On 10/14/2018 09:58 PM, Christopher Havel wrote:
Quick phone top-post, sorry Luke.
Zap, I will presume for the moment that you have been living under a large roundish lump of granite for the past year-and-a-half-plus (or perhaps in a small cave in a particularly remote area) and that Creepy Uncle Google, for whatever reason, is not working for you.
There is a protocol and a connector at work here. USB 3.1 would be the protocol, theoretically even faster (and otherwise more capable) than USB3.0. USB-C is the associated connector, and the two are inextricably linked - AFAIK, one can *only* use the USB3.1 protocol over a rwo-connector cable that has at least one end terminated in a USB-C connector.
USB-C is a rectangular-ish connector - its ends are circular but the area in between is flat so it's not an oval shape. Not sure what the technical term is - high school geometry was a long time ago indeed. At any rate, the connector is a little larger than USB Micro. It contains a ridiculous number of pins for its size... 19 IIRC, but that may be me getting confused with HDMI and MiniHDMI...
The other thing about the connector is that it's reversible. You can plug it in upside-down and it will match merrily along as if nothing was different.
However, it is also yet another freakin' USB connector to keep track of and require adapters for, and as such, it's completely redundant and unnecessary. Everyone on earth has already done the USB-A triple-plug-to-fit dance enough times to be used to it. I have no use for a standard whose only meaningful advantage is one I don't care about and whose actual effect is that I need to buy more effing adapters just to make my stuff work the way it should OOTB.
My understanding is that USB-C is supposed to phase out all USB-A and USB-B connectors eventually so that there's only one type of USB plug. I'm pretty sure it's not required for USB 3.1. You may be confusing USB 3.1 as a whole with certain aspects of it that require USB-C (basically higher transfer speeds than normal USB 3.1, if I'm understanding correctly).
To be fair, USB-C does bring this Xkcd comic to mind:
But one noteworthy distinction is that the standards body behind USB-C is intending to replace their own standards, not others' standards (though it might have the nice side-effect of finally convincing Apple to switch to USB rather than insisting on its proprietary "Lightning" nonsense).
I suppose time will tell, though.