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Google Engineer Warns Against Perils of Buying Cheap, Third-Party USB-C Cables (hothardware.com)

Posted by timothy on from the cables-for-nerds dept.

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.

5 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The legendary Chinese contempt for tolerances by gnupun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Like health inspectors checking restaurants for bad food or procedures, isn't there an independent company that can randomly test and certify USB cables?

  2. Re:Just like HDMI cables by avandesande · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Having a cable format dependent on a resistor in the cable sounds like a poor design to me.
    ++ since it could damage hardware.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  3. Resistors in a cable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    This makes little sense. Cables should be just cables. If the amount of current needs to be negotiated with resistors, then the resistors should be put inside the devices that provide or require current.

  4. usb 3 similar problems by divenpuke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I worked on the first usb 3.0's for Apple. Same problem. We ended up buying nearly every different cable we could find and doing a tolerance study. Things varied so widely that the mouse i was using on my workstation was out of spec! The standards are CRAP. INTENTIONALLY. The mechanical tolerance standards read: for example the height of the internal spring contacts like 3mm max. no...minimum? pretty sure this thing ain't gonna work if the contacts don't...you know...touch anything. I had an internew w/ some asshat at Tyco - (they also make connectors) When i mentioned that the USB standards are crap, he said "oh yeah. we do that too. intentionally. We spend a lot of time developing the connectors to work properly and then because we HAVE to open source the standard, we'll obfuscate things such that we can gain a competitive advantage. Our cables and connectors work out of the box, or other companies are going to have to spend a couple months figuring things out w/ reliability testing before they can release a quality package. I about walked out of the interview at that point. Who signs their name to something that is intentionally a POS?? Speaking w/ the EE's at Apple, the signal integrity was written just as bad as the mechanical. Components of the signal integrity that would be controlled separately by the receptacle were lumped in with the cable. Just all junk. According to one guy Intel outsourced the design of the standard to india/china and just accepted the crap they gave them (because intel doesn't have like ... any mechanical engineers working there) J

  5. Re:The legendary Chinese contempt for tolerances by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's the difference between Joe's blog and Amazon.com customer reviews?

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