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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
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.
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.