Yeah, standardizing on USB-C would be a great idea, but only in a world where there weren’t fifty different “standards” using visually indistinguishable connectors. Thunderbolt, in particular, should have its own connector: it’s so annoying when I accidentally plug my Thunderbolt 3 dock into a normal USB-C port and then can’t figure out why my external monitor and other peripherals aren’t working.

The expensive Apple 1m USB-C I believe is a full-featured cable and you pay for it.

A lot of the cables that get included with devices only supports the subset of features that device needs - sometimes down to just power delivery only.

Cables are much more complicated now with embedded chips and so on so you need to select and use them as if they were any other electronic you would spend time reviewing the specs or comparisons on.

I got a few, also the longer one. Works 99% for both days and PD.

But then I have this one Seagate external SSD that simply won’t mount with it, for which I have to use a TB4 cable (even though it’s not rated for TB).

Also, some cheap Chinese devices only work with their supplied USB-A to C cable.

Other than those edge cases, those Apple cables are great.

It goes to show there is no one cable to rule them all, even though they look identical.

For those interested, this video shows scans of what is inside Apple’s cable vs cheap cables off Amazon.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84

For those who prefer to read and want to look at the scans in more detail, that can be found here:

https://www.lumafield.com/article/usb-c-cable-charger-head-t...

They compared a thunderbolt 4 cable to several non thunderbolt cables. It's not surprising the non thunderbolt cables do not have thunderbolt chips

This cable also has no thunderbolt chip and is only usb 2.0

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MU2G3AM/A/240w-usb-c-char...