I have a cupboard with about 4 small boxes, each one full of cables. All of them have, at some time or other, had important jobs; part of a chain from a thing that makes sounds (say, a synthesizer, a guitar, an iPod) to a thing that makes noise (ie. speakers/headphones), or a chain that ends up with some sort of pictures on some sort of screen, things that give those devices the right kind of power, things that move data between devices (mostly from a pre-wireless age - but I do have a lot of ethernet, just in case I need to move several gigabytes of data in so much of a rush that wifi simply won't do) - or cables that do some sort of combination of two or more of the above. Some of them might, one day, be useful again. (Say, if I know someone who urgently needs to take some videos off an old camera with only a Firewire plug to work with, then I will be a hero.) Some of them - if I'm honest with myself, most or maybe even all of them - won't.

Because otherwise, I wouldn't be putting them in a box in a cupboard - I'd be putting them in the other cable place by my desk, where I keep things like micro-usb cables. The sort of cables that, not very long ago, were used by everything - kids toys, grown-up toys, phones, MP3 players, photo cameras, video cameras - and now are just an occasional "oh, I know I've got one of those somewhere" type of cable.

I think everyone has a cable stash of some sort, but as I'm both a hoarder and an early-adopter, I'm pretty sure I've got more than most. I've had mobile phones for a long time; I think since 1996; possibly a year or two later. I've had phones from NEC (x2 - I got a very cheap deal because I was working for them), Nokia (x3, I think), Ericsson (the only thing I remember about it was that you could turn the screen sideways and play Tetris), Sony Ericsson (my first colour phone - it had a thing at the bottom where you could plug in an SD card and play MP3s off it, or you could plug in a tiny camera with ridiculously low resolution). Those were all pre-smartphones - every manufacturer had their own charger cable.

Then came smartphones; a Motorola MPx200 (my first smartphone), followed by two HTCs (one a smartphone, one a PDA). All of them used the same charger/data cable - the industry standardised around Mini-USB. Then I got an iPhone; followed by four more iPhones. I think the first two had the old, wide iPod socket, then came the (curent) Lightning plug. Somewhere along the line I also had a Blackberry from work - which I didn't use much and gave back after a while; by that point, the industry had realised that mini-USB just wasn't quite good enough (for reasons I'm not entirely sure of) and had transitioned to Micro-USB; better in no way that I can figure out, other than being a fraction of a millimeter thinner.

I've had enough Apple laptops that I've got four different types of charging sockets - and several chargers for each type. Magsafe, Magsafe 2 (from when the laptops got too thin for Magsafe), and Magsafe 3 (because who would have thought that a day would come where Magsafe 2 wasn't thin enough?), and the one that I use the most (because both my work-provided and bought-myself laptops both use it), USB-C.

Also, I've had a few iPads over the years - from the old-fashioned iPod socket on the first two generations, to later models with Lightning, and now I've got an iPad Pro, which also has a USB-C socket.

Although the 'latest iPhone' seems to get less and less interesting each year (as I've mentioned), I do expect to replace my iPhone 8 later this year, and that I expect that whatever I replace it with will also have a USB-C socket.

A charger plug is really quite an odd thing to get excited about, but I really do like USB-C.

Firstly, you can just stick the plug into the socket - if you can figure out the difference between thick and thin, you can align the plug with the socket. If the HDMI sockets on the back of TVs that I occasionally have to blindly fumble around with did the same, then I would have spent much less time blindly fumbling around the back of TVs. (Is the plug the wrong way? I'll try turning it round… No - it's definitely the wrong way round now, so I'll turn it around again… Or maybe I'm trying to plug it into the wrong socket? No, I've just got the plug the wrong way around…)

Secondly, there is the promise of the "U" for "Universal" in USB, USB-2, USB-3, Mini-USB and Micro-USB, which I think is actually going to get delivered by USB-C. The idea that I could carry one charger around and not have to worry about my laptop, my phone or my iPad running out of battery is an obvious benefit. It seems likely that pretty soon, any other battery-powered thing I might want to carry around would also use the same socket. But the idea that I might want to plug something into a screen, or some speakers, or some sort of data transfer and be able to use the same, single cable to do it with - and not one of those 'cheating' cables that has half a dozen different sockets hanging off the end - is, again, a significant benefit.

Before I had a USB-C Macbook, my desk would typically look something like this.

Yes, its a mess - this was when "working from home" wasn't such a big part of my time/life, and I'd just push stuff aside to make space for a laptop when I needed to (and it wasn't a photo ever intended for sharing)- but the point is how many things are plugged into the side of the laptop; there's power (MagSafe 2), ethernet (plus an ethernet-to-Thunderbolt dongle), a monitor (plus an HDMI-to-Thunderbolt dongle), and a USB cable that goes to a USB hub hidden away in one of the wooden drawers - that connects to an external hard drive, an audio interface (so I can connect my guitar to my laptop), a lightning cable so I can plug in my phone, and a bunch of spare USB sockets for anything else I might want to connect to my computer - because with all those things plugged in is now out of sockets. (Inside, the bottom of the drawer is cut away, revealing a hole in the desk that all the cables are routed through for power etc.)

Now, there's just one cable coming out of the laptop - a USB-C cable.

Hidden away inside the wooden drawer (that I modified a little more), there is a USB-C hub that connects that single cable to power, ethernet, the external hard drive, the monitor, the audio interface - and pretty much anything else I want to connect it to.

Clearly, this is an improvement!

Here's the frustrating thing though; see how short the cable coming out of the drawer is?

I'm essentially stuck with it; the other end is fixed to a USB hub, so I can't just swap it out for a longer cable. There are lots of USB-C hubs available on the market, but they seem to all sit at one of two price points; 'portable' ones like mine, which are generally around the £25-£50 mark with a short USB-C cable that isn't removable, or 'desktop' ones, generally around the £250+ mark, that connect through a 'normal' cable - ie. one you can replace with another one that is the length that you want.

I really want a longer cable. It doesn't have to be too much longer - another two inches would mean I'd be able to position my laptop on my desk, just where I want it, without any stress or strain on the cable. An extra six inches or so would cover pretty much anything I really want (like being able to plug in my iPad in 'landscape mode', where the socket is on the right side of the iPad). Make it about 18", and that would cover pretty much any eventuality I can think of - like having an iPad in my hands that is also connected to the hard drives/monitors etc.

But effectively paying £250 for an extra bit of cable is clearly insane though - but all of these things are economies of scale. The faster people adopt USB-C, the more useful USB-C hubs will be, if they get more useful to more people then more of them will get sold, and that means more will get manufactured, costs will come down, and my dream desk setup which is so close will be here.

By which time, I'll probably have a new desk in a new room somewhere.

Some Random Nerd