> But I shouldn't have had to do any of this. It's time cables came with a label of their own, or some sort of color coding.
There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable. There should be a single connectivity/performance spec, and if the cable meets it, it can be called a USB-C cable, and if it doesn't, it should have to be marketed as USB-JUNK or something.
This is what happens when the spec is awful and says "the cable must do 480Mbps, or it must do 40Gbps, or... whatever, have fun!"
Unless you want all cables to be thick, $60, and cap out at 1 meter long, this is not a reasonable standard. 480mbps USB-C is perfectly adequate for many applications. Likewise for 60W cables.
So, call it USB-D or something, if one cable is significantly different (in purpose, performance, form factor) than another cable. Don't just call everything the same label, and let the non-technical buyer beware.
I think Apple much rather tells users that this is exactly what they warned them about when they were forced to support USB-C and will advise users to only buy official cables from Apple.
Some chargers will re-negotiate depending how many cables are plugged into the adapter. Which is fine, but sometimes makes it tricky to know if it's the cable, the plug, or the number of cables causing a slow charge
Ehem, we already do that. USB-C is an umbrella term and everyone has a homebaked organizing system to tell which USB-C cable can do what, or a homebaked testing routine where we run through 5 cables each time we need to connect something.
That's what the article is about. Calling all these cables USB-C and making them look indistinguishable is a very leaky abstraction.
So there are 4 different current-carrying levels, from 2.5A to 5A EPR.
There are 6 different transfer speeds, from 480mbps to 120gbps.
There’s DisplayPort yes/no.
There are 4 thunderbolt genrations, each with its own marker.
Some of those are dependent (480mbps cables don’t have markers), so it’s not a full permutation problem. Only about 20 different combinations are valid.
Is the proposal to have 20 different physical connectors? Or to prune the space down to 6 or so by requiring all cables to be very thick, or to support higher transfer speeds than make any sense for a charging cable?
It’s not a leaky abstraction. It’s a physical interface standard that does not guarantee electrical properties. Same way you can plug a 6A cord and a 20A cord into the same electrical outlet.
- "USB Speed 3" means 100gbps, thunderbolt 4, etc.
- "Power 100" means 100 watts minimum.
Make a little logo for each standard - "S2" / "S3" / "P100" which can be branded onto each end of the cable. People who care can look at the logos and tell what a given cable can do.
I mean, if you care about this and it annoys you the fix is very simple and relatively cheap.
Just set a minimum baseline/standardization for the type of cable/capabilities you need for your highest end device. Only keep those cables, give away the rest, and buy a half dozen new cables so no matter which you select you will always get the right one.
I've rarely found I need a "special" USB-C cable outside of connecting Thunderbolt ports. Those are mostly static on my monitors, with one in my laptop bag. They also happen to be decently labeled on the connector with what they are.
Once in a while I get an incredibly cheap horrible one from some throw away style device and I simply toss the cable immediately.
The only exception I can think of are USB-A -> USB-C adapter cables where the device is so cheap it doesn't implement USB-C PD delivery at all and expects a "dumb" 5V connection. That is a charger issue though, not a cabling one. Those devices are luckily starting to become much more rare.
I purged the house of the worst 5W USB-A charges long ago in a fit of rage. Anything that couldn't do 15W was tossed. We still have more 15W chargers than I could ever use in a lifetime.
> Just set a minimum baseline/standardization for the type of cable/capabilities you need for your highest end device. Only keep those cables, give away the rest
I don't have a cable tester, and I don't want to buy one. The companies who make USB cables should be responsible for this testing. I don't want to do expensive homework on behalf of USB cable companies.
Buy nice cables from a trusted brand and bin anything else. You're going to be overpaying though because there's not a lot of reason to be powering your laptop with a 480 Gbps TB 4 USB-C cable.
> Or do we now need to resort to labeling cables and checking the label?
YES oh please yes! Give me labels! I'm sick of playing guessing games with my USB cables. Which one should I use for my external drive? This cable is thick! Will it work? Maybe it's only thick so it can send power? It seems impossible to tell, even if I plug it in to my computer. The files are there, I just need to somehow guess that it's a bit slower than it's supposed to go. Another cable feels expensive but its 1m. Will it work? Do I get slower data rates? I can't tell. I hate guessing. Label the cables!
USB-A has many variants and we don’t call it a different connector. Heck, USB-B and micro USB both have 3.0 variants that are physically different and we don’t call them something different either. I don’t see the problem here. This is just semantics, especially when they aren’t even labeled period… people just see a cable and will try plugging it in.
The other USBs are no better TBH. I still remember USB Full Speed and USB High Speed. Do you remember, without looking it up, which one is faster? Same form factor, same physical connector.
USB2 has been backwards compatible from the beginning though. I can’t think of a time in the past… 15, maybe 20 years where a USB cable wasn’t capable of high speed, unless it didn’t have data lines at all.
(And yes, I don’t need to look it up. But also I’m extremely familiar with the USB spec and have been tangentially involved with the USB-IF)
> USB-A has many variants
> especially when they aren’t even labeled period
What are you talking about? USB-A is color coded. You'll frequently see white and blue. Admittedly this is harder with USB-C because the size, but I don't see why we can't label these things. Not labeling just leads to confusion and fraud.
The color coding is optional and ambiguous: Blue is recommended, not required, and there is no difference for 3.0, 3.1 (10gbit) or others. And you now also have red, yellow, green, purple and orange, which have no defined meaning in any standard and are just whatever a manufacturer wants to do. There is nothing preventing someone from selling standard 4 conductor A ports with red coloring.
I've never seen white; in order of prevalence, I've seen black, blue, red, and yellow. But such colour coding is not standardized, every manufacturer is free to choose their own rainbow.
Sometimes. They’re not required to be labeled, though. I would agree that the blue connector for USB3.0 is more common… but again it’s not universal and certainly not every device ever does this.
There are names for all of the features. It would be cool if there were some sort of color code or physical indication of a cables capability, but one of the cool things about usb-c is that the same connector works for really cheap stuff and really high end stuff. For example, in a pinch I can charge my MacBook (slowly) from a $5 gas station usb charger.
USB-C is the connector type, not the cable. The connector type supports multiple protocols, including for interoperability with other connector types as a cable can have USB-C in one end and something else in the other end and users expect the cable connection to just work the USB way.
So a USB-D would imply a different physical connection and end up confusing the consumer even more.
If the cable supports 60w charging or only 25w, if it's full or half bandwidth, those characteristics seem to me like we are talking about grading quality, so a better expansion would be:
TECH PHYSICAL-TYPE GRADE
USB A/B/C 1/2/3
And define which quality the cable should present to achieve higher or lower grade levels, depending on the convention.
I have several 1m long TB4 cables (100W, video, 40Gbps) and they’re neither particularly thick nor were they anywhere close to $60.
The best you can get is TB5 (240W, up to 120 Gbps data transfer) and at 1m long they’re $32 or so from CableMatters. Those are admittedly somewhat thicker, but not stiff.
I wish there was a higher baseline data transfer mandated for usb-c. Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask? We had usb 2.0 speeds back when CPUs just barely entered 1 GHz range, it’s practically ancient technology. Admittedly most people never transfer any data over usb, but with this logic we might as well have usb-c that does charging only. Being able to pick any cable and have 5 gbps baseline means that any usb-c cable is fundamentally usable, if slow. 480 mbps is… ugh.
I don’t have an issue with 60W being the baseline, it’s enough for most laptops and the average GaN charger is 65 W (or less) anyway.
> Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask?
5gbps means you add 8 additional wires to every cable, and also would require that both devices on each side implement 5gbps PHYs for their USB (if you mandated it on devices too). It’s a large cost, especially when you’re talking about billions of cables.
And for the applications it not adequate for, a different cable should be used. But instead I have a drawer full of USB c cables and no idea which ones are which.
That's still an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason. Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs? There is zero reason why 480mbps USB-C should exist when we already had 480mbps USB-A, except for misguided designers prioritizing aesthetics over usability.
Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
This isn’t a great example because, on the ‘other side', car chargers also have different size cables between the ‘charger’ (EVSE) and the car, with the same plug used on them all (especially with NACS, which doesn’t even differentiate between AC and DC plugs). They rely on negotiation to tell the car how much power it can draw. No-one complains about this.
In a world following your proposed rules, we’d never get to 480Mbps USB-A, because we already had 4-wire 12Mbps USB-A ports with just D+/D- and power and creating 480Mbps USB-A from that would be “an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason” and not all 12Mbps capable USB-A cables would support the 480Mbps spec.
Except usb-c will have a baseline level if working even with your very lightweight cheap flexible usb2 60w cable.
Adding connectors to obstruct functionality, to make each specific use physically incompatible with every other use, was hell. No thanks.
Usb-c rocks, it's flexibility is amazing, and anytime you need a serious business use, good cables are well labelled. This is just yet another HN lightning rod issue where all the very narrowly intolerant particular people come out in hordes, but it's just not really an issue. And everyone else is living much more happily.
> Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
They largely do. I’m not sure I understand your point? The amount of current pulled by the car in an EV is dictated by the car (equivalent to the PD controller on USB-C) and the amount of current max is indicated by the EVSE (which, is sort of like an emarker). When you plug that EVSE into the wall, there is absolutely nothing telling it how much current it can pull.
"absolutely nothing" is overly strong wording for a plug-in EVSE.
The standardization of the receptacles tells how much current is safe to pull. "This receptacle is 50A rated and can supply 40A continuous" is given by the 14-50 receptacle shape.
But you can buy an EVSE capable of pulling 40 amps and plug it into a 20A rated receptacle. It will happily pull 40 amps until the breaker pops. Most EVSEs that are plug in have adapters to do explicitly this purpose.
It’s not hard to make a functional standard, the USB folks just don’t care, IMO. If they had simply worked on better naming, things would be much more clear.
(now they’d need to do something crazy like USB-C 40G PD60 as a name in order to fix things, unless the next version of USB is a clean break)
Now they’ve made a mess of things, and cables AND connectors are all over the place.
How would better naming make things more clear when manufacturers don’t want to put labeling on cables, generally? Even if it was a USB-IF requirement, that doesn’t have any teeth. Ports tend to be decently well labeled, but you can only cram so much into these things.
Why would speed capability be replaced with power capability? They are orthogonal capabilities intentionally so you don’t have to overbuild cables in either direction if you don’t intend to.
I think you didn't put a lot of research in before making this recommendation. Labels make more sense because the top tier USB c specs are darn expensive.....
> There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
Then USB is forever frozen in time, unless we start using new connectors.
This was the tradeoff we got when standardizing on one connector. The protocol versions change (USB, USB-PD, Thunderbolt), the cables that go between each connector change based on the needs of the spec they supports. But the connectors stay the same.
In my opinion, this was a poor tradeoff and now we’re living in the hell we asked for.
If you want every cable to support the latest and greatest of whatever exists as of right now, you can do that. By all means, buy Apple’s USB-C Thunderbolt 5 cables. They’ll run you $70 apiece but you’ll be buying a cable that makes no compromises.
My personal approach is to just use whatever cable came with the device for anything for which that’s convenient and plausible. For mobile devices with relatively limited charging speeds over USB-PD and for which portability and durability are typically important, I buy the latest Apple woven cables. For high-bandwidth devices I spend the big bucks on the Apple Thunderbolt 5 cables. I discard any cables of unknown provenance.
