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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.
The problem is that the average Joe has no way to judge true quality at the time of purchase. It seems the best he can do is perhaps not buy the absolute cheapest. But what about one step up in price from that? Is that "good enough", or still junk? This is a basic flaw in capitalism: for it to work "best", the consumer must know what he is buying. In a world with unknowable and constantly changing suppliers for components, what was a "good" quality product one year could easily become "junk" next year.
Known "quality" brands that cost more would seem to be the answer to this problem, but they face pressure to lower costs in order to increase profits, so this doesn't seem to be a permanent answer either...
In the face of this, people just buy cheap, since they can't judge quality, hope it doesn't break, and when it does, just buy another cheap one. Explained in this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
USB-C could have been such an awesome standard. But when I read about all the possible feature variations (http://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/anton-shilov/not-all-usb-type-c-ports-are-equal-nine-implementations-of-usb-c-incoming/), I can only shake my head. While it's very cool, especially with integrated thunderbolt support, the idea of splitting it into different versions is just gonna cause nightmares.
We're going to enter an age where people tear their hair out because everyone has the same port, but one person can do one thing with it but another person cannot. The whole HDMI versions confusion is gonna look tame compared to the confusion USB C will cause.
Seems to me that it would be a faulty design that requires a 'cable' to need any electronics at all.
Just like anything with a jack, you can't really trust anything that may get plugged into it.
Wires, wrapping, and shielding, sure. Electronics (caps, resistors, etc.) should be in the devices themselves, and devices when encountering bad cables should always fail 'safe'.
Gods no. The important thing is that the cable be capable of carrying the current the device requests. If the resistors were just in the device, then it would have no idea if the cable you've used to connect it to the hub is thick enough to carry the current it is about to draw.
You mean like the serial number that the USB specification forgot to mandate must be different in each device, so manufacturers just didn't bother and now operating systems have to treat plugging in the same device a second time as plugging in a brand new device because even though everything is identical, the device might not be?
How do you handle backwards compatibility with devices or chargers that can't follow the new communications protocol?
Perhaps you think you are smarter than the engineers that designed USB-C and USB 3.1, but I do not.
Actually, I think he's saying the person who can afford to work only 8 hours x 5 days is less tired and less likely to make mistakes than someone who must work 14 x 7. I don't think location had anything to do with his comment.
I didn't trust it anymore after that current overload so I junked it. So, yea. Not overblown. Actual problem.
You do realize that sentence completely contradicts itself right? Look, I'll make it even simpler for you:
I didn't trust it anymore after that current overload so I junked it.
Thats pretty much the definition of overblown
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager