And USB-C 10 Gbps cables aren't much cheaper, especially if they do 100W power delivery. Both probably could be cheaper if there were more demand for them, but siren song of cheap slow cables seems to have made it impossible to scale production up.

Well, realistically, you don't need 100 watt power delivery for a keyboard, so you might want a less robust cable.

The big mistake IMO was a lack of obvious keying. Very little stops me from using that 2w-capacity keyboard cable to try to charge my laptop. If we're lucky, there's signaling at the device to tell me what's wrong, but if they had made a different plug on the 100W cable, it would eliminate a lot of cockpit errors.

Having one cable for everything is a huge red herring. If you need a keyboard and a power brick and an external hard drive, you need three cables. It doesn't matter if they're different, as long as the OEM isn't pulling some Apple-style "one single port is enough" BS.

So you'd want a low speed connector, a high speed connector, a high wattage connector and also a high speed + high wattage connector? So 4 plugs, or more if you want to add even faster speeds in the future. And then you need cables which have one of each of those connectors on each end, so we're talking about dozens of variants.

No thank you. The drama around USB-C is insanely overblown; the vast majority of use cases are fine with the 60 watt + 480 mbps required minimum configuration for USB-C cables. In the few rare exceptions where you need >60 watts or higher speed, you're generally going to have purpose-built hardware anyway, so just devoting a special cable to that isn't such a big deal.

I think the drama is mostly about the fact that there is no way to tell what a cable (or a port) "supports" by looking at it.

> Well, realistically, you don't need 100 watt power delivery for a keyboard, so you might want a less robust cable.

But on the other hand doubling the power wire thickness and leaving the signals wires untouched shouldn't add more than 10-20% to the price of the cable.

> The big mistake IMO was a lack of obvious keying. Very little stops me from using that 2w-capacity keyboard cable to try to charge my laptop. If we're lucky, there's signaling at the device to tell me what's wrong, but if they had made a different plug on the 100W cable, it would eliminate a lot of cockpit errors.

Every cable supports at least 60 watts. It's not a big deal if you use the wrong one to charge with.

That's a licensing issue/cost.

Is it? They’re complicated active cables.

true. and, with a licensing fee ;)