N=1, but my quality of life has greatly improved. Literally all devices I use daily (laptop, phone, mp3 player, Bluetooth speaker, headphones) I charge from a single cable.
I'm still grateful for this unification every time I charge my phone via the laptop charger.
Now we live in a world where any cable can connect any two devices, but what happens and what’s supported is a complete and total crapshoot. The more devices and cables you own, the more chaotic things become.
I have devices that take USB-C cables but won’t charge if the cable supports USB-PD.
I have a monitor that supports Thunderbolt 3 and two Thunderbolt 3 laptops. It took me multiple tries with various switches and Thunderbolt cables to find a combination that worked.
I have had multiple other situations like this, and the only practical solution I’ve found is to aggressively get rid of cables of questionable provenance, unless you can keep them permanently connected to or associated with the device they came with.
I suspect I’m running into this sooner than most because I’ve gone all-in on USB-C. I have gotten rid of every device possible that used USB micro or USB-A.
For simple electronics that just need to charge? Fine, sure, outside of random cable/device pairs charging slower than expected, it’s nice. For anything that actually depends on features on the cable or on a combination of features supported by the devices on each end? Total chaos.
USB-C is just a connector. A cable can be a USB-C connector USB 3.0, power delivery 3.1 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector Thunderbolt 4 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector DisplayPort 1.4 cable.
Yeah, and it also can be a RS-232 compliant serial link cable with 4 wires that are RX, TX, GND, and a +5V for good measure, attached to a USB-C head, can't it? I mean, that'd be totally fine, right?
Yeah and that's the confusing part. Just imagine saying "Yeah this is german power plug, but it might support just 120V, but the device will negotiate once you plug it in.
Spec range is not the issue, its the inept thinking of designers that people should qll become little detectives and find out themselves what which cable does. Which is ridiculous assumption and judt doesnt work in real life.
Clear big labeling saying version, speed, watts or similar mix so everybody can quickly glance and know whats being sold. Whatever chinese crapware has mislabeled is another topic.
Also keep in mind that the standard supports cables with USB-C connectors in one end and USB-A connectors in another end. What do you expect the USB-C end to do?
Do people really not remember the hell of every device having it's own cable which was incompatible with all the others? Going around to a friend's house and finding out, no, they don't have the cable that can charge your phone.
It is a strict improvement to be able to transfer data or charge at degraded speeds, compared to not being able to plug it in at all. Wanting all your cables to end up entirely incompatible just because you don't want to bother checking labels (modern cables come with clear ones, I have ones that clearly say 40Gbps/240w on them) is, frankly, silly.
> A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
This would completely defeat the point.
There is a range of needs for cables. Some devices have simple needs for power/data transfer/extra functionality, and some devices have more. A $3 USB-powered lamp does not need a cable for gigabit data transfer and 100W charging - this cable would be more expensive than the product. Similarly, new features & performance levels will emerge and we want to be able to use these in new cables backward compatibly.
Given a range of needs, you have two options:
- A single cross-compatible connector, but with a range of capabilities
- Different types of connector for every capability
We used to be in the latter situation, USB-C is an attempt to do the former. Having different capabilities for same-shaped cables is the goal.
Labelling would be great, but standardizing one single spec for all cables would defeat the point.
But the current situation is I can take two devices with a USB C connector, connect them with a USB c cable, and they won’t work. Is that really better?
Yes. This is the worst case scenario: You don't have the required cable.
In an alternative world with no unified connector, you also likely don't have the required cable. The result is the same.
It's just that in this world, the worst case scenario happens a lot less. There is often a fallback when you don't have the required cable and you get some functionality. But, most people most of the time the cable they have does what is needed.
In almost all cases they will work, just slowly. There's always some power, and almost always some data (power-without-data cables exist, but they're very rare, mostly a specialist security thing).
If the power isn't enough to power a device, that's annoying, but it's strictly better than when we had a unique power cable per-device. We've replaced "carry a charger per device" with "carry one charger for your highest power device, and it can do everything else too". And even with just a low-power cable you can usually trickle-charge overnight or something.
