. Which we'll get to you in a minute. And it's literally either a 240 watt, it'll be like a little sticker on your thing that this is. a cable that is capable of going up to 240. It's like a little USB. It has a thing. You can see it on our site. And they also have one for up to 60 watts. So you'll know this is either, you know, a quote unquote low power cable that's designed to charge, you know, lower power things. Or this is a high power cable that can charge your theoretical, you know, 240 watt gaming laptop. And for me, like the big thing with USBPD and this was a problem early, early on with USBC is there, like you mentioned the proprietary. charging standards. I think Qualcomm had one that was super weird. A bunch of Android phones were using

Wackadoo fast charging systems and not using standard USB PD. But by and large, it seems like we're at a place where most stuff is using the non-proprietary standards-based USB power delivery system. And it's just a matter of making sure that you look for the correct label on the box to make sure that your cable is capable of providing the power that your device is asking for. Exactly. Okay. So power could be worse. Could be worse. It's definitely like okay for the most part, as long as you're keeping an eye on things. What about data?

Because we also have new standards for transferring data. So data is where things get a little complicated because just because you have a USBC cable does not necessarily mean you're using the USB data transfer spec. And even if you are using the USB data transfer spec, it doesn't guarantee that you're using any particular version, except for USB 4.4. which in part was largely designed to fix a lot of these issues. There are many different USB specs. There are many different names. They have gone through various attempts to rebrand them. So we have all the way going through, you have USB 3.1, Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.2 gen 2, and USB 4.

Wonderful. Part of this is not as bad as it sounds because a lot of it is whenever they come up with a new standard. So when we have USB 3-2, USB-3-1, Gen 1 gets renamed to USB-3-2 Gen 1. Same with Gen 1-2 and Gen 2-2-2-2-by-2. A lot of this is just backporting because the new standard has to include all the previous standards so that if I get a USB3.2-gen-2-supporting cable and I plug it into my old headphones or my old computer that only supports the lower data transfer speed, everything still needs to work. And to a certain extent, you know, we're running through all the different names of all the

specs over the years, but this is a problem you actually kind of want to have. I mean, you want to have clearer branding, for sure. Yeah. But you want your cables to get faster over time, right? You want this to progress. The perfect opposite example is Lightning, which is the same cable, the same port, and hasn't updated its data transfer speed. and, you know, half a decade at least,

and transfers much, much, much slower than USBC does. Right. So this is a good kind of problem. It does lead to some confusion. And that, in part, is sort of what USB 4 is sort of trying to solve. Yeah, so why don't you talk about USB 4, what is trying to solve and what's good and maybe bad about it? Okay.

So USB 4 is the newest USB spec. And it does a couple things differently than like the four versions of USB 3.2 that existed before, which is, it is technically a super set of USB3.2 and Thunderbolt 3, which went open source in 2017. So it was previously Intel's own standard. Now it's open source, and a lot of that is what the foundation of USB 4 is. A couple things that make USB 4 different is you're no longer allowed to make USB type A cables or USBB cables. If it is USB 4, it has to be USBC.

Got it. Second, if you are doing charging, the charging has to support. support PD. Got it. So in theory, if you buy a USB4 cable, you know that it will have certain minimums for charging and certain minimums for data transfer, and those will be consistent across anything that is USB4 compatible. Got it.

Which is good, except it's not perfect, because when we mentioned before that you don't have to do both at the same time, so you don't have to do everything. So there's two different levels of USB4 data transfer. USB 4 goes all the way up to 40 gigabits per second, but there are actually two substanders. There's USB 4 20 gig bits per second, which, as the name implies, only goes up to 20 gigabits per second. And then there's USB 440 gigabits per second, which goes all the way to 40 gigwits per second. And there are also separate logos for those two things. So in theory, when you're looking at a USB4 cable or charger, well, USB4 cable for data transfer,

you're going to look at the cable and it'll say on the box, you'll look for 20 or 40, and you'll have an idea of whether you have the slower or faster cable, and then 60 or 240, which will give you an idea of whether you have the slower or faster charging. And part of the thinking here isn't just, oh, let's confuse people. It's that like making a full USB 4, 40 gigabit, 240 watt cable, it's just, it costs more, right? And so you could theoretically go buy something that only does 20 because you don't need the 40 because that's a lot. Or you could buy something that doesn't support all the way up to 240. You only need 100 or 15 or whatever.

because you can save a ton of money. Buying a full spec top of the line USB 4 cable supports everything is like buying an old Thunderbolt 3 cable. Exactly. There's limits on its length and it also costs a lot of money, right? USB 4 also does fix a couple of the other problems with the older USBC standards because it is built on Thunderbolt 3. So USB 4 by default will support things like audio and display port, which you did not necessarily

have to bundle in before on USB 3. but it's also a slow rollout. To my knowledge, there are no 240 watt USB 4 cables that you can just buy today. Except technically, I guess you could say maybe the MagSafe, although it's not for a gigabyte. MagSafe is just power. If you were to buy two MagSafe cables and cut the ends off and splice them together, you might have one, but please.

