Hector Martin

I honestly have no idea! But apparently, at the least, some people think they are, or could. At least, that was the sense that I got from the Ars article.

The author of the article just had a back-and-forth with me on twitter but he didn't produce any examples of *hosts*, just of devices, so I dunno...

Fair enough; I don’t even know. Juuuuust seems like an unnecessarily confusing mess, probably moreso than other versioned specs. But I don’t really know the realities of the marketplace. So *shrug*.

Honestly I think part of the problem is just that USB is the most widespread, bottom-of-the-barrel, cheapest-crap-you-can-imagine devices standard. So of course it also gets the most bullshit marketing.

Oh yeah, that’s a major contributor. But re-branding old specs as <NewSpec Gen N-1> is… weird and silly, and adds to the confusion. Did they *update* the 3.1 spec when they renamed it?

But it's not really re-branded, is it? Nothing is getting renamed, it's just that there is a new version that *adds* speeds (and keeps the old ones). Like USB 2.0 kept low speed and full speed from 1.1.

I feel like it’s very specifically that they’re calling them “3.2 Gen 1”. They’re keeping the same marketing names, but “absorbing” the previous specs. It’s just a weird way to phrase it; feels like 3.0 should just be “USB3 Gen 1” and 3.1 capabilities “USB3 Gen 2”.

But this is why the marketing names say "SuperSpeed", "SuperSpeed 10Gbps", "SuperSpeed 20Gbps", and don't mention USB3 or 3.anything. All the Gen stuff just has to do with internal technical names.