you might get a charge-only cable bundled with some sketchy usb-c accessory. if you do, throw it out. but any standalone cable sold as a cable will do data transfer. the USB-C cables that only carry power and not data is an imaginary problem.
It's moreso things like PD, is it 480Mbits or is it 5Gbit or is it 10 or 20 or 40. What's the voltages, does it support PD 2.0 oh wait is it 3.0 or 3.1?
To be fair, it's been a number of years since I've tried to purchase cables, so perhaps just grabbing the Anker result at the top will net you most of these features. I just remember having to dig and not getting clear answers one way or another which is the spirit of my question.
in practice, in my daily life, all USB C cables work the same. a couple years ago i got one bundled with a device that didn't support some feature, and so i put it in the garbage. problem solved. since then, all my cables work all the time in whatever device i plug them into.
I haven't heard of a phone coming with a charge-only cable. Especially because that cable is usually used for syncing to a computer (iOS)/transferring data from an old phone (Android).
Unless an included cable came with a hard disk, monitor or eGPU, you can be reasonably sure it is USB 2 speeds. If it didn’t ship with a computer either, it is probably 30W max.
Finding a truly power-only USB C cable is difficult but not impossible. It's a special order.
Yes it is.
The spec could have been written such that different capabilities were reflected with different physical characteristics. That is exactly what standards exist to do.
Even if we pretend spec writers wouldn't ever have predicted the proliferation of crappy cables before publishing it, this is not a new problem with USB.
It is absolutely a choice made by the USB Implementers Forum.
And the cheap knockoff brands would have just violated the spec written that way like they violate the current spec.
This is why some things that have a C port won't charge on a C-C cable, but will on a A-C cable, because they don't actually talk to say they need power, but the A port will provide some power regardless, but a C port won't.
Power-only cables should be specified to have a different connector. Vastly different speeds should have a different connector. It should be physically impossible to stick the wrong kind of cable in.
Third parties will make out-of-spec cables no matter what. Some of the ways that Apple has addressed this is the "Made for" program which goes back even to the iPod. And the devices themselves detecting and showing an "Accessory may not be supported" error message, again going back to the iPod.
This is why USB-C is a user-hostile spec.