Actually, please, if you spend $160 on this and on this mad science experiment and you don't electrocate yourself, let me know if it works. Yeah, please, please be safe. I don't recommend trying this at home, but if you wanted to. So you briefly mentioned displayport, alt mode, and audio. So there's like standard data transfer, but USBC cables have also been used just for straight audio or for straight providing display via the displayport standard. That was not necessarily included before, but part of the point of USB4 is that all gets,

that all has to be part of the spec now. Exactly. That's sort of a trickle-down effect from Thunderbolt. Right. Because you have all these alt modes and these optional protocols that you can build in that you don't need to necessarily or you didn't need to. The logic sort of was, if I was building a pair of headphones or a battery pack, the battery pack doesn't need data transfer. For the most part, there are one or two battery packs that have firmware that you can update. But for the most part,

most battery packs don't need data. Yeah. My battery pack doesn't need a headphone jack. Right, right. Okay, so you roll up to Amazon.com or Best Buy or Walmart or whatever, and you see there's a USB 3.2 cable and USB 4 cable. Is it reasonable that you might just want to spend less money and get the 3.2 cable, is that a totally normal thing to do? Or should everybody be thinking, oh, I only want to buy USB 4 from now out if possible? I mean, as someone who likes to future-proof their stuff, I always try and buy the most, which is funny because now all my 100-watt cables are going to be worthless if I ever get a device that needs more than that. Yeah. I mean, it depends a lot on what you're using it for, you know, a one job fits all cable to hook your computer up to your monitor that'll do,

you know, audio and the whole USB hub that's built into your monitor and display port and charging it everything, make sure that you're getting the cable that you need for that. And it can be easier just to get a USB4 cable because you're pretty much guaranteed that that will work. If you want to avoid the hassle, that's probably your best solution. If you know what you're doing, if you, you know, just need something to charge your cell phone at night, you know, just want a long cable to stretch across the living room to, you know, charge your phone while you're watching Netflix. You're probably good with anything so long as it, you know, supports PD and the thing to really keep an eye on, and this is the thing that you know, you'll see on sellers on Amazon and in stores,

look at what the wattage that it supports is because not all PD cables support 100 watts, even. Some are 30 watts. Some are 60 watts. I have personally run into when I've been charging with cables and realize, like, my laptop wasn't charging because it was only a 30 watt cable because it was really old. Right. So this all sounds great. We've landed at USB4 is the one that you can safely buy, but you've brought up Thunderbolt a couple of times. And now Thunderbolt is Intel standard, and it has It's using the same USBC plug, at least with Thunderbolt 3. They open source Thunderbolt 3, so that's now part of USB 4. But there's a new version of Thunderbolt.

Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah. So that's Thunderbolt 4. And the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 is Thunderbolt is proprietary to Intel. Not that other device, other manufacturers can't use it. They show up on devices all the time. Again, Apple's new MacBook Pro's are Thunderbolt 4 ports. But if you want to make a Thunderbolt 4 device or a cable,

You need to go to Intel, and Intel has to approve it and test it and make sure that everything works. Right. And Thunderbolt is sort of the idea that the USB4 standard was sort of promising before, which is that it's just one cable. You don't need to worry about what you're getting or what you're doing or anything. If it has the Thunderbolt and a 4 on it, you can plug it into your Thunderbolt thing with the 4 on it, and you will be guaranteed. It'll support the 40 gigabits right off the bat.

It'll support the multiple displays. It'll support PCAE data transfer speeds up to a certain thing. It'll work with Thunderbolt 4 docks, which will let you have more ports. The flip side is that Thunderbolt 4 cables and Thunderbolt 4 accessories are really expensive. So it's sort of your one-shot fits all thing, except you're paying for that privilege. Right. The other weird quirk is Thunderbolt 4 was built on the original batch of USB 4. So it's cross-compatible with that in a lot of ways.

