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Google Engineer Warns Against Perils of Buying Cheap, Third-Party USB-C Cables (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: A USB-C cable is just a cable. Or is it? Google engineer Benson Leung noted today that it's definitely not the case. Leung and his teammates at Google work inside of the Chromebook ecosystem, and as such, they've had lots of hands-on experience with USB-C cables. The Chromebook Pixel remains one of the very few notebooks on the market that directly supports USB-C. Nonetheless, in his experience, not all cables are built alike, and in some cases, cheap out-of-spec cables could potentially cause damage to your device. It's such a big problem, in fact, that Leung began buying cables off of Amazon and leaving his feedback on each one. Ultimately, what the problem boils down to is that some of the specifications in a cable may be not well controlled. He notes that in some bad cables, resistor values are incorrect, throwing off power specs wildly — 3A vs 2A in one example.
USB type A to type C cables require a different pull-up resistor than the Type C to type C cables. Lots of vendors didn't do their due diligence and just put the USB-C spec'd pull up resistors in their A to C cables. As a result, devices try to draw too much power.
I bought one of the bad cables, and was wondering why my wall charger was flaking out. Went online, and saw the issue -- my phone was trying to pull too much juice, overloading the charger and putting it into brownout mode. Now, this is a 4-port wall charger, so my other 3 connected devices were sitting there going charging/not charging/not charging at sub 1 second intervals for the ten minutes that it took me to figure it out. After that, my charger was acting really finicky, and I didn't trust it anymore after that current overload so I junked it. So, yea. Not overblown. Actual problem.
Here's the list of cables that he tested, from the TFA. There are ten of them
http://amzn.to/1MlG3g3