USB Type-C has had a long and winding road in achieving proliferation of the standard. After all, mega-corporations like Apple fought the adoption of the plug type for as long as they could, until governments forced their hand. Today, USB-C is used in just about every consumer gadget, including laptops, phones and tablets, PC gaming peripherals, external drives, and everything in between. Even my Roku remote now charges via USB-C. While standardization has certainly been welcomed by consumers and consumer advocacy groups, it has led to some pervasive myths about the simple, flat connector over the years. These are the most common myths about USB-C that should go the way of the Lightning connector.

4 Thunderbolt and USB-C are the same thing

Most modern Thunderbolt ports use USB-C, but not all USB-C ports are Thunderbolt ports

A lot of this misunderstanding comes down to semantics and terminology. While USB-C is simply the name for the 24-pin reversible connector, Thunderbolt is the name of a hardware interface whose most recent generations all use USB-C connectors. Thunderbolt as an interface has become commonplace in high-end laptops, particularly gaming laptops, as the technology is capable of handling immense bandwidth through a single USB-C connector. This means it can support ultra-fast data transfer speeds for high-end external drives, push high-resolution and high frame-rate video to multiple gaming monitors at once, and is even fast enough to support external GPUs.

The amount of bandwidth supported by the interface has been increasing exponentially with each generation, and the latest gen, Thunderbolt 5, which launched in some gaming laptops this year, supports up to 80 Gbps in bidirectional bandwidth. This is an absolutely insane rate of data transfer by any measure and will power peripherals that we haven't even dreamt up yet.

3 A device with only a USB-C port cannot be Hi-Fi friendly

Audiophiles should not immediately dismiss a device with only a USB-C port👁 A woman with brown hair and glasses listens to black headphones

The proliferation of the USB-C port has been accompanied by the near extinction of the 3.5mm headphone jack. Many of today's most popular smartphones feature only a USB-C port on the device. There was some fear that this would spell the end of Hi-Fi–friendly mobile devices, as products began pushing users to rely increasingly on Bluetooth headphone connections instead of wired ones. Thankfully, this is not actually the case. Users wanting higher-fidelity audio out of their USB-C mobile phones can use USB-C to 3.5mm dongles with built-in digital-to-analog converters (DACs). This allows them to keep using that old pair of Hi-Fi headphones, as long as they are using a modern dongle with an active DAC.

If users only have an older passive dongle, then they will need a device that supports Audio Accessory Mode (AAM), which is the standard required for direct analog output via USB-C. This is far rarer these days, and it's more likely that you'll be using a dongle with an active DAC. Many headphones today also support a direct USB-C to USB-C connection, and while this is not an analog connection, it will allow your headphones to receive music at a much higher bitrate than Bluetooth alone would allow. This can be used for higher-fidelity listening from a PC that supports audio-out via USB-C as well.

2 USB-C can replace every other important port

This one isn't true... yet

It's important to say right off the bat that this may one day be true, but it isn't yet. While interfaces like Thunderbolt may be able to achieve the necessary data transfer rates to replace HDMI, DisplayPort, and every former standard for high-speed external drives, as well as feature the ability to power and charge devices, it doesn't mean that USB-C replacing everything else is that simple. Firstly, not every USB-C port supports Thunderbolt. In fact, far from it. The great majority of consumers are not using the latest and greatest in laptops, PCs, or peripherals. It remains more affordable and more practical to build a work or gaming setup with hardware and peripherals that support legacy display connection types and may feature slightly older, less cutting-edge data speeds on built-in USB-C ports.

While it's true that the highest-end USB-C interfaces can replace most ports, and that there are increasingly more peripherals that support USB-C on the market, we are still a long way from talking about USB-C as if it's replaced everything else. That is certainly the dream, though: that one day there will be one standard of connector for just about any function or facet of our devices and rigs.

1 All USB-C cables perform the same functions

While they may all look alike, they are not all created equal

Finally, the most common misconception about USB-C yet again stems from the fact that the ports and cables look identical, almost across the board, but this does not mean that they all perform the same function. If you've ever tried to charge your USB-C laptop with an older USB-C phone cable or tried to connect your VR headset to your PC using a long USB-C charging cable, then you've already learned this the hard way.

At their simplest, USB-C cables can perform a few basic functions. These are power, data transfer, and video output, but not every USB-C cable supports all three, and most USB-C cables support just one or two. Much like using an older HDMI 1.4 cable on a 4K-enabled streaming device or console will leave you stuck with a 1080p or low frame rate 4K image on your TV, using the wrong USB-C cable might result in slower data transfer rates, lack of power to your device, or incompatibility with an external display.

USB-C has opened a lot of doors, and will continue to do so

I have USB-C to thank for the near-elimination of my junk cable box, and after years of digging around for that MicroUSB cable, a lightning cable, and any number of esoteric power cables, I'm relieved that USB-C has found its way to most of my household devices.

All of these myths come down to the same core misunderstanding, which is just because all the ports and cables look pretty much the same, it doesn't mean that all the ports and cables do the same things or carry the same technology, and it also doesn't mean the end of some uses that predate the USB-C port, like Hi-Fi listening on the go.