Ethernet, USB, HDMI, DisplayPort.
Why are there so many different kinds of cables and connectors?
I mean, think about it. All these cables carry digital signals,
which are just ones and zeros. And with the newest version of USB 4
carrying up to a whopping 80 gigabits per second,
why can't we just have one cable for everything, whether it's USB or something else?
Well, there are actually some pretty good reasons. And as long as we're talking about USB,
looking at the history of USB specifically is a good place to start in answering this question.
Think about how many things do use USB, mice, keyboards,
game controllers, printers, you name it. But in the past, there was a very specific connector
for every one of these devices, with USB being, in part,
an attempt to bring most computer peripherals under the same umbrella.
But USB had its own limitations, at least in the early years of the spec.
Most of the gadgets that connected through USB didn't need super high-speed data transfer.
I mean, it doesn't exactly take much for a keystroke
to travel down a wire. However, USB simply wouldn't cut it
for the very important use case of digital video,
like the one you're watching right now. For example, a 1080p uncompressed video signal
at 60 frames per second, basically the default
for mainstream PCs, takes just under 3,000 megabits
per second of bandwidth. This is way more than the USB 2.0 speed
of 480 megabits per second, or the USB 1.1 speed
of 12 megabits per second.
So instead, DVI, which was designed specifically
for video in 1999, had a single link speed
of just under 4,000 megabits per second.
Bit of a different league. By the time USB 3.0 came around,
offering 5,000 megabit or five gigabit per second speeds,
DVI was fully ingrained in the market, and HDMI was starting to become popular
for monitors as well. And even though USB is now capable
of supporting very high-quality video in terms of bandwidth,
this capability has to be implemented by the display itself, which costs more money
than just putting in an existing HDMI or DisplayPort connector that we know just works,
except that DisplayPort sucks sometimes. Not to mention that consumers could very easily be confused
if they try to connect a USB monitor to a computer that has a different implementation of USB-C
that doesn't support video out at all. This is one of the drawbacks of having one port
to rule them all. It's just, you don't know what it does.
But lest we go on and on at length about why there aren't more USB monitors,
let's talk about Ethernet is another standard that you might think should be superseded by USB.
The simplest reason it hasn't been has to do with cable length this time, not bandwidth.
The maximum cable length for gigabit or 10 gigabit Ethernet is 100 meters,
whereas the max recommended length for USB is between one and three meters,
depending on which revision and what kind of speed you want. Beyond these short distances,
you'd have signal attenuation, meaning degraded speeds,
which would be a huge problem for networking as those cables often need relatively long runs.
Think about connections between servers far away from each other in a data center
or routing cables inside of the walls for Ethernet jacks in a house or an office building.
Ethernet cables are generally simpler to manufacture than USB and their physical construction
means that they can support these long distance runs at a lower cost.
USB is probably not gonna take over anytime soon for that. But one common type of connection
that we haven't mentioned yet is the analog connection,
which is commonly used for audio applications. Think about the three and a half millimeter stereo jack
your headphones use or used to use, or the RCA cables for your amplifier.
Speakers and headphones rely on varying analog voltages
in order to drive them and specifically create the sounds you hear,
meaning there's not a way to directly replace these connections with something digital like USB.
Even USB gaming heads that still require internal digital
to analog conversion in order to work. So if you're using speakers or headphones
without internal logic, there's gonna be an analog cable somewhere in the mix.
Bottom line, even though it seems like we could technically have one connector for everything,
concerns about the cost, the communications protocol
and even the construction of the different cables and jacks
means that they're still good at different things. That doesn't mean that the number of connectors
and cables we use won't continue to gradually decrease over time, but I wouldn't expect a truly universal
electronics connector anytime soon. Besides, think about how hard it would be
to give tech support to your normal family and friends over the phone or something or a video
if every connector looked the same. It's hard enough as it is.
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with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.