The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support. Would it be better to have a whole different USB-C2 spec which requires display support (and so is significantly more expensive)? If the connector is the same you have the same problem (it's just labelling) and if it's not that sounds like you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
You’re somewhat underplaying it - plugging a cheapo random Chinese knock off cable into my MacBook is effectively useless. Plugging a 480Mb cable into a thunderbolt dock is effectively useless.
> The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support.
Between charging, data transfer and monitors we’re now at the three primary uses for USB that may or may not work at their advertised performance depending on what combination of devices you use and what connector you use. And to be clear, trickle charging a high power device is “degraded” in the same way that GitHub was “degraded” yesterday.
Yes I do think a different spec is the right solution - why should the charging port for my electric toothbrush accept a cable that’s plugged into a Nintendo switch dock on the other end? Something like USB 3 MicroB is an example of how a “high featured” device can share with the power delivery.
> you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
There should be proper error correction. So you will have "this is a fast cable" versus "this is a slow cable", and NOT "this is a good cable" versus "this is a broken cable". Unfortunately, the second situation is the one we're in.
This is basically Thunderbolt and why most of cables I buy are either braided charge cables or Thunderbolt 3/4 for data. They’re usually labelled with their version too.
You do have to worry about active bs passive after 1m or so length.
I am not a fan of the USB-C spec, the naming of all the sub specifications/versions is a nightmare.
A label is fine. With USB the risk is that the thing doesn't work as well as it could. It's been the situation forever with extension cords that they have the wire gauge printed on them, and in that case the risk is that if you choose the wrong cable you will burn your house down. Labels are good enough.
LTT has created true spec cables with the actual spec mentioned on the cables but they can not keep up with demand despite being expensive get sold out as soon as new stock comes in.
By chance, has anyone tested Cable Matters' cables?
I just bought a couple of their Thunderbolt™ 5 cables. They seem like a reputable company that would make their cables true-to-spec. Thanks in advance!
I've not spec tested them, but astronomy gear is notoriously picky about USB cables and since I switched all of my cables to cable matters a lot of weird behaviors just stopped happening
I bought a 3-meter long USB C cable from them for data and display transfer, which turned out to be the only USB C cable of that length capable of driving my display at its full resolution and framerate. However, after a year of use, it stopped transferring any sort of data. So while they're probably up to spec, the quality isn't necessarily what their pricing may suggest.
Support allowed me to send it back for replacement as a "one-time exception", though I was well within the common 2-year warranty period in the EU.
We had good results testing Cable Matters stuff here at work, but that was for non-critical use so I didn't go too hard on the tests. (Actually, I didn't go too hard on any of it since it was mostly make-work from a manager trying to cause trouble, but still....)
I was quite impressed by GlobTek (available at Digi-Key) and have been buying those when I need something nice. Their USB-C line are some of the best I've seen, not that I'm a connoisseur.
I have some that I got to connect to my MBP, which supports TB5. Unfortunately my MSI MPG 321URX doesn't properly support it, so half of the time the DisplayPort over USB negotiation doesn't work, and the monitor doesn't connect properly.
Apparently the majority of non-TB devices will have trouble with it. I can't even use the cable to charge my phone when attached to a wall wart!
> I can't even use the cable to charge my phone when attached to a wall wart!
It sounds like maybe you have a defective cable? When I first used the cable, it didn't charge my phone until I made sure it was plugged in all the way.
My concern is stiffer cables are likely more likely to rip USB ports off the PCB. A lot of devices provide very little support to the USB port which is basically just hanging off pads on the PCB, so a stuff heavy cable could provide a lot more bending force to rip it off.
Phones and macbooks have it done right where the outer portion of the port is built in to the device body, but most other devices don't do this.
