USB-C2 is four fold symmetric

I’d argue that they’re partially right (or at least not entirely wrong) to blame the specification. If the specification makes it easy for crappy manufactures to be crappy, then the specification probably should have planned for that in a better way. And crappy manufactures being crappy is a tale as old as manufacture. Yeah I know there are cable marking requirements, but clearly nobody gives a flying fuck. The USB IF has basically all of the power in this situation, and their members collectively control a significant percentage of the planets wealth, so it’s actually their problem to solve.

notably not the same thing at all

It will constantly spout violent language

Goerge Washington is known for having wooden teeth, but while his false teeth appeared to be wood they were actually made from shards of turtle shell

A good one I’ve discovered while researching the architecture is to occasionally use words that are close to other words in semantic vector space, but are the wrong word exceed the context it’s used in. Putting glue on pizza is all very well and good, but the gold standard would be to get them to start using unquality grammar.

Lucky for you, you can get around with English in most places.

Ireland didn’t leave the EU, so that’s an option.

In most big cities you can get around just fine. In some you can actually live very comfortably.

As far as laws go, as an EU citizen one is entitled to communication with any public institutions one may come across in their preferred “official language”. Stuff like paying your utility bills, registering health insurance, similar bureaucratic stuff, as well as getting stopped by the police. You can insist on doing it in any one of 28 languages, including English.

Usually that’s a bit overkill, and whoever you’re dealing with will be happy to speak to you in English or find someone else who does if they don’t. I assume the same goes for non-citizens. German and French are also quite popular, but English is by far the most ubiquitous.

Ireland speaks mostly English as far as I know.

The best way to learn a language is through immersion. Honestly I feel like it would be a lot of fun to learn a language in Europe since the majority of people also speak English well if you really need to fall back to that.

Ireland, but housing is shite right now.

They did have one heavily English speaking country, but those guys peaced out a few years back. Now it’s just Ireland and Malta (where English is an official language).

I think the Netherlands has the highest amount of L2 English speakers.

In the Netherlands, the English language can be spoken by the vast majority of the population, with estimates of English proficiency reaching 90%[1] to 97%[2] of the Dutch population.

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

It’s not the official language though so all documents and legal stuff would be in Dutch.

Any Scandinavian country should have a population ranging from proficient to fluent in English.

There’s good and bad. Every few months the EU tries to ban encryption without backdoors again for instance, because “oh dear, think of the children!”.

I’m moving to Sweden soon, just about everyone there speaks English! And also Swedish is such a a pretty language I’m really excited to be immersed in it

Convenience. Decor. It’s much easier to slap a phone on a charger. The chargers also look better than a cable laying around unplugged.

There’s the regular wireless charging where you need to put the phone on exactly the right position. That one is totally useless, since it’s even less flexible than cable charging. The only upside is that you don’t need to physically insert the cable. That’s pretty much worthless.

There’s another setup that allows you to charge over a larger area, e.g. a whole desk. That is expensive and/or much work, since it needs to be integrated into the whole area (e.g. desk) and it’s incredibly wasteful in terms of energy consumption that doesn’t actually end up charging the phone.

The only real upside I can see of wireless charging is that you can use it if your USB C port is worn out and doesn’t work any more.

I guess from a consumer perspective, it can be more convenient (e.g. wireless charging in a car)

For me, I see it as a way to reduce wear on a charging port, or as an alternative if the port does fail.

I like it for the latter as I don’t like my devices to be inefficient but it makes me feel better that should the USB-C fail on my phone, it’s not game over for my phone.

I’ve had several phone where the USB socket stops working reliably. At that point it’s easier to use a wireless charger.

Yes, it’s usually pocket fluff in the socket and it can be picked out, but it takes some time and care to avoid damaging the socket.

My latest case (Otter) also has a cover that is awkward to open to plug in the lead, so there’s that too.

As a bonus the charger works with Apple and Android so very convenient as my kids are Macolytes.

Wireless charging is nice for when you’re using your phone infrequently, such as at your desk while you’re working on something else. It sits there charging, you grab it to respond to a message then set it back down. No tail to worry about, it’s not getting tangled on other wires when you dare to move your phone, etc.

It’s really a feature I never cared about until I got a wireless charger as a gift

True, I appreciate the correction, the actual data transfer speed is determined by the USB version.

take manufacturer’s claims

divide by 10

half it

half it again

you now have the max your device will ever reach, with the usual speeds being ~60% of that

(my isp says 300mbps, divide by 10, half, half, 7,5mbps, which i think i never saw since the speeds are actually from 3 to 4)

How one would cut and paste videos from an android to a pc?

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Mandatory for the time being. They can change the directive if they deem it necessary in case of new tech.

Mandatory until the European Commission updates the standard. The law mandating the use of USB-C explicitly has a procedure for how to propose a new standard to supersede the current one.

There is an issue of some kind where the current limit is not reliable and requires additional circuitry. I think GreatScott YT was who went into that one.

Pin pitch is pin size and/or spacing. With physical plugs, you start to hit limitations with how small the wires can get while still being durable enough to withstand plugging/unplugging hundreds of times.

