Unbundling the sale of a charger from the sale of the electronic device .
The 'common charging' requirements will apply to all handheld mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, portable speakers, handheld videogame consoles, e-readers, earbuds, keyboards, mice, and portable navigation systems as of 2024. These requirements will also apply to laptops as of 2026. Such transition periods will give industry sufficient time to adapt before the entry into application.
Consumers will be able to purchase a new electronic device without a new charger. This will limit the number of chargers on the market or left unused. Reducing production and disposal of new chargers is estimated to reduce the amount of electronic waste by 980 tonnes yearly
Producers will need to provide relevant visual and written information about charging characteristics, including information on the power the device requires and whether it supports fast charging. This will help consumers understand if their existing chargers meet their new device’s requirements and/or help them select a compatible charger. Combined with the other measures, this will help consumers to limit the number of new chargers purchased and save at least €250 million a year on unnecessary charger purchases.
Since everyone here seems so confused by USB naming schemes, a short primer:
USB 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, and USB4 are the major and minor revision number of the standard. You don't have to worry about it if you are not implementing it yourself.
The Gen number indicates the supported transfer speed, Gen 1 is 5Gbps, Gen 2 is 10, Gen 3 is 20, regardless of the spec revision.
(USB 2.0 is 480mbps)
Dual lane (Gen ?x2) means you take the speed of the Gen number and multiply it by 2.
The only major difference between USB 3 and 4 is that USB4 uses Type C plug only, whereas USB 3 can use a variety of connectors.
All USB-PD compliant cables support up to 100w of power delivery, only cables labeled as EPR (extended power range) supports up to 240w of power.
Also, USB4 can optionally support PCIe tunneling, which is a fancy way of saying it supports plugging more advanced types of hardware in (like GPUs, high-speed network cards or NVMe SSDs) at speeds of up to 40Gbps.
And there is USB4 v2 (not kidding, that's the name) which extends USB4 to up to 80Gbps, but there are no devices that support that yet.
What the above user is saying is how it's listed in specs and technical documents
What you are saying is how the USB IF recommends it be marketed. In theory, yours is the only one the average person should worry about these days
However in the real world it's an absolute mess of OEMs advertising their ports as being one or the other naming schemes, or neither and just saying "USB"
Also to add to this, the USB-C connector is perfectly compatible with the actual USB data protocol all the way back to the original USB (1.0) in low speed mode (with its mind-dazzling 1.5Mb/s speed) - all the required pins are still there as are the bits of electrical signalling necessary in the original USB protocol.
It's just that USB-C adds more data lines and other things used in the more modern versions of the USB protocols (including for the newer power protocol - USB-PD, though maintaining backwards compatibility with the old power provision which was controlled via the USB data protocol itself) as well as support for the connector being flippable (works whatever way you plug it in) which is done by basically having the original lines appear twice, one on each side of the connector.