Michael Sippey
1 min readSep 14, 2020

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Owen Williams has a great piece on OneZero about the complete and utter mess that is the USB-C “standard.”¹

Having a single, universal port on the majority of my devices is a godsend, but it feels like spinning the wheel every time I plug something in: Will it behave the way I expect? If it’s this difficult for me, I’m not sure how the average person will know how to figure out what’s wrong.

In November 2016 I wrote a piece (on this very website!) about how confused I was around USB-C and Thunderbolt.

I have a 12" MacBook from 2015, and a 27" Cinema Display with Thunderbolt. Do they work together? Nope. You know how much bullshit technical jargon I would have had to read to figure that out? An infinite amount, more or less.

Still true, four years later.

¹ Yes, I’ve seen the xkcd comic.

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