Why aren’t motherboards mostly USB-C by now?::I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this PC can last until 2029?). In looking at new des…
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I agree most motherboards should at least come with 2 or 4 USB-C ports.
That being said, people upgrading all their peripherals happens significantly less often than the PC upgrade itself, and 90% of my current setup relies on USB type A, so if a motherboard (specially mATX) needs to decide what ports to fit into limited space, I’d prioritize USB A for sure.
Yeah, I’ve got mostly USB-A peripherals, and the USB-C ones are using a USB-A to C cable anyway. What I’d actually want is graphics cards with the same Thunderbolt type ports that laptops have, so the USB stuff can be pushed through the same cable to your monitor.
How the heck is USB-A a legacy port and what would I do with 11 USB-C ports on a PC when everything I plug into it besides my phone (depending on the cable) has a USB-A connector? Like how would I even use something as simple as a flash drive or Bluetooth/wifi/radio transmitter?
USB-C makes a ton more sense for mobile devices, docks, and charging, but not so much when you’re plugging them into a suitcased size brick that doesn’t move. I could see useful applications for something powered that needs a lot of bandwidth, but PCs also come with dedicated ports for all those peripherals too.
A cheap USB hub solves everything you are describing. You can just leave it dangling from behind.
Saying that, I’m not in favour of only usb-c motherboard though.
Cheap USB hubs get fried if you try to use it with something that requires power feed. Or usually just feed the whole voltage to one of the connectors, have fun finding out which one. Fully competent dock hubs are not cheap.
I just recently bought a cheap kitchen scale that has a USB-C connector, used for charging the LIR2450 inside.
Am I throwing away all my mice, keyboards, DAC, digital pens, and other peripherals just so I can have a connector with more bandwidth than I’ll ever need? Nah.
Am I buying them or adapters all over again just so I can be compatible with a new universal standard that I don’t need? Double nah.
KVM switches, or breakout hubs that these devices plug into, then a single USB c device goes to the computer is the most logical avenue for a migration. But this will take a long time. Most people don’t even have that kind of luxury.
But we’re not at the point of debating whether users should replace all of their devices. If motherboards with a single USB-C are so common, we’re actually at a place where we’re expecting users to buy all their new peripherals to be USB-A as well.
I don’t understand why I would want a bunch of usb c ports? On a phone where there obviously isn’t space for a full sized port sure, but I find that fiddling with the one usb c port on the back of my desktop is a pain in the ass and the port really struggles to keep a good connection when attached to a stiff or heavy cable.
Back in the late 90’s why did we want USB ports when serial and parallel and P/S2 worked so well? There were decades worth of hardware that were compatible with the old standards.
Yeah, not once have i had any need for a usb c port on my pc? Not having to deal with orientation is nice, but I’ve also had the experience that usb-c is worse at keeping a connection, and I have so many cables with USB-A at one end anyway.
Two extra monitor setups. My slim book has 3 usb a, 1 USB c and 1 HDMI. With the USB c and the HDMI I have two monitors in my office setup and is super nice. I understand that for common devices is preferable USB a but for video, it saves a lot of physical space compared to VGA or HDMI in a small laptop
Standard USB type A ports are cheaper, and more importantly, STURDIER then USB C ports. This is extremely important for peripherals that do not need to be disconnected and reconnected often.
USB C is great for convenience for certain things, but it’s a weaker port in terms of physical connection strength.
Would make much sense. You still want USB-A ports for most peripherals as using an usb-c port to connect a single mouse would be pretty much wasting a port.
However adding a Thunderbolt4 port or two along side the usual USB-A ports would be nice.
Ofcourse you’d still want some type a ports, but I have 6 type a ports and a single type c on my rear io but i would definitely give up 1 or 2 a ports for 2 more type c.
Why not half and half? Then I can afford to both keep my current accessories, and to buy USB-C when I need to replace them
I’d only need 2 extra since I got dual a and dual c on my case front io aswell.
And since most devices i plug in are still type i can’t sacrifice too many.
Because there is no reason to have more than 1 or 2 since almost everything uses a type A connector.