So it supports, you know, the USB 4 40 gigabit per second data transfer rate, which is the Thunderbolt 3-1. But USB 4 has a weird quirk, actually, where it is slightly better in theory in charging than Thunderbolt. Because Thunderbolt right now only does 100 watt charging because it has the old PD spec, because Thunderbolt 4 came out in July 2020, a full year before the USBIF actually introduced PD3.1 with this 240 spec. Got it. So if you are buying a new and at this point non-existent, if you're buying a laptop somewhere in the future and it charges at 240 watts, right now a Thunderbolt 4 cable theoretically does not charge that, which is actually a quirk you can see just to bring it

up again because it's the only device that's even a little bit using 3.1, PD3.1. On the 16-inch MacBook, the reason that you can only fast charge the 16-inch MacBook through that MagSafe port is because that's the only one that uses USB PD3.1. The other three are Thunderbolt ports, and those can still only charge at 100 watts, which isn't the full 140 that that 16-inch laptop needs to fast charge. Right. So in theory, we could say that that MagSafe port is a USB4 port, but it's not USBC. It's not really even USB because it's just power. It's just sort of a...

Yeah, so the MagSafe port doesn't do data. Like you can't plug your MagSafe cable into a USBC hard drive, and that's the perfect example of how you can use PD as a spec without necessarily using the USB 4 transfer and everything. Okay. Lightning round. If I have a Thunderbolt 4 cable, does it support everything that USB 4 does? Yes, except for the 240 watt charging. Got it. If I have a USB 4 cable, does it support everything Thunderbolt 3 does? Yes, but they are not entirely cross-compatible. All Thunderbolt 3 stuff should work with USB 4. But it's not necessarily backwards compatible because Thunderbolt 3 came first. So like if you have an older hub, it might not necessarily play well unless it's been updated, et cetera.

Got it. If I see a USBC cable sitting on my desk, what can I trust that it will do? There's no label on it. You can't trust that it will do anything in theory. It is probably a good bet that it will do data transfer at at least five gigavits per second and that it will charge at, you know, at least five watts, which is, the minimum data transfer rate of USB 3.1 Gen 1, which is the, you know, slowest and worst USBC cable that exists.

Anything past that, there's no real way to know unless it physically says on the cable has, you know, the USB IF branding that they've been encouraging people to use. Right. Or some other markings, you know, on the physical cable itself. Yeah, which nobody's doing. I've never seen this mark on the cable itself in my life, except maybe I'll see like the Thunderbolt. I'll occasionally see the display port one.

Like, I have a cable on my desk that has a display port one. There is, in theory, like, USB 420 and 41. Like, I have a nice picture of it from USBIF of what it could look like on a cable, but I've never seen it in person. But I also haven't seen a 240-watt cable yet. So maybe that's a new era. Final lightning run question. Are you happier with this system than with having every single cable does something different?

It has a different port and looks different, and you don't know if it, you know, you plugged it in the wrong way and whatever. Do you think we're better off with this USBC plug and these like progressing standards on top of the same cable year after year? I actually do think we're better off because at the end of the day, a lot of this does suck and is really confusing. But I think we're better off because a lot of this sucks. It's really confusing. The verge. I have a butt.

I have like a good, a good second half to this sentence. All right. If you are willing to, you know, play not entirely, play by the rules and play to the higher end and always assume the worst out of USBC. If you charge everything with an 100 watt PD charger, then I know that I can confidently travel with one brick and two cables and I can charge my laptop and my headphones and my Kindle and my switch and my battery pack. And I don't need to bring a separate charger for this and a separate charger for that. I don't need to worry about, you know, oh, did I bring the right USB cable? Did I bring the right thing? Everything works.

And if I need to plug this into that, I have one cable that'll do that. If I need to, you know, sync an e-book that I bought, I can do that. So the benefits do still outweigh the negatives, especially because, and this has been true for a while and we'll hopefully continue to be true, things are slowly getting better. The things are getting more consolidated when I first bought Nintendo Switch. Like, I couldn't figure out how to charge it with anything other than the charge it came in because the PD standard was very new. And things were out, battery packs were out, cables were out that didn't support P. And PD chargers were actually pretty expensive at the time. Now every charger in my house is a PD charger and I can charge my switch with my laptop charger and vice versa.

So things have been getting better. It's just been a slow march. There's a Kindle with USBC now, like that did not exist for a very long time. So it is a slow thing forward, but it is better. It's just still not great. And it's never going to happen on the iPhone? It's never going to happen on the iPhone. All right.