They are not TB5 compatible though, and if you are going to drive monitors through it, or connect external GPU, 120Gbit (TB5) is much better than 40Gbit TB4 gives you. If you are willing to pay a bit more, consider TB5 cables from CalDigit, StarTech, CableMatters, or Apple.
I used LTT's 40 Gbps cable to connect my ThinkPad X270 to a USB-C monitor and it worked fine. I guess neither device there is TB5, but just wanted to share that those cables do at least support DP-alt mode (or whatever it's called).
I can't say I've seen it on USB-C-esque cables (except maybe a thunderbolt cable a while back?) but I've seen some cables use a type of aluminum or mylar-looking foil between the outer rubber sleeve and the inner sleeves and wires.
That shield is a drain wire combined with either a woven braid (most effective at lower frequencies) or a solid aluminized mylar foil (most effective at higher frequencies), or, for the best cables, both together.
A USB-C cable really should be shielded. Here's a cross-section I took of a nice full-featured USB-C cable: https://ibb.co/svR5Yvyr . You can see the VBUS/GND (fat red/black), the SS pairs (white plus red/blue/yellow/brown, each one foil shielded on this cable), the USB 1/2 pair (white/green), and then the CC and SBU stuff is the remaining wiring. Notice how not just the whole thing is braid+foil shielded, but the SS pairs are individually shielded; that's really important at these speeds, and what you want to see on a good cable.
Compare with two USB 2.0 cables: https://ibb.co/BHz4v1mx and https://ibb.co/GfpJmgbx ; the first one has the shield braid, as it should, but everything else is nicer on the second one. Cables!
Didn't they not care enough and not put vendor id on their cable. Which results some devices rightfully refusing to operate at high powers... Or am I miss remembering something.
This keeps needing to be pointed out every thread this appears on. Plenty of cables have eMarkers that claim "40Gbps" or whatever speeds, or support 240W PD...but absolutely cannot deliver either of those. And none of these consumer level testers can test either of those claims.
Resistance measurements can cursorily test claims of 240W but resistance changes with temperature which changes with current...so unless your tester puts 5 amps down the wire for 5 minutes and then tests resistance it's not a very good test.
Yeah — "the eMarker said 40Gbps" is basically the same problem as trusting the print on the jacket.
For home use I've ended up treating real capability as an empirical property of the specific cable+port+device combo: does this exact cable drive this monitor at the mode I want, under load, for an hour? If yes, it gets a colored heat-shrink band and never leaves that use case. Everything else is a phone/charge cable until proven otherwise.
I had a cheap no-name cable which claims 3.1 speeds (and thus needs a marker), though it lacks all differential pairs and borks every usb connection (after I cut it, it was obvious). No clue why it contains a marker chip but doesn't have any conductors. Likely for usb-pd but you do not want to put any power though it anyway as the conductors were cheap copper clad aluminium.
You need to generate a precise, calibrated, 40GHz signal, transmit it, then precisely measure the returned signal for phase, amplitude, and waveform integrity -at that speed.
Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that run at that speed, are damn expensive.
You need to at least look at waveform integrity (which can be approximated, by doing things like looking for harmonics).
For example, you may send in a 40 GHz square wave, and get back a wave full of ringing, or a sine or sawtooth wave. It’s damn difficult to maintain clean square waves, at that frequency. The cable could also double as a microwave antenna.
Since it’s digital information, some waveform alterations are OK, but not too much. You need fairly clear state transitions. Ringing, or waveform distortion, can introduce extra (or fewer) transitions; thus, completely changing the data.
That's not really what I mean. You don't have to diagnose the signal, just the medium, which can tell you what will happen to the real signal. It requires a fast edge (or a very broadband sweep), but nothing much beyond that.
E.g., here's what a bad connector at the far end of an SFF-8654 cable looks like on a TDR: https://i.imgur.com/AiLnSuC.jpeg . This type of plot can be interpreted as impedance versus distance along the line. It could be made with a small handheld instrument, but currently a human is needed to read the