Pretty much sums up the experience of buying cables in the past couple years.

Ideally, the computer would test every pin in the cable, and also test the resistance/voltage drop of the cable to detect thinner-than-spec conductors.

I'm pretty sure USB-C hardware in a typical laptop can already do most of this, if only the firmware added support for such testing.

I don't know the cost of the such device, I am assuming the higher cost based on other devices for other thing such as ethernet cable tester such as Fluke which are $100+.

Also you only really need to test the resistance here. Or volts and amps separately.

And I don't know if testing power was even part of the idea or if it was more about doing a signal test.

They forgot to say how it re-appeared the next day under some other manufacturer name that's a random assortment of words and letters slightly different than "NiceTQ"

The weird thing, IMO, is that Amazon doesn’t see this as a big problem that they need to solve.

I mean if I was to give somebody advice as to which cables they should buy on Amazon, it would have to be: use a brand you know and make sure you buy it directly from their account, and if there’s no such brand, don’t buy a cable from Amazon… but then I guess nobody asks.

Not so weird I think. They pretty much have a monopoly so what do they care. The more Amazon is used as the sales-channel the more money Amazon makes. And most users don't have a way of testing their cables. If a cable stops working it is easy to assume the user somehow broke the cable or its connectors themselves.

Commingling makes this advice useless.

Outside the consumer space, I suspect any serious business relying on USB is going to have an EE or 10 who are happy to inform the buying decisions.

https://caberqu.com/home/20-42-c2c-caberqu-746052578813.html...

I have one from the kickstarter, and every new USB-C cable gets tested and labeled. Most are USB 2.0. A few will have the power delivery pins. It's such a crapshoot on any shopping site.

It should be mandatory that these cables are correctly spec'd and labeled.

It's pretty much useful for testing charging, but not use for e.g. eGPUs. :/

And I have yet to see a cable that bothers to have a E-marker like that that then doesn't actually have the pins connected. I suspect if the e-marker lies then rather than just dropping down to a lower spec the cable will just outright fail

[0] See the bottom 2 lines of

https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...

https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...

https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...

(edit: looks like searching FNB58 does the trick)

Still, more trustworthy than buying more niche electronics from Amazon imo.

I'd imagine simplest one would be just to... passthru pins and leech off power at whatever voltage other device is commanding.

Testing cable is a quite bit more complicated on top of acting as "PD analyzer" and if it isn't advertising it it's probably not doing it.

For data transfer that wouldn't be a good metric though, so again you are right!

And maybe it won't just stop working like the one I bought did...

Which makes me sad because it was somewhat of an unique product because outside of the "chinese USB tester functions" (paging thru what negotiation succeeded and monitored voltage) it also had little buck-boost converter so I could use it as power supply (for example connect to bog standard 5V USB and boost it to 12V or current limit it).

(Sidenote, this pattern is so common with AliExpress: very very good hardware but janky software. But God do I like the hardware since it seems like even the most niche, non mainstream stuff still see steady innovation and improvement. None of that 10 year old hardware that used to be common for almost all hobby tier niches haha.)

Why doesn’t the USB standards group mandate labeling of some type? Probably not words, but symbols would be good enough.

And the reason we don't do that is because it would expose the lie that there can be a universal data and power connector for all devices, and rather than live in a world where everything can connect perfectly fine with the right cables, we have chosen to live in one where the market can be flooded with garbage cables that don't work for your devices. And rather than blame the device manufacturer for choosing a shoddy cable, or the government for forcing them to, we can happily blame the cable manufacturer instead.

If you just slap a label on it, it's not going to fix the problem. No one is going to read them, and people are going to lie.

I think the logos would be helpful but I doubt anything will happen in that direction because the benefit is likely marginal.

And yet, such a connector and cable does exist!

> everything can connect perfectly fine with the right cables

Right, because carrying 3 different cables to give a presentation, which I wont be able to if I forget one of them, or it gets too bent in my backpack is indeed "perfectly fine". As opposed to carrying just 1 USB-C cable (which as a bonus I can use to charge my Android phone in case the battery unexpectedly starts running out before the end of the day) and even if it gets damaged or broken, odds are increasingly that there will be several other people who will also have that cable.

> rather than blame the device manufacturer for choosing a shoddy cable, or the government for forcing them to, we can happily blame the cable manufacturer instead

And we can't do that with universal cables because?

It was never promised for ALL devices. Obviously, there are high power applications where type-C connector would melt no matter what you do.

But it's quite obvious that USB-C cables with 40Gbps and 100W power delivery exist. And it's good enough for most devices. At least for now.

I even see 40Gbps cables with 240W PD.

Their names are terrible.