Well, here we go. I'm. Thank you so much for coming on the Vergecast. and explaining all of this to us. We will have more to explain about USBC, I'm sure, in the near future. I look forward to arguing about it then. Okay, so you've actually got the right cable. You're transferring data at 40 gigabytes per second.

You're ready to charge at 240 watts. That's great. Congratulations. You bought a cable. Unfortunately, that's still just the beginning. You still need the right ports on your actual devices, and you still need a charging brick that could support all the wattage that you want. And there are still a lot of devices that just haven't adopted USBC yet.

There are laptops with barrel plugs, gadgets with micro-usb, and, of course, the iPhone still uses Apple's lightning connector. See, for a lot of companies, it doesn't make sense to change over to the newest tech standard for a variety of reasons. If you have a hardware design that's been built around something like micro USB, it costs a lot of money to change that. And if you don't need to redesign your product or it wouldn't necessarily benefit from what USBC has to offer, it doesn't really make sense to spend all that development money to remake your product just to put a new port on it. Now, Rod Wippey, who we spoke to earlier, has seen USBC from its infancy. He was there at the very start of making new kinds of data speeds and power standards work. So I asked him, is the adoption rate for USBC just taking way too long?

It's a good question. I think it has taken longer than I expected, but I'm not surprised. How come? Doing USBC properly and supporting these 100 watts charging or 240 watts charging in the future, you need to put a chip in there for a start, right? Just to do 100 watts instead of 60 watts, you need to have a chip in the cable and you need to have chips at either end that can do this negotiation. To do high-speed data, you know, the 40 gigbits for second,

well these days, even inside a new laptop, just to get from the processor, which is sitting in the middle of the laptop, to the ports on either side, you need extra chips to redrive the 40-gibit signal. Oh, right, yeah. I mean, if you remember the first MacBook that came out with USBC, it had the USBC on one side only, right? Yep.

There's a reason for that. And it wasn't that they hate having ports on both sides? It's because if you want to have ports on both sides, then you need to put extra chips in there to redrive the signal the further distance to the other side. That's amazing. That's like less than a foot, but still... When you're going at 40 gigabits per second,

then 10 centimeters matters. So you can see that this is way more complicated than you assumed. It's not just, say, Microsoft resisting, putting USBC on the surface because they're worried people will get confused about whether or not they should use their phone charger to charge your laptop. It gets down to centimeters within the device itself. Even Apple who led the charge for USBC on laptops had this problem where they didn't want to spend the extra money to put extra ports all the way on the other side of the laptop.

There are still technical limitations to this technology, which have hindered adoption. Rod says that once you start going past two meter cables, for example, you start to stretch the boundaries of the technology and you start thinking about putting repeaters into the cable. But hey, you know, we've got U.S. USBC ports on both sides of the MacBook now, so progress. Anyway, speaking of Apple, as we mentioned before, MacBooks have fully incorporated the Thunderbolt 3 standard into USBC, and newer iPads have USBC on them, and that's great,

but again, the iPhone doesn't. And it seems more likely that the iPhone is going to end up with no ports before it ends up with a USBC port. But that hasn't stopped our next guest from adding USBC to, to the iPhone himself. I could see how that could possibly be done, and I thought that nobody was doing it. And so just one day I thought,

well, maybe I'm the guy who's going to do that. We're going to take a quick break for some ads, but when we come back, I talk to Ken Pionnell, a hardware hacker in Switzerland, about how he opened up an iPhone 10 and figured out how to replace the lightning port with USBC. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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to all the features mentioned in today's episode. clod. a.ai slash vergecast. Okay, we're back with the Vergecast USBC special. I'm about to talk to Ken Pionnell who cleverly built USBC

directly into his iPhone. So I guess if we could start with, can you tell me why you decided to pursue this project of getting USBC working on an iPhone? I think there's a lot of reasons. Like the first one, that's maybe the most relatable one, is that, like, as a consumer, you know,

I think it was in 2015. Apple came out with, like, the MacBook, and they really sold it as having courage and, like, going all in with this type C port, that it's going to be the port of the future, and that we only have this one connector to rule them all. And I was really, like, sold by that idea, you know? And then the years went by, and for some reason, this lightning port just stuck around and it didn't want to go.

