USB-C vs USB: What’s the Difference?

USB-C vs USB
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You are at the café and you know that an important call will come any time soon.

But when you looked at your phone, you were surprised to see that it is almost running out of battery and you don’t have your charger with you.

A sense of panic overwhelms you and you consider your options. Either you get a new charger or you drive home, hoping to get there before the call.

USB-C or USB

This problem can be easily solved with the help of a USB-C port. USB-C is a universal port, which means that you can always borrow the laptop power cord of the person next to you at the café to charge your phone safely. You can also borrow power straight from a different device to allow the phone to phone connection and charge the one using the other.

Having said this, what makes the USB-C vs USB different in the first place?

Physical Appearance

USB features a bigger physical connector compared to USB-C, with USB-C having almost the same size as that of micro-USB connector. With USB-C, there is no need for you to try, insert, and flip it over before inserting again just to get the correct orientation when making a connection. What makes USB-C great is that you can insert it in any way since it has the same connector pins on both sides.

Faster Charging Made Possible

The standard USB 2.0 connection can offer the power of up to 2.5W that can pretty much give you a snail’s paced charging of your phone. On the other hand, the USB PD standard that the USB-C supports can deliver a whopping power of 100W that is more than enough for charging a laptop. Being bidirectional, it also lets you connect devices so they can receive and send power simultaneously as needed.

Support for the New Standard

USB-C connectors can connect different new and exciting USB standards such as USB 3.1 that allows extremely fast transfers of data at as much as 10Gbps as well as USB PD that allows delivery of power.

Interoperability

USB-C isn’t the kind of obscure connector exclusive to the devices of a specific company alone. Over 700 technology companies worked on the adoption and design of the new connector that includes big names such as Apple, Dell, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, HP, and Intel. USB-C has now become a common feature in other new electronic devices that were released for the past several years.

Save More Space

Gone are the days when you need several different connector ports for different devices. USB-C ports now support a wide selection of various protocols that use alternate modes that let you have adapters that could output other kinds of connections from its USB port. With USB-C, you can streamline DisplayPort, HDMI, power, headphone, and VGA ports into one type of port to help devices become slimmer and better space-savers than before.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that USB-C has become the new standard for data and power and is now ubiquitous across most devices as this offers more features you can’t expect to get from your usual USB.

You can learn more about USB-C with these articles: