"All USB-C charging cables that come with phones and laptops have USB 2.0 data transfer speeds. That includes flagship Samsung phones."

This statement is a complete nonsence. All USB-C cables I received with Windows laptops and android devices allow very fast transfer speed, way higher than 500 MB/s.

Here you have a source for flagship Samsung devices: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/15sby2o/what_speed...

The same applies to Pixel devices and Apple devices. There might be exceptions I'm not aware of but it's definitely not the industry standard for USB-PD charging cables to come with 3.0 or faster data transfer speeds as the extra wires increase cost and decrease flexibility, which makes them less suitable for a daily charging cable.

My pixel 4a and 6a both came with usb3 usbc PD cables.

This Reddit user claims the included charging cable with the 4A is limited to 2.0 speeds.

https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/14irr99/cable...

Same for the Pixel 6A. Google charging cables are all 2.0.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/xm2fw5/why_doe...

My Pixel 1 came with a blue USB 3.0 cable, which handles 5Gbps just fine.

We are specifically talking about USB-PD fast charging cables which the Pixel 1 does not support.

It supported 18w of USB PD. Is there some further spec?

That's hilarious, so the Pixel 2 not only dropped the 2.5mm port, it also dropped the USB3 cable.

One could speculate that the moment Google knew their phone was a success, they stopped caring about open standards.

Wow, thanks for pointing this out. This is horrible journalism.

Pick nearly any topic you know a lot about and read the mainstream media reporting on it. You'll come to the realization that it's nearly all horrible journalism.