Maybe not 18W, but apparently a lot of Apple customers have had issues, since Apple offered a range of power adapters and people bought the smaller 60-65W ones, even though their high-end notebooks required a 96W one. People don't like lugging around big power adapters...
The incentive would be that 3.1 would have a longer overall lifespan than 3.0, since we are what, 2-3 years away from this being a fixed requirement due to the two year grace period. So why start with an older standard when there's already an improved standard out there.
Mandating PD technically doesn't mean that companies can't continue making their own weird standards, as long as PD also works. But at least trickle charging might be going away, since no-one likes to plug in their phone to find that it only charged 3% and hour later.
It just tells us that a lot of companies are lazy when it comes to implementing sensible software features.
Apparently not, since some devices won't request more than 500mA, so that is still part of the spec, but oddly enough wasn't part of PD 1.0.
Well, at least everyone in the office will have a cable that fits everyone else's device, which should be a huge bonus, rather than you being the only one that uses the plug that your device has...
Yeah, as answered above. That's also insane and very annoying, as the only reason a manufacturer would do that, is to sell more accessories. Not exactly a new thing to do, but no less stupid.
I just want to point out that I'm not the only one with USB-C related issues, as the article below started in 2018 and three years later is still going strong, just with a different set of evolving issues. It also contains a graph that shows that not all devices will charge at the speed you'd expect, despite the charger being able to deliver enough power over USB PD. Sometimes an 18W charger can be a faster option than a 40W charger and sometimes the supplied 40W charger doesn't even deliver 25W, although this is for obvious reasons of how fast charging works, but I'm sure some consumers are going to be complaining about this too.
USB-C phones and devices are billed as the one-stop solution for all our future cable needs, but feature compatibility is a major problem.
www.androidauthority.com