And don't get me wrong, I'm a super fan of Apple. Like, I like what they do. But I never could be like full on into the ecosystem because there was always this thing that was bothering me. So I always had like an Android phone. And after a while, like I started to gain more skills and I could see like how that could possibly be done. And I saw that nobody was doing it. And so just one day, I thought, well, maybe I'm the guy who's going to do that. And I just went for it.

So you built a sort of an outboard thing for it so that you could just test to see that it worked. And you were tracing all the leads and whatnot. And you were pulling off little chips from Apple's own board and transferring it over. What was that process like? Did you sort of have a hunch it would work? Or was that part of the process of, well, let's see if this thing will even work, even with a, you know, big giant Frankenstein thing attached to the side of the phone? Yeah, so I thought if it works with the big Frankenstein thing, then there's no reason that it won't work if I redo it myself smaller. It's just a matter of time and dedication and like fixing the problems.

But in theory, if you see it work here with your own eyes and it's big, I know for a fact that there's a lot of stuff in here that are not useful, like the lightning connector. I can remove it. I can replace it with wires and things like that. So I knew then that I could get it done eventually. I just didn't know how long it would take. One of the really surprising things to me, I mean, maybe that's surprising, but just something I hadn't thought about is that you without working at a big company or whatever, you can go out and design a board and design a PCB and like have it manufactured for you.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that process? Because, you know, I was like, how do you fit the electronics in there? And like, I would have wires everywhere. I would never have occurred to me like, oh, wait, I could just go into cat. I can actually make a thing and have somebody manufacture it for me. So it's not too complicated. Like you said, you go into a CAD software. I think here the most difficult part was choosing the shape of the board

because my board bends 90 degrees two times. And so you really need to have some kind of like spatial awareness of like where it's going to go inside the phone and really imagine it. And once that's done, it's really like a flat surface. and then you place the components where they are, and then you run little traces. It's like little wires on them. And then you get like a file that you send to here. It was a company in China.

And they manufacture it for you. And then they send it to you. And then you can solder things on it. And yeah, it's pretty amazing what, like before you couldn't do that. But now for the last few years, there's really a lot of companies, like low-cost companies that came into the market. and that proposed those services. And like for the Do It Yourself community, it's really like awesome.

You can do things you couldn't do before. It really is incredible. Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to ask, why did you pick the iPhone 10? Was it just that it was like not too expensive? Or do you think that there was stuff on newer iPhones that would have made this project more complicated? So first I started like more than a year and a half ago, almost two years ago. Oh, wow. So I think back then it was like the iPhone 11, the latest iPhone.

and it was just I didn't want to pick the latest one because it was the most expensive and I went with the iPhone X. And also now looking back because I was thinking maybe I could port it to another iPhone like the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 or something like that. I'm not sure I'll be the person to do that because with like the repair community,

they have kind of like a war with Apple on authorized repairmen and unauthorized. And now they're really like putting serial numbers on parts. So you can't just like you could before buy a screen and swap it up yourself. And so that kind of annoyed me. I thought if I break something, which I did in iPhone X. I broke the screen.

I broke a few things that I had to change multiple times. If I need to have those specialized tools just to change my screen once, it doesn't make sense. Right. And the iPhone X didn't have those problems. So also it made a great fit for this project. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When you manage to get USB in and working and got everything working, do you know if you were able to get, I don't know, faster data speeds?

One of the problems with lightning is its data speeds are slower. I'm assuming that it's just, you know, it's the same interface internally with the board you made. So it basically still had USB 2 or whatever lightning speeds are. But I'm wondering, were there any other functional differences that you notice once you switch it over? So that's a question I get a lot. I think so first about data, there's a limitation inside the iPhone. where the connection to the main board only has, you could say, two wires, two data wires, and that's the limiting factor.

Like, I don't see myself being able to change that. That would take... You'd have to replace the whole main board. It'd be your architecting the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. So if you want to get into faster data transfers, USB 3, for example, then you need multiple pairs of wires. And USB 2 only had one, so they're called D plus and D minus data plus.

and the data minus signals. And so in the iPhone, all the iPhones until the latest ones all have this one pair. And so that's the limiting factor. You can't change that. So yeah, the project is stuck at USB 2. Then about accessories, can you plug in a USBC hub and then put the HDI? Sadly not. You can't do that in this mod.

