I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.
You’ll want to run USB PD, not to be confused with the USB “P” and “D” label which refers to DisplayPort, not to be confused with some other ways of transporting DisplayPort over USB. And you’ll want charging support, so look for the USB lightning bolt that means “USB charging”, not to be confused with the different USB lightning bolt that means “Thunderbolt”, which isn’t the same thing as the Lightning connector that is about the same size as the USB-C connector and was used in a similar role on various devices.
Piece of cake.
The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I’m not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.
It’s still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.
It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.
Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.
It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.
I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.
Also, giving anything the initials “DP” is weird and creepy as fuck, given that “DP” was already a well-established acronym in the porn industry years before DisplayPort was even conceptualized.
Given that there are engineers involved I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was deliberate. Trying to get potentially offensive or otherwise NSFW acronyms past marketing without them noticing is practically an industry-wide joke at this point, which is why they are so prevalent in the FOSS space. (no marketing staff to complain)
If that’s true in this case, though, hats off to whoever managed to get it though to official commercial standards
