and Orange or Yellow are usually “always on” and/or 2.4 amp or some other kind of thing like that.

It’s the variety and surprise here that adds novelty and excitement to life.

https://www.usbmemorydirect.com/blog/usb-port-colors/

The blue USB port is also known as USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed (SS) USB. It was introduced in 2008 and offers a data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps, which is more than 10 times faster than USB 2.0. In addition, it can transfer data in both directions simultaneously.

I definitely have a number of devices that use newer-than-USB 3.0 and use blue.

The teal USB port is also known as the USB 3.1 Gen 1 or SuperSpeed+ (SS+) USB. Released in 2013, it supports up to 10 Gbps data transfer speed, which is twice as fast as USB 3.0. The color is similar to USB 3.0, but it will appear as slightly more green-toned than the classic blue of 3.0. This is the easiest way to differentiate USB 3.0 vs 3.1 ports.

I don’t think any of my devices actually use teal, regardless of what they support. Oh…hmm. Wait, I think my last desktop motherboard did that.

goes to investigate

Yeah, it has teal and blue ports.

My current motherboard uses blue or red for everything USB-A, so clearly isn’t using blue to indicate “USB 3.0”, and labels every port, blue or red, in English as “USB 3.2”. So it clearly isn’t using the port color to indicate purely speed.

The red USB port is generally classified as USB 3.2, which was released in 2017. However, it can also be used to indicate a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.

Another source of novelty and excitement.

Yellow USB Port Meaning

The yellow USB port is another color that can indicate either USB 3.2 or USB 3.1 Gen 2.

So much excitement.

The yellow USB port is more commonly found on laptops while the red USB port is more commonly found on desktop computers. This is because the yellow USB port indicates that it is always on, meaning it will continue to draw power even when the computer is turned off or in sleep mode. As a result, you can generally use it to charge other devices, such as smartphones.

Honestly, I didn’t really have an issue with USB type A ports. They worked fine, and it was only a minor inconvenience to orient them the right way. I cared far more about capabilities of the port (speed, power delivery, etc) than I did about the actual port.

I believe that the reason that the smaller USB variants showed up was because some devices were just too small to physically accommodate a USB-A plug. Think MP3 players and later – very importantly – smartphones.

For the vast majority of consumer electronics, USB-A is fine. But for things that are as thin as possible, usually to fit into a pocket, it starts to bump up against limits.

That said, micro-USB sucks in every way. The awkward “is this the right way?” thing is way worse than with USB-A, it’s not meaningfully smaller than mini-USB, the port is incredibly hard to clean (and it always gets dirty), and the connector seems to break all the time. I would’ve been totally fine with moving everything to mini-USB instead.

Mini-USB put the tensioners – the bit that wears out over time, is the bottleneck on the lifetime of the thing – on the (expensive) device rather than the (cheap) cable. Micro-USB and USB-C didn’t make that mistake.

Like, I think that there was a legitimate reason to fix that one way or another.

You’ll want to run USB PD, not to be confused with the USB “P” and “D” label which refers to DisplayPort, not to be confused with some other ways of transporting DisplayPort over USB. And you’ll want charging support, so look for the USB lightning bolt that means “USB charging”, not to be confused with the different USB lightning bolt that means “Thunderbolt”, which isn’t the same thing as the Lightning connector that is about the same size as the USB-C connector and was used in a similar role on various devices.

Piece of cake.

Oh, okay, makes sense, thanks.

Would be nice to have a standard indicator on the cable side of things.

There nothing in the comment that you are responding to or OP’s original post that is specific to USB-C. OP references USB-A and USB-C both, and the comment you responded to doesn’t specify USB-C.

No USB cable has “gigabit speed”. It probably has 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 standard).

What? I’m either misunderstanding you or this statement isn’t correct. Having USB cables that can move data at gigabit rates has been common for quite some years.

Here’s the latest stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4

Bitrate

20 Gbit/s
40 Gbit/s
80 Gbit/s
120/40 Gbit/s asymmetric

And then you have the standards for not just raw data speed, but also what other modes are supported, for information to be seamlessly tunneled through the cable and connection in a mode that carries signals other than the data signal spec for USB.

Not to mention power-only cables to avoid the security issues associated with cables that permit data transfer.

It’s also important to permit use of adapters for backwards compatibility. Like, if we stop having computers with A ports, there are still gonna be some very expensive devices out there that have A ports. You aren’t going to throw out your electron microscope with a USB A port because the USB guys have decided that USB-C being reversible is cool.

I guess they could have a USB certification body, kinda like UL is for wall power devices, and require that a device have an certification ID number on it that you could look up in their online database to qualify. I mean, you could forge a fake number that doesn’t map to anything, but I feel like that’s a higher bar than just throwing a USB symbol on there. Like, you gotta know that you’re doing something fraudulent in that case.

investigates

Huh.

Apparently UL does certify USB devices. I have no idea how to tell whether a UL-marked device of a given age is certified to do what from the logo alone, though. I guess you could look it up with UL.

https://www.ul.com/services/ul-taiwan-usb-test-lab

I bet that only my high-power USB chargers have it, though. Honestly, I didn’t even know that they covered USB, wouldn’t have looked for a UL mark on USB devices.

investigates

Well, my Logitech F710 gamepad does have a UL mark. That’s some proprietary wireless standard, uses AA batteries. Dunno whether they certified it for wireless or power safety or whatever.

looks further

I have a wired USB gamepad with a bunch of Chinese characters, the URL “www.izdtech.com”, no USB labels, and no UL mark.

I have a wired/wireless USB 8Bitdo gamepad with a CE mark, USB symbols, and no UL mark (I understand that CE doesn’t work like UL. It doesn’t indicate that any independent organization has tested the device, just is a concise way to state that the device manufacturer states that the device conforms to some set of standards).

I have a 100W USB PD “Nekteck” charger with a UL mark and some ID number that looks to be associated with that, no CE mark, an FCC mark that I assume is related to RF interference compliance, an enormous USB standard mark with the 100 watt capability listed, and some sort of mark with a box inside another box that I don’t recognize.

I have an SIIG USB audio interface that has no USB labels, a CE mark, an FCC mark, and no UL mark.

I have a USB-powered audio mixer that has no USB labels, no FCC mark, no UL mark and a CE mark.

I have a laptop USB charger that has no USB labels, a CE mark, multiple UL marks, one of which appears to be in some sort of teardrop-looking thing, some “UK CA” mark that I assume is some kind of UK regulatory body. It’s got that same mysterious “box in a box” mark that I saw before, “VI” in a circle, a picture of a house, some “NYCE” mark, and a “NOM” mark.

I bet that most people have basically no idea what any of this means. I probably know what more of it means than the average person, but definitely not enough to extract a whole lot of information from this. And all of these have a different set of marks; there is no least-common-denominator mark.

clear text labels

The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know it.

The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there’s more push for using symbols, which…can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.

Maybe “STOP” or “ON” and “OFF” or something aren’t that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. “ON”, “OFF”, “STOP”, “YES”, “NO”, “CANCEL”, “POWER”, “ERROR”, “RESET”, “UP”, “DOWN”, maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has “CERTIFIED”, hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?

Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that’d be for the US market. Okay, it’s easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can’t recognize a single Chinese character.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I speak English. I’d rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don’t feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.

At least they are all physically compatible.

They mostly support an electrical least-common-denominator (like, I have USB devices that won’t accept USB PD for charging below a given level), but they definitely aren’t all physically-compatible. There are a lot of physical USB connectors.

I’d also add that while I have rarely had problems with it – only came up with one USB-powered analog audio mixer that had less-than-amazing power circuitry and bled noise from dirty power being provided by USB through into the audio signal, and where I put it on a dedicated charger – USB power can be stupendously dirty. I was watching some guy with an oscilloscope investigate various devices, and all those sensitive devices are accepting all kinds of craziness in terms of power. I’m surprised that USB power sources aren’t required to provide some hard guarantees on what they can do in terms of load and response.

My headphones (Sennheiser Momentum 4) have Bluetooth support. When using Bluetooth mode with the latest firmware update, they sporadically shut down while using in Bluetooth Multipoint mode.

I used headphones for decades very happily with a 1/8th inch jack.

They weren’t perfect.