Simply because the accessories that will use all have a different chip inside the accessory. So the way I see it at least is if I wanted to include all those accessories, I would have to include like this little chip inside my special board and then have some kind of logic. Like I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying it would take me maybe an extra two years to add other accessories. So then I thought charging and data is already pretty good. Then if I have more time, I'll do something. I'll probably add something else. Yeah, I've wondered if it'd be possible to take, say, the USB connection off an iPad, like the new iPad Mini, and take those parts and plug them into an iPhone, if it would just somehow work, but it sounds like it probably wouldn't.

It'd be a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, I thought about this in the beginning. So in the iPad, I think what changes is that there is a software change. So iPad OS knows it's directly talking a USB language. And so what's useful inside the iPhone, like the hardware, would just be. the little connector, but the little connector, I can order it for $2 of any website. It's no different than the others. So the thing in the iPad is that the software already knows it's talking USB and then

goes through the USB connector, whereas here, if I would want to do something like that, I would have to change the software on the iPhone so that it knows it talks USB and not lightning. Right. But that would change completely the scope of the project. They would be like jailbreaking the iPhone or something like that. The whole thing. And so here it was only a hardware act where we took the chip that does the conversion in the cable and we integrated it inside the iPhone so that it does the job for us without having to worry about software or anything like that.

Were you surprised at your ability to, I don't know, fit the larger USBC plug at the bottom of the phone? You know, you did a really clever thing to mill out the space. finding the space inside for your adapter. Were you concerned early on? Like, oh, wait, Apple goes with lightning. They must have to because it's thinner. There's no way this could work. Or just from taking apart iPhones, did you know, like, come on, this is actually possible?

So it worried me a little bit at the beginning because it does look bigger. Well, it is bigger because I had to drill out the hole. But when I went to choose actually the connector that I was telling you about, like actually order it on a website, just that little connector. metallic piece. Every time you order those components, there is like 2D drawings with the dimensions. And so I went through maybe like 50 of them or something like that to look at their dimensions and compare them with the lightning connector. And I was trying to find one that could actually maybe be smaller than the lightning connector. And I did, in the end, I did find one that was

smaller. So the connector where you plug in the cable is bigger. But from the outside, like the the volume that the connector takes, the one I chose is actually smaller than the lightning connector. And so that gave me some extra room to then do a little 3D printed bracket that holds the connector so it doesn't, when you plug in a cable, it feels strong. Right. So yeah, I think that's pretty funny to know about that in the end is that my connector is actually smaller than the lightning connector. And so you put all this on GitHub and there was a step where you had to get like you had to order some extra parts. Can you talk about the process of sort of putting your process out there in the world so that anybody might theoretically be able to redo what you did.

So when I was trying to reverse engineer this little connector that Apple builds for their cables, right, I saw that it was kind of, it wasn't impossible to do, but it was kind of hard to do because they make it so it's hard. They make it so people don't go put their nose in that cable and see how it works because then maybe someone in China will make a fake connector and then sell it on their their website and then they lose revenue for those accessory sales. And then I thought if I continue pursuing this connector, then it's first, I don't think I'll be able to make it open source because if I do, then I'm basically putting out the layout of what Apple builds. It's kind of like I put the plans out there, how to remake what they do, right?

And then here I would definitely get in trouble. Yeah, regardless of whether or not you are right for the, you know, various. DMCA-style rules. Apple would not be afraid to go after you and you don't want to deal with that hassle, even if you were in the right? So I knew from the beginning if I did that, I would get in trouble. And then I started, I was doing some research on the connector. And then one day I stumbled across an article that was saying, hey, actually, someone did what you want to do already. Someone hacked that cable and they're selling fake cables on the internet for cheaper so that you can charge your iPhone or your AirPods with that case. and it won't give you an error message saying this cable is not original. Then it clicked in my mind, hey, maybe I can hack them. I can hack the hackers. And so then when I post my plans online, I'm not posting the plans of what Apple did.

I'm posting the plans of the people who hacked Apple. So I'm not really doing anything wrong, right? Yeah, that's great. And why did you post the plans? I mean, you know, you could have been like, look what I did. But like, was it important to you to put this up? on GitHub instead of, you know, just like a blog post or something else? Well, here, you know, there's files, right?

