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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.
which is why i only buy Gold plated, oxygen free, twisted pair, sheathed Monster cables for $99.99 each. I can see the difference
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
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
Here's the list of cables that he tested, from the TFA. There are ten of them
http://amzn.to/1MlG3g3