Name: What Exactly is USB-C? (And Why Everyone Was Forced to Use It)
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T04:35:53.000Z
Duration: 6 min 30 s
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Adverbs of degree

That one kitchen drawer stuffed with a tangled nightmare of cables you're too afraid to throw away.

You've got the wide, flat ones for your old printer, the chunky square ones for that digital camera you haven't used since 2011, and

about five different versions of a phone charger.

For 20 years, connecting our gadgets was a confusing, frustrating mess.

But then, almost overnight, everything changed.

One small oval shaped connector appeared and started killing off the competition.

It took over our laptops, our headphones, our gaming consoles, and

finally, after a massive geopolitical fight, even the iPhone.

I'm talking, of course, about USB C. But what makes this tiny plug so special?

Or is there something much more powerful hiding inside those pins?

Today, we're unraveling the surprising history of the one port to rule them all, right here in simple things, surprising histories.

To understand why USB C is a miracle, we have to remember the dark ages of the 1990s.

Back then, if you looked at the back of a computer, it looked like a Sci Fi villain's control panel.

You had a serial port for the mouse, a parallel port for the printer, a game port for your joystick, and

they all required you to restart your computer just to get them to work.

Then came the Universal Serial Bus, or usb.

That's the one, you know, the one you can never plug in right the first time.

But as our gadgets got smaller, that big rectangle didn't fit.

They shrank it down to mini usb, then micro usb.

But then printers still used the square type B, and

hard drives used this weird double plug thing called micro B.

By 2013, the dream of a universal cable was dead.

The tech giants Apple, Intel, Microsoft and HP knew they had to fix it.

They went back to the drawing board to build something permanent.

In 2014, the USB Implementers Forum unveiled the solution.

USB Type C. first glance, it just looks like a smaller micro usb.

It's the old USB cables had just four power ground and two for data.

That's it, USB C. It crams 24 pins into that tiny oval.

The pins are mirrored on the top and bottom.

You can plug it in blindfolded and the cable instantly detects which way it's facing and reroutes the electricity electronically.

But those 24 pins aren't just for convenience.

They unlocked a superpower called alternate mode.

Suddenly, a USB cable wasn't just for moving files.

Those extra pins could turn the cable into an HDMI cord to blast 4K video to a monitor.

And most importantly, they could carry massive amounts of electricity.

This is the killer feature of USB C. Power Delivery or or PD.

They pushed out about 2.5 watts, just enough to slowly charge a phone.

If you tried to charge a laptop with an old USB cable, nothing would happen.

USB C changed the physics it can negotiate with your device.

The charger talks to the phone and asks, hey, how much power can you handle?

If it's a pair of headphones, it sends a trickle.

If it's a high end laptop, modern USB C cables can blast up to 240 watts of power.

That is an insane amount of energy for such a tiny plug.

This is why your modern laptop doesn't have that heavy brick charger with the round tip anymore.

It just uses the same port as your phone.

But wait, if USB C was so perfect, why did the most popular phone in the world, the iPhone, refuse to use it for nearly a decade?

Apple actually invented USB C. They were the first to put it on a laptop in 2015.

But for their phones, they stuck to their proprietary lightning port.

By owning the lightning standard, Apple could regulate who made accessories.

But the European Union had a different e waste.

Every year, 11,000 tons of old chargers were being thrown away in Europe alone, because every time you bought a new phone, you needed a new cable.

By the end of 2024, all portable electronics sold in Europe had to use USB C.

Apple couldn't afford to lose the European market.

So with the iPhone 15, the Lightning port died, and USB C finally became truly universal.

Because USB C does so much, not all cables are equal.

You can buy a cheap gas station cable that fits the hole but charges slowly and can't transfer video.

But despite that confusion, we have finally arrived at a world where you can travel with a laptop, a tablet, a phone, and

headphones and bring just one single cable to charge them all.

And frankly, after 20 years of digging through that drawer of doom, you that is a simple thing worth celebrating.

If you enjoyed unraveling this history with me, hit that like button.

And tell me in the comments, what is the oldest, weirdest cable you still have in your junk drawer?

Thanks for watching Simple Things, Surprising Histories, and I'll see you in the next story.