Engineering wise, Torx was always superior, particularly small screws that would strip easily. People hated it because of the patents, and getting good tools were extremely expensive because of the licensing.
I'm confused by the idea that torx could be superior. I don't think I've ever touched a device or car with torx heads that didn't end up with half of them being stripped.
I have tinkered on cars both with and without torx.
Torx sucks, its also not uncommon for dimensions to differ on included torx tools so when you use a size 3 on another products "torx 3" it will strip away.
Philips used to be the "good" one because although it's a pretty bad design, everyone had it. Now that lots of people have torx drivers, they're better in pretty much every way. They're a lot harder to strip, they don't cam out as much etc.
Are they still covered by the patents that made them unattractive initially? Patent expiry could very well be the reason for their increased popularity.
Wikipedia tells me the original Torx patent[1] was filed in the 1960s, so anything related should have long since expired. (There’s apparently also a “Torx Plus” patented[2] in the early 1990s around the time the original patent was expiring, but I don’t believe anybody deliberately chooses that one. Expired in 2011.)
Torx patent expired in 2011, so that's increasingly likely why it's taken off.
Edited to add: the "Torx Plus" design's patent expired in 2011, which was put in place in 1990 as the original Torx patent was expiring then. Some more nuance, but there ya go.
My understanding is that the patents for Torx (and Torx Plus) have expired. They're an ISO standard, "hexalobular internal" (which is much more fun to say).
I think it may seem like Torx has more sizes than say Phillips or flat-headed screws due to the fact that with those you can generally get away with a screw driver that is "close enough" in size, whereas with Torx you really need the exact size the screw is using.
If you want to strip your screws, you can do that. And then there's the Pozi vs Philips thing that people tend to get wrong. Torx is kind of a pain in the ass because you always try the wrong screwdriver first, but it's still way better than philips/pozidriv
It's because philips drivers are wedge-shaped. They properly fit a range of screw heads. This means that there's only two or three commonly used driver sizes. With torx the sides are parallel so the driver size is directly related to the screw head size.
Also, Torx takes the guesswork out of determining which bit to use. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Phillips can be a pain in the ass to figure out which bit to use.