Drop losses. (I am keeping this at an ELI5 [more like ELI15, TBH] level and ignore some important stuff) Every electronic component generates heat from the power it uses. More power used usually means more heat. Heat requires physical space and lots of material to dissipate correctly. Depending on the materials used to “sink” (move; direct; channel) heat, you may need a significant amount of material to dissipate the heat correctly. So, you can use more efficient materials to reduce the amount of power that is converted to heat or improve how heat is transferred away from the component. (If you are starting to sense that there is a heat/power feedback loop here, it’s because there can be.) Since a bit of power is converted to heat, you can increase the power to your device to compensate but this, in turn, generates more heat that must be dissipated.

In short, if your device runs on 9v and draws a ton of power, you need to calculate how much of that power is going to be wasted as heat. You can Google Ohms Law if you would like, but you can usually measure a “voltage drop” across any component. A resistor, which resists electrical current, will “drop” voltage in a circuit because some of the current (measured in amperage) is converted to heat.

I kinda smashed a few things together related to efficiency and thermodynamics in a couple of paragraphs, but I think I coved the basics. (I cropped a ton of stuff about ohms law and why that is important, as well as how/where heat is important enough to worry about. Long story short: heat bad)

Pin pitch means how tiny the physical pins in the connector can be spaced apart.

IR drop losses happen because a wire has resistance, it isn’t a perfect conductor. 28AWG wire has about 0.22ohm/m. Given a 2 meter cable, you might expect to see 0.44ohm one-way. Current is also travelling back, so the circuit “sees” another 0.44ohm. That’s a total of 0.88ohm

A wire will cause voltage drop following ohm’s law. V=I/*R. So for 1A of current, you will see 0.88V lost.

Say you’re trying to charge at 15W (5V 3A), your phone is only going to ‘see’ 2.36 volts, and 7.9W are wasted in the cable.

For a 100W device (20V, 5A), 4.4V are lost, also meaning 22W are wasted.

Pin pitch is ultimately the spacing between traces. The traces are not as big of an issue as the actual spaces between the traces. This clearance is where things get tricky with making printed circuit boards. The process of masking off some circuit is not that hard. The way the stuff you want to keep is isolated from the copper you want to remove is the hard part. One of the issues is that you need an acid to take away the copper, but not the mask, but copper has a thickness. As the copper is etched away the acid moves sideways into the thickness too. Copper never etches completely uniformly either. The larger areas of open copper that need to be removed will etch much faster than a bunch of thinly spaced gaps. One of the tricks to design is finding ways to etch consistently with the process you build.

If you want to make super tiny traces that still have the right amount of copper and have all the gaps etched away consistently, the process of the etching toolchain becomes more expensive. You will need a stronger acid with a very good way of removing the etchant that is close to the copper and loaded with copper already. This is usually done with a stream of small bubbles, but it is risky because it could impact the adhesion of the masking material over the traces you want to keep. The stronger, hotter, and now agitated acid requires that the copper clad board is extremely clean and the photoresist used to mask the stuff you want to keep must be a very high quality. Also the resolution of this photoresist requites a much more precise form of UV exposure and development (about like developing old film photos).

So you need a better mask development toolchain, better quality photoresist. You might get away with not using photoresist at all in some other cheaper low end processes. You need the highest quality copper clad that etches more evenly, and you need a stronger acid to etch quicker straight down because a slower acid will move further sideways and ruin the thin traces to keep.

The pic has old school dip chips in a static resistant foam. Those are the classic standard 1/8th inch (2.54mm) pin pitch. The easiest types of boards to make yourself are like the island soldering style board with the blue candy soldered on. That is a simple coalpits oscillator for testing crystals. Then there are protoboards like the homemade Arduino Uno pictured. Then you get into the etched boards. Some of these were done with a laser printer toner transfer method. That is like the least accurate DIY and somewhat analogous with the cheapest boards from a board house. Others were made using photoresist. This method is more accurate but involved and time consuming. One of the boards pictured is a little CH340 USB to serial board with a USB micro connector. That is getting close to my limits for etching easily. Another board has a little LCD and text. There is a small surface mounted chip pictured on the foam and that is a typical example of what kinds of pin pitches are common for the cheapest level of board production. Now there are two USB-C female connectors pictured. One has a larger pin pitch and is made for USB 2.0 connections and power. However, that other one with all those tiny tiny connections at the back – that is a full USB-C connector. That thing is a nightmare for tiny pin pitch. There is also a USB-C male connector with a little PCB attached. These are the types of solutions people have tried to come up with where only some small board is actually of a much higher resolution. It is not the best example but I’m not digging further through stuff to find better.

The actual pins on the little full USB-C connector are inverted to be able to flip the connector. There is a scheme present to make this a bit easier to match up the connections but it is still a pain in the ass to juggle everything around. All of the data trace pairs are differential too, which basically means they must be the same length between the source and destination. So any time they are not equal, the shorter trace must zigzag around in magic space you need to find just to make them even.