Besides. If companies are going to make non-conforming cables, they can put fake labels on them too. No normal person is going to check for the right labels.

They need a “USB C 4 cable”. They type that into Amazon and buy the thing with a low price and 4 stars.

The exact markings on the cable don’t make a difference.

These were always only intended to be internal designations for very specific technologies, with the devices and cables simply labeled with their actual capabilities. None of the Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 nonsense, simply "10G" / "20G" / "40G".

Unfortunately not everyone got that memo, and once the general population got used to the complicated internal-only designation it became pretty much impossible to use any other term for it.

USB-IF also maintains a list of products that are certified: https://www.usb.org/products

The question then is, “Why is this still confusing?”. The answer is probably that the popular retail and e-commerce channels are flooded with products that aren’t certified, and consumers don’t realize that a certification process even exists.

I've bought some supposedly USB-IF certified cables a couple of weeks ago and I didn't notice the logos. When I get home tonight, I'm going to take a closer look.

I don't think the usb standards body can realisticly police the labeling in any real way.

Also apple's usb-c cables w/ thunderbolt has the little thunderbolt icon on it, so at least they are labeling it (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MN713AM/A/thunderbolt-4-u...)

They recommend the following naming: XYZ's USB 40Gbps 60W USB Type-C® Cable or USB 40Gbps 60W USB Type-C® Cable

USB 40Gbps... correspond to the USB4 Gen 3×2 mode Hi-Speed USB is USB 2.0 (High-Speed).

A tip usb cable and a number in the logo = not USB2. A usb c cable and black/white in the logo = not USB2

Sometimes the marketing name and a logo specify a certain mode like USB 10Gbps the marketing name is only used for USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 mode, the black/white logo with 10 Gbps always correspond to USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 mode.

If you see USB in blue and 10 Gbps in red than it's either USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 or USB4 Gen 2×1 ( those modes have different encodings )

I'm sure it'd be worse as soon as a common spec for this popped up for USB-C.

https://alvarop.com/2023/07/usb-cable-tester

Github project: https://github.com/alvarop/usb_c_cable_tester

Feels like every nerd should have one.

Would be cool to have a version where it measures the resistance of the power wires too

    5w
    10w
    15w
    20w
    ...

    480mbps
    5gbps
    10gbps
    20gbps
    40gbps

    USB2
    USB3.0
    USB3.1
    USB3.2 gen 1
    USB3.2 gen 2
    Thunderbolt 3
    Thunderbolt 4

Clearly we are paying for quality here, the question is LTV

how quickly does the thunderbolt break

Well, yes, because the competitors are functionally a completely different cable. One of them is just for charging, that is obviously going to be very different. So kinda hard to tell what you are really paying for. As another comment says: would be rather interesting to see differences in cables which claim to do the same.

But that's also because TB has significantly lesser margins for errors than USB 3.1/3.2.

> Clearly we are paying for quality here

It's not just quality. It's because Intel did the sensible thing and made a bunch of things that are optional in USB-C mandatory in Thunderbolt certification. So you always know what you're getting.

Not really. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison. The Apple cable is a relatively long 40Gbps cable, with active redriver/retimer due to its length. The competitors are bargain-bin 0.48Gbps cables, intended primarily for charging.

In fact, the NiceTQ cable violates the spec so badly it won't even work in most scenarios. The ATYFUER one is part of an A-to-C cable and is pretty much a textbook example of what such a connector should look like. The AmazonBasics one is also a decent example of a pretty standard low-speed C-C cable.

It works for exactly one second and it fails.

It was SO BAD that AliExpress emailed me that "this product is a counterfeit and you should ask for a refund" :D

USB-C the idea was great. The execution has been so stupid.

The worst USB-C to C cable is still no worse than the best Lightning cable

The EU wouldn’t have forced their hand if they were innovative instead of being greedy, lazy, and rent-seeking.

Gotta love those random 5 letter “brands” amazon is covered in these days.

Even brands I trust more so do this awful keyword stuffing, example: the first result on my amazon for "USB-C":

> Anker USB C Charger Cable (6ft 100W, 2Pack), USB 2.0 Type C Fast Charging Cable for iPhone 15 / 15Pro / 15Plus / 15ProMax MacBook Pro 2020, iPad Pro 2020, iPad Air 4, Samsung Galaxy S23+/S23 Ultra

It's not quite as egregious as some of the titles that use broken english but it's something...

An SEO optimization disaster.

It looks like they start at a 10 and then continue with 4, 3, 2.

I wonder who paid for this...how is this even getting so many upvotes? It's pretty much useless.

Yeah...it's not useless for their and Apple's marketing department. For everybody else, it is.

Are you worried about the internet paper that will be wasted and the digital trees that will be cut down if they post a follow up in a second blog post?

> USB-C head-to-head comparison

> Apple’s new iPhone 15 marks a disruptive departure from previous models. The 11-year reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another.

> Does Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 cable really warrant its $129 price tag? Or does a $5 cable get the job done just as well? We’ve used our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanner to uncover the hidden engineering differences between them.

It fails doing that.

PS. my comment said that your previous comment didn't have anything to do with the topic and instead tried to judge me and my feelings.

Would be awesome if these were donated somewhere like Wikipedia some day.

The highest volume manufacturers may be fully integrated. Usually how it works, especially for these relatively low volume no-name brands, is they buy connectors from one vendor, PCBs from another, cables from another, plastic moldings from another, and then assemble them together (which may also be subcontracted). The assembly process doesn't have to be sophisticated: a small warehouse with a few workers with soldering irons and some jigs. Even some medium-volume assemblies like the USB-C front panel cables for major computer case brands are soldered by hand by a handful of workers in a small building.

Almost all of the USB-C connectors which are available off the shelf have all of their pins populated. Pins are very cheap. You need to be moving a whole lot of volume before it makes sense to go to your connector manufacturer and ask for a custom one with missing pins.

Probably not, at least not in the way most people think of hand-soldered. There are hybrids where a human drives the soldering iron electronically rather than holding it in their hands, although even this the rate of defects would be so high it would make it impractical at even a small scale.

The hardest part with cables is to prepare the strands and keep them in place. For this you can build fixtures.

USB-C connectors with pre-attached PCBs ("paddle cards") are widely available[0], and are created by a machine. Aligning the cables with the paddle card is quite tricky to automate, so humans are still used for that.

[0]: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C62322.html

   406 Not Acceptable

Or for power delivery? I see what might be resistors or capacitors. Not sure what else.

9 layers might sounds like a lot. But reversible connectors are a bit of a logistical nightmare from a PCB routing perspective. Made even more complicated by the very tight signalling requirements needed to hit Thunderbolt 4 transfer speeds. The end result is what looks like a significant over-engineering, but is really just an expression of how difficult it is to transport high data rate signals around PCBs and cables.

The high speed pins (4 per side) should be going directly into a multiplexer or driver, the CC pins (1 per side) detect orientation, the sideband pins (1 per side) are only used dual-sided, and the power and ground pins (4 per side) aren't fussy at all.

Unlike Apple's late Lightning connector, USB-C isn't two sets of mirrored pins. The power pins are simply shorted together on both sides, four pins each for VBUS and GND. USB2 and CC (connection detection) are connected only on one side. The remaining pins are four high-speed lanes, two per side.

With rare exceptions, a USB-C cable does not do anything about reversibility. It simply connects the pins straight-trough to its partner on the other plug. The lane swapping needed for the high-speed lanes is done by the devices, not the cable.

The Apple cable is so complicated because it is a 40Gbps cable over 100cm long. This means it requires a redriver to guarantee signal integrity. That's what the big chip is for. Doing that in the small space available in a plug means your routing gets complicated.

It's not just that. If it was just data speeds that's way easier, passive 10/40GBit DAC cables have been there for long time, they just use twinax (2 wire coax cable instead of differential pairs IIRC) and can go up to 7m passive, but that makes for not so bendy cable.

But USB-C so much more than few data lines, high power, legacy USB2, power negotiation and various alternate functions all in same connection.

That being said, an odd number of metal layers is very unlikely. It's physically possible but due to the lamination process, PCBs are basically always built in an even number of layers. It's a bit tough to tell with the resolution of the scan, but it looks like the dielectric layers were counted as 9, giving 10 total metal layers.

https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable

This cable has a built in keylogger and Wifi among other things.

If an anonymous comment[0] is to be believed, the adapter runs XNU (the macOS kernel) on an ARM SOC with 2GB of RAM. The OS for the adapter is pushed down when the device connects.

0 - https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...

https://www.macworld.com/article/1514105/macbook-air-pro-mag...

A wiggle that small is adding picosecond delays. I’m surprised that’s necessary. Cool!

For Apple, perhaps the most economically exposed to customer problems of any major tech company, and has enough scar tissue from past failures, it's not surprising that their products tend to feature first class electrical engineering. Their DC chargers are widely regarded as among the best in the industry.

The page is a very explicit plug (pun intended?) for their industrial CT products, and it was clearly done for marketing purposes, not because it reveals anything interesting. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison of several cables, basically showing that they're doing what they're supposed to and are constructed as expected. It was even submitted by an account that is clearly tied to the company.

I'm not upset with them - I think it's a better ad than most - but it's a pretty solid case study of how clever "covert" marketing is being done.

Does this cable run iOS or something?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/23/teardown-of-apple...

https://youtu.be/LBWnb0ZIlEA?si=hgLg_TOa9zr42wpU&t=304

I can't find the 7040 specifically, but here's a similar 9040R chip: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/211299/...

Is it because the thunderbolt spec inherits timing parameters from PciE and it was hard to meet those with a long cable?

That probably explains the irregular pricing intervals stepping up from 1.8m $129 to 3.0m for $159. Though it's a very Apple thing to charge $30 for the extra 1.2m of cable. At least the complexity of the integrated circuit can explain that first jump.

I'd imagine both the very-high bandwidth and the PCIe interop make necessary the retimers.

I have a USB-C cable that has been yielding 10 Gbit/s speeds (i.e. USB 3 Gen 2x1 or possibly but very unlikely 1x2) when used at my Mac with various devices (mostly SSDs).

However, that same cable only gets USB 2 speeds when connecting the iPhone to my Mac. The iPhone itself also seems to only get USB 2 speeds using the SSD and that cable. Yet with another, newer USB-C 10 Gbit/s cable, I get 10 Gbit/s throughout all scenarios.

What's going on here? Is the iPhone overly strict about supporting USB 3 speeds over USB-C cables, i.e. is my old cable possibly not electronically marked properly, and the Mac is just more tolerant of that?

And something else I've noticed: The iPhone also does not get 10 Gbit/s using a somewhat monstrous adapter construction (USB-C to USB-A adapter, USB-A to USB-C cable) that should however be fully standards-compliant without any active e-markers (i.e. a resistor-marked A-to-C cable and a resistor-marked C-to-A adapter).

I really wish there was an easy way to dump the cable's SOP' communication on macOS and look into whether a given cable is actually e-marked, and if so, with what capabilities. Alternatively, just showing this in "System Information" would really help, i.e. indicating whether a connection is only using USB 2 speeds due to the cable or the device not supporting more.

From their support page https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213839

> The USB-C cable that comes with your iPhone supports charging and USB 2 speeds. If you want to use a USB 3 device, use a compliant USB 3 cable that supports 10Gbit/s.

Note that this is only the 15 Pro. The "vanilla" 15 uses last year's A16 SoC and doesn't have a USB 3.x-capable PHY.

Doing 40Gbps data is really hard because physics. Once you get beyond about 100cm, the signal loss basically requires you to add a repeater or retimer. This has been part of the USB-C specification since the very beginning, and any cable of this length doing 40Gbps will feature a similar PCB.

The USB specs say that C-to-C cables need an e-marker for that, and A-to-B or other non-C-to-C cables need nothing at all (apart from one or two resistors in case of an A-to-C or C-to-micro-B adapter).

There are already some SOP-related messages in the system debug logs (although almost completely redacted), so I'm at least optimistic that this is handled by the OS, and not e.g. purely in firmware in the USB-C controller.

I wonder: is your Mac an Intel model or an Apple Silicon model? Perhaps the Intel powered ports are more lenient?

It would be interesting to know of a high quality cable tester showed some other difference in capabilities between the cables that may explain it.

> It would be interesting to know of a high quality cable tester showed some other difference in capabilities between the cables that may explain it.

I'm fairly certain that the cable itself is perfectly fine, but that the iPhone insists on a specific bit being set on the e-marker chip insider the cable, while Macs are more tolerant and will just attempt a USB 3 connection anyway, especially since they need to support unmarked USB 3 for use with USB-A adapters anyway.

https://hackaday.com/2022/12/27/all-about-usb-c-illegal-adap...

It doesnt say USB A female to USB C male is noncompliant. These are reasonably common and I had one included with both my current laptop and my current smartphone, for example.

[0]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb-if_usb_type-c_ca...

Feature matrix of port is less of a problem (althought can still be confusing) but fact that one feature can work with one cable but not other is massive mess.

And power direction too, it's utter mess

Of course I would prefer too a comparison between reputable manufacturers. :)

Apple certainly gouges people a lot of the time, but I don't think their Thunderbolt cables are an example of this; they're genuinely complicated pieces of engineering.

I don't know a lot about intermediate quality cables, but I'd at least want to see a thunderbolt 4 fly by night cable, one of these $20-$30 ones.

There’s a part of Apple that capitalized on hidden reservoirs of tech and talent.

Then there’s a part of Apple capitalizes on its own reputation and history.

Lightening cable feels newton era.

What is the PCB for if it's technically possible to omit it?

This isn't nearly as important with USB-2-only cables, which makes the direct soldering possible. It's going to require making a custom connector, so it's not really surprising a lot of manufacturers just reuse the high-speed ones and stick with a paddle card.