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Ethernet, USB, HDMI, DisplayPort.

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Why are there so many different kinds of cables and connectors?

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I mean, think about it. All these cables carry digital signals,

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which are just ones and zeros. And with the newest version of USB 4

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carrying up to a whopping 80 gigabits per second,

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why can't we just have one cable for everything, whether it's USB or something else?

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Well, there are actually some pretty good reasons. And as long as we're talking about USB,

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looking at the history of USB specifically is a good place to start in answering this question.

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Think about how many things do use USB, mice, keyboards,

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game controllers, printers, you name it. But in the past, there was a very specific connector

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for every one of these devices, with USB being, in part,

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an attempt to bring most computer peripherals under the same umbrella.

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But USB had its own limitations, at least in the early years of the spec.

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Most of the gadgets that connected through USB didn't need super high-speed data transfer.

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I mean, it doesn't exactly take much for a keystroke

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to travel down a wire. However, USB simply wouldn't cut it

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for the very important use case of digital video,

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like the one you're watching right now. For example, a 1080p uncompressed video signal

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at 60 frames per second, basically the default

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for mainstream PCs, takes just under 3,000 megabits

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per second of bandwidth. This is way more than the USB 2.0 speed

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of 480 megabits per second, or the USB 1.1 speed

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of 12 megabits per second.

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So instead, DVI, which was designed specifically

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for video in 1999, had a single link speed

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of just under 4,000 megabits per second.

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Bit of a different league. By the time USB 3.0 came around,

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offering 5,000 megabit or five gigabit per second speeds,

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DVI was fully ingrained in the market, and HDMI was starting to become popular

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for monitors as well. And even though USB is now capable

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of supporting very high-quality video in terms of bandwidth,

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this capability has to be implemented by the display itself, which costs more money

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than just putting in an existing HDMI or DisplayPort connector that we know just works,

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except that DisplayPort sucks sometimes. Not to mention that consumers could very easily be confused

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if they try to connect a USB monitor to a computer that has a different implementation of USB-C

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that doesn't support video out at all. This is one of the drawbacks of having one port

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to rule them all. It's just, you don't know what it does.

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But lest we go on and on at length about why there aren't more USB monitors,

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let's talk about Ethernet is another standard that you might think should be superseded by USB.

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The simplest reason it hasn't been has to do with cable length this time, not bandwidth.

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The maximum cable length for gigabit or 10 gigabit Ethernet is 100 meters,

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whereas the max recommended length for USB is between one and three meters,

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depending on which revision and what kind of speed you want. Beyond these short distances,

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you'd have signal attenuation, meaning degraded speeds,

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which would be a huge problem for networking as those cables often need relatively long runs.

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Think about connections between servers far away from each other in a data center

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or routing cables inside of the walls for Ethernet jacks in a house or an office building.

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Ethernet cables are generally simpler to manufacture than USB and their physical construction

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means that they can support these long distance runs at a lower cost.

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USB is probably not gonna take over anytime soon for that. But one common type of connection

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that we haven't mentioned yet is the analog connection,

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which is commonly used for audio applications. Think about the three and a half millimeter stereo jack

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your headphones use or used to use, or the RCA cables for your amplifier.

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Speakers and headphones rely on varying analog voltages

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in order to drive them and specifically create the sounds you hear,

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meaning there's not a way to directly replace these connections with something digital like USB.

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Even USB gaming heads that still require internal digital

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to analog conversion in order to work. So if you're using speakers or headphones

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without internal logic, there's gonna be an analog cable somewhere in the mix.

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Bottom line, even though it seems like we could technically have one connector for everything,

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concerns about the cost, the communications protocol

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and even the construction of the different cables and jacks

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means that they're still good at different things. That doesn't mean that the number of connectors

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and cables we use won't continue to gradually decrease over time, but I wouldn't expect a truly universal

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electronics connector anytime soon. Besides, think about how hard it would be

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to give tech support to your normal family and friends over the phone or something or a video

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if every connector looked the same. It's hard enough as it is.

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Thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section

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with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.