USB-C is very hard to manufacture and expensive as fuck as a result.
thats why.
Especially when most devices don’t need the bandwidth or power needs of USB-C.
Source? Why is it expensive?
Pretty sure this person is just talking out of their ass. I found one source from four years ago that showed a price difference of about a buck to manufacture. Yes, that is more expensive, but passing that dollar onto the consumer for some USB-C ports on a motherboard seems pretty reasonable, and by now I’m sure that gap has decreased significantly.
Some of the implementations are pretty expensive, usually the ones found on phones that need to do everything. But they brought the price down with a myriad of different feature supports so you can progressively wind down costs, but with it, features. Not all USB-C ports are made equal. Some ports have the bandwidth but not the power feed, others can be made specially for charging with 48W+ feed, some are stuck at USB 2.0 specs.
I know for a fact that USB-c is about 1.5× mirco-b.
https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=usb breakout board
Since USB A is not a slave connector that are no comparable boards on adafruit. So I asked Bing AI:
According to the web search results, the cost of a USB-C connector on a motherboard depends on various factors, such as the manufacturer, the chipset, the data standard, and the features of the motherboard. However, based on some examples of motherboards with USB-C ports, the price difference between USB-C and USB-A connectors with the same speed (USB 2.0) is not very significant. For instance, the ASRock B550M-ITX/ac motherboard has one USB-C port and four USB-A ports, all with USB 2.0 speed, and costs around $120. The [ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0] motherboard has six USB-A ports, all with USB 2.0 speed, and costs around $70. The difference in price between these two motherboards is $50, but this is not only due to the USB-C connector, but also to other factors such as the chipset, the memory slots, the audio codec, and so on. Therefore, it is hard to estimate the exact cost of a USB-C connector on a motherboard with USB 2.0 speed, but it is likely to be less than $10.
I dont remember off the top of my head the exact number of conductors, but it has like 22 or 24 very very fine wires in it, that have to be lined up perfectly on both sides of the (comparatively small) connector to be soldered to equally small pads.
So its much more labor and time intensive to make a USB-C connector, compared to a USB Type A, which has big bulky cables and equally bulky (comparatively speaking) pads.
USB Micro/Mini used tiny wires too, but again… only about 2-4. So far less time and labor to line them up, and even compared to USBC it can still have larger solder pads to connect to due to the number of conductors vs the 22-24 conductors inside the Type-C connector.
And thats just the connectors and the wires. the support circuitry to actually run it is more complex and expensive as well. Which further increases the cost.
And theres just no reason for it, the number of devices that need and benefit from higher speeds USB-C can support are few and far between, and typical motherboards coming with 1-2 type-C sockets is more than enough to support that for 99.99% of the people, and if you are in some very weird niche case scenario where you need a bunch of USB-C ports, you can get a USB-C PCI-Card (just make sure you get a reputable brand one, and not one of the suspiciously cheap no-brand chinese knockoff ones)
I’d honestly love to see everything USB-C-ified. Would be great to finally just have one standard to concern yourself with.
Nobody tell them about the massively fragmented set of standards using the USB-C connection.
I know, but at least we’d only have one physical connector at that point. While there are indeed a lot of standards for USB C, many of them are not all that relevant in day-to-day use when you’re mostly just looking to connect some basic USB peripherals like a mouse, a thumb drive or charge your phone.
I disagree.
More technical people would understand, but your average Joe would try to plug in their external monitor and RMA PC because it’s not working, same with slow charging phone speed etc.
I’m honestly all in for keeping USB-A for basic I/O devices. Although inventing an USB-A female connector that works both sides and is backwards compatible would be neat.
Don’t think this didn’t happen for people that wished to copy something from or to an external drive, and RMAd as they found it to be too slow. They plugged it into a black usb 2.0 port instead of a red one because they thought it was dangerous. Ow wait, no. That motherboard manufacturer used green usb ports for USB3.2. What do you mean you didn’t try it because you didn’t know what they were for? Your hard drive cable has blue plugs, didn’t you at least try the blue ports? No? Because there was a lighting bolt printed nearby… I understand you don’t want to lose the data. Do you have a backup? … You should. Ok, well you can test it with the mouse or keyboard. Yes, the top two usb ports do have the icons for those, but that doesn’t mean… Oh, you already put the pc in the mail. See you in 2 weeks then.