• Some devices used a 1/4 inch jack. This at least was electrically-compatible, so one just needed a cheap, appropriately-shaped piece of metal to adapt them.

• The 1/8th inch jack connector took up enough space that the smartphone guys eventually mostly banished it from phones, to try to get a bit more space in the device.

• There wasn’t a standard impedance. While most consumer devices used more-or-less the same impedance (and if you had to, you could just adjust the volume up or down slightly with different headphones) some higher-end headphones required a headphones amplifier that could push more power.

• When you plugged a device in, it briefly shorted the connector, and made a lot of noise.

• It wasn’t wireless (which could be seen as a minus or plus, depending upon whether you wanted ability to walk away from a computer in exchange for a set of other complexities and issues).

• It couldn’t transmit power (well, not much; there was a convention for doing so that didn’t become widespread). That became more significant with the rise of headphones with active noise cancellation, which would need at least some way to get power to the headphones.

But honestly, those were mostly pretty minor problems. Headphones just worked in virtually all cases.

I didn’t have to worry about whether-or-not my headphones supported a given sampling rate, the number of devices that could connect to my headphones, wireless interference, or physical plug compatibility aside from the 1/8th inch and 1/4 inch issue (well, and occasionally 2.5mm headset connectors on phones). USB audio didn’t resolve the calibrated volume issue, one of the few annoyances I had with the analog connector. I have one set of Bluetooth headphones that start breaking up when I leave the room with the transceiver and another that work flawlessly across the house. I have charging rates to worry about, and whether the device is smart enough to have a battery management system capable of prolonging battery life by shutting off charging at appropriate points. The protocol and physical connector for telephone jacks has changed twice over the past hundred+ years, once to add a ring (for stereo) and once to move from 1/4 inch to 1/8th inch. The Bluetooth and USB standards, while providing for some level of backwards compatibility, have changed like some people change socks. There are different audio protocols (and in some cases competing audio codecs, like LDAC vs aptX). Lossy compression becomes an issue with Bluetooth. Some devices don’t support some sampling rates; analog headphones don’t care. Having (effectively) zero-latency pass-through mixing is guaranteed doable with any analog headphones with the appropriate mixer, so that one can hear some other audio source live; that’s not an option with Bluetooth or USB headphones.

I do like active noise cancellation, and the wireless functionality can occasionally be handy (though in general, it isn’t a game-changer for me). But I feel like the user experience has gotten a lot more problematic, in general.

With some devices, I assume that they’re trying to save a bit of money.

With the MBP, I’m pretty sure that they just don’t want to disrupt the designer’s vision of the aesthetic.

the colors are just for aesthetics.

Blue is a convention to indicate USB 3. Of course, not everyone actually implements that, and USB-C ports don’t, as far as I know, do that at all, just USB-A.

My current desktop does both – the case has USB ports on the top that come off a USB header from the motherboard, which have a simple number “3.0” pointing at its USB-A ports in front, but uses black plastic for them. The motherboard’s USB connectors in back use the “blue plastic” convention on its USB-A 3 ports, and black plastic on its USB-A 2 ports. The motherboard also labels the USB 3 ports by having a text label reading “USB 3.2”, which isn’t listed on OP’s set of symbols, and puts symbols on them.

Last I looked, these (and the “blue plastic for USB 3” convention) weren’t mandated by the spec. So it’s not that they’re violating the spec, but that they’re optional.

I mean, they fixed that with USB-C (after introducing one small USB port, mini-USB, that wasn’t reversible, with the tensioners that wear out on the expensive (device) side and and then introducing micro-USB which fixed the tensioners but still wasn’t reversible).

I’d personally kind of like to have magnetic breakaway connectors or similar so that I can’t damage devices if they fall, especially given that micro-USB and USB-C aren’t the most-physically-robust of connectors. Adapters with proprietary ways to do this exist:

https://www.amazon.com/MoKo-Magnetic-Adapter-Straight-Thunderbolt/dp/B0CGLM6PYN

But they aren’t part of the USB spec. If they ever switch to something like that, we’re gonna have another phase of incompatibility.

deleted by creator

I discovered that my Thinkpad apparently supports charging from all of the (unlabeled) USB-C ports after I inadvertently started it charging from my cell phone’s (unlabeled) USB-C port.