There's the schematics for the electronics. And I thought probably some people who want to contribute to that. And then they can actually add their own files to it. Of course, I need to look into it see if it's good and then I can add it. But then if it's like a hub, well, it's called GitHub. But if it's like a hub for this project, then people can go on it and maybe they can download their own files and then make their own version of it. modified however they want. I think that's very interesting. Are you using the iPhone that you

modded as your phone? I've used it for a few days just to see that it wouldn't burn in my hand. But no, I'm using a Samsung phone as a daily driver. If you could just speak briefly, what do you think of USBC itself as a spec as a standard? Do you really like it? I know Apple was evangelizing it early on, but do you think it's a good plug? Do you think it's a good plug? Do you think it's a standard or is it just that it's the thing that everyone's using and that's why you wanted to get it going on the iPhone? I think it's an aspect that sometimes not talking about too much on why it's, it would be interesting to have only one connector. Like, you can't save things only when they go your way. Like, you can't stop including a charger in your iPhone in the box and say it's to reduce

waste. And then for other things like the connector, you act the complete opposite. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I think it's important to be consistent with what you say and with what you think. And I think it's an important aspect to talk about. Do you think it's worth a trade-off of having the same plug, given all these extra complications and things you need to know about? Because in the old world, every plug was a different shape. And so you knew what the plug would do based on its shape. Do you think that we're better off having all the plugs have that same USB shape, but you need to understand what the cable or the devices are capable of? I think we're better off if it's safe.

So, I mean, if the worst that can happen is that you charge your MacBook very slowly instead of at the normal speed, I think it's worth it. Yeah. But I do think that in the mid to long term, there needs to be solutions to that. And I think that's things that I will explore in my channel if it's something that is of interest to people. And I know it's of interest to me because I'm here talking to you about this right now. I'll definitely do some more research about that and maybe propose ideas that are mine or not mine and get people talking about the subject. Well, cool, man. It's a really fun project. I'm really glad you did it. It's really nice, if nothing else, to be able to point to it and be like, yep, see, like nothing. Nothing exploded. The world didn't come to an end. The phone still works fine. Nobody got hurt. It still fits. So if nothing else, congrats for showing everybody that it's absolutely possible.

Thank you. Thank you so much. So now Ken probably has the only iPhone of the world that has a proper USBC port on it outside of Apple's labs. And I am, I have to admit, insanely jealous. So look, we know that Apple doesn't want to put USBC on an iPhone. But if they want to keep ports on it in general, they might actually be ordered to make the switch. The EU Commission is proposing common USBC charging ports for all new smartphones, iPads, tablets, cameras and headphones. In terms of waste, this is significant because this measure will allow us to save 1,000 tons of electronic waste and 2,600 tons of raw materials per year.

There is also the impact on CO2 emissions. It will save 180,000 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. So the European Union may speed up the process of forcing companies to adopt USBC, but speed up as a relative term because the European Union has been talking about charging standards for devices for around a decade or so. In fact, what are the reasons that a bunch of phones switched over to micro-usb from all of the proprietary charging standards was the European Union tried to force that as the standard, and now we're moving on to USBC.

So now they're pressuring Apple to switch the iPhone over to USBC, and in theory that could happen, but the reality could turn out to be much, much different. And actually, I also talked to Heim Gartenberg a little bit about all this. So the proposal is mandatory USBC on all devices for smartphones and other electronics, common charging port. The goal here is to cut down on E-waste by letting people reuse their existing chargers and cables so that you don't have to get a new charger every time. Devices won't have to include chargers in the box anymore, which is a trend we've already started to see with companies like Apple and Samsung.

And it notably would only apply to wired ports, not wireless ones. So this is, as you said, it's really the culmination of like a digital. decades-long process. The EU actually did have a similar thing where they had required micro-USB, but that original voluntary thing was less strict and also allowed, you know, the loophole of you could include an adapter in the box. Right. Which Apple did for a while when you bought an iPhone in the EU, it would come in addition to a lightning cable. It would include in the box like a $15, you know, little freebie of a lightning to micro USB cable so that You could use your existing chargers and plugs with that device, which is really the thing that the EU is looking to try and cut down on.

Under this proposed rule, you would not be allowed to sell a device. You know, if it has a form of wireless charging, it has to have USBC. So, for example, Apple, in theory, could make, you know, an iPhone EU edition that had a USBC port and a lightning port. But in theory, under the rules, it would not be allowed to just offer a lightning port. Would they be allowed to offer a phone that has only wireless charging? Only wireless charging would be allowed. Okay. The exception here includes the fact that it only applies to a common wired port.

If a device doesn't offer wired charging, it is not required to fall in. It doesn't have to abide by that rule. I see. The proposal is right now also just a proposal. It still needs to pass a vote in the European Parliament. And then if it is actually adopted as law, device manufacturers, like Apple, will then have two years to comply with the new rules. So there could still be a fair amount of time before this actually impacts. Don't necessarily expect the iPhone 13 to suddenly have USBC port. Yeah. So how do you think it's

going to shake out? I mean, it took us this long to get to the proposal that Apple is strenuously fighting. I know you're not an expert in European law, but do you foresee Apple like saying, sure, you know what? You're right. We're changing our mind. On the one hand, there's not a lot of wiggle room in this proposal, which would require either Apple will have to. to ship a USBC iPhone. It could limit it geographically. It could only sell them in the EU. It could take an approach similar to the bundled in adapters that it offered at the time. I assume Apple as a company will be doing everything it can, you know, from a lobbying and legal side to make sure that this doesn't actually become law. It also could try and jump to a proprietary wirelessly charging

iPhone. The issue there is sort of getting the genie back in the bottle because Apple can sell a wirelessly charging iPhone or a wireless protocol iPhone, but it already supports Chi on its stuff, which is a universal charging standard. It's actually the first and really only, you know, cross Apple universal charging standard that you can use to charge an iPhone and something else. Yeah. I mean, there are ways to transfer data wirelessly right next to each other. Like, there have been phones, the failed essential phone that actually literally had a little near-field wireless USB thing. So you could attach things to it and it will communicate over a relatively slow, but it was there, like wireless USB. So these things are possible. We just have no idea

how aggressively Apple is pursuing them. Yeah, but the other issue is that there's no real wireless solution that exists yet. That's better than wire charging. There's a reason we use wired charging for things, which is transferring data wirelessly is not as fast as transferring it wired. Transferring power wirelessly is not as efficient. And even if Apple can circumvent those two issues and come up with a super fast, super power-efficient way of doing power and data transfer, it also then has the trap of its own argument, which is switching away from lightning to something else will generate a huge amount of e-waste and it'll inconvenience customers. Switching from lightning to a new proprietary magnetic wired thing with a dock and a cable and

everything will generate a huge amount of e-waste and generate more waste than just switching to USBC would. Okay, we have learned a lot here about USBC, its advantages, its disadvantages, and the wacky things that makes us do in a confusing tech market. So here we are, but where are we going? What's next for USBC? How will the technology advance? I asked Rod Whitby. I think the next thing will be higher data rates. As we've seen, the power go from 100 watts to 240 watts. The data rates go from 5 to 10 to 20 to 40. I expect you'll see 60 gigabits a second with a Thunderbolt 5 or something. I've got no internal information, of course, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to disclose it.

But that's just what you expect. People always want faster data, always want bigger video screens, which means more data being transferred across the cable. So I think at the moment, the research is there to be able to send more data across the same cable. And the spec is now there

to be able to send higher power across the same cable. So I think we'll see 240 watt 60 gigabits-per-second data cable as the next step. See, this is why I keep bringing in Rod, because he's got me excited for the near future. But he also makes me take a step back and realize how we actually got here with USBC. The emphasis, I guess, is there is a lot of work that happens

through a lot of engineers in a lot of different companies to make sure that when you plug a USB cable into a computer, that it actually does something. And it's incredible the number of ways that it could possibly not work, but somehow through all this hard work, usually, you know, 98% of the time, just does work. Here's how I deal with all of this confusion.

I just make sure that I know which of my USBC cables are good and can do the things that I need, and I e-waste the bad ones. For me, I know that the cables that I get from Apple and Google tend to work better, and they also happen to be white cables, so I keep those cables around for when I need a good USBC cable. But for the cheap stuff, like charging earbuds or cameras or whatever, I have a bunch of cheap cables that happen to be black. And if I need something truly reliable, like the main cable I plug in my laptop with,

Thunderbolt cables usually have a little lightning bolt on them. So I keep an eye out for that. Is that a perfect solution? No, not even a little. But is it better to have fewer cables? Yes, actually. It really is. And as we're going to see in this series of special Tuesday Vergecast episode,

new standards and technologies do solve real problems, but they don't solve them quickly, and they do bring up new problems of their own in the meantime. And the truth is, we live in the meantime. It's always the meantime. Thank you for listening to this USBC spectacular. We brought the term back. See what I did there. You're welcome.

I'm sorry. This episode of The Vergecast was made by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and me, Dieter Bone. Special thanks to Heim Gartenberg, Ken Pionnell, and Rod Whitby, who gets a second extra thanks for working on WebOS internals back of the day. Thank you to all of them for alighting us along this journey. The Vergecast will be back on Friday, and my Tuesday episodes will return next week.