Also, switchable usb-a is already a thing, but is very flimsy due to the necessity of moving parts.
The difference between different generations of USB-A are speeds. If user notices differences in speeds, they are way more likely to know the difference between USB versions.
The differences between USB-C and USB-A are capabilities. USB-C is already confusing for many people. My boss (IT Project Manager) thought he could use USB-C to connect his monitor, while he couldn’t because his laptop doesn’t support DisplayPort over USB-C.
There is already a huge mess with USB-C capabilities. Some of them are just glorified USB-A ports, some of them have DisplayPort over USB-C, some of them are Thunderbolt (with different versions or course), some of them are QC (with different versions - once again).
I can just imagine the confusion from users, who expect all of the USB-C ports in the motherboard to work the same way, but then only one or two ports from 8 total have DisplayPort capabilities.
“If it doesn’t fit it means it’s not supposed to go here” is a great way to tell the user what capabilities the port has.
Yeah that is true. But I was more or less portraying that customers gonna custom-er. And PCs will be RMA-ed for stupid reasons no matter what. And usb-a also had customers confused, sure c is worse. But don’t make it out to be that a was so magnificent. SuperSpeed, QC, trying to plug the male printer side into the ethernet port, different grades of cables for different speeds, expecting a bump in speed because they bought a ‘golden cable’ while their pc and peripheral were on usb 2.1, all these things are also in usb a forms.
Because I had all those conversation. The man was aware, yes. But wasn’t aware enough and too afraid to lose his precious data. (But wasn’t willing to pay for extra drives or remote storage. But that is a different story.)
This is about cost. The standard USB ports are far cheaper and they probably already have a billion of them on hand. Plus all the board layouts already use standard USB for their layouts. Also you’re not really getting any advantage from the USB c size wise or performance wise.
Further more now you’d have to make USB c to whatever form cables and make customers buy these new cables.
If u had to choose between 2 computers and 1 made u buy completely new cables for every peripheral which would u buy?
billion of them on hand
Been thinking that for a long time! For example, I can imagine Chinese warehouses jammed with micro USB connectors. Want to build a low-cost widget? Meh, save some pennies per unit and put a micro on there.
Most desktop peripherals are still USB-A. For low-power, low-data things like keyboards and mice, what would be the point of USB-C? It would increase the cost of the product but provide no real benefit to the user.
Also, if you had a new desktop motherboard with say 6 USB-C ports, would you expect all of them to be capable of delivering 20V at 5A so they can be used to drive USB-C monitors &etc? Because that’s a lot of power to be running across your motherboard, even if you have a power supply that can handle it. You’ll need a separate cooler just for the USB-C bus controller, and pray that nothing ever goes wrong with power delivery because it will probably fry the whole board.
You could at the same time ask: “Why are motherboards no longer made for 486DX?”. The answer is simple: Time and technology moves on, and USB-A is old.
Take a look at that question again. OP Is asking why USB C isn’t standard and you gave an answer as to why it would be standard.
I would like to see a new USB form factor for chonky hardware like desktop PCs that combines the sturdiness and reliability of USB-A with the symmetry and power delivery of USB-C
My kids laptop has 4 IIRC. Getting a PC motherboard with more than one on rear and one connector for front of case was impossible last I looked. I generally keep my pc’s for about 5 years and wish to future proof somewhat. It is beyond ridiculous at this point. Although, I haven’t tried to buy one for a few months so perhaps this has changed.
yeah and good luck getting a case with multiple USB-C front panel. I don’t even think I’ve EVER used the USB-A on the front of my case
my thinkpad has two usb-c ports, both can be used for charging. i still prefer usb-a cuz i still use peripherals and drives i have right now. im not ready throw them away for the sake of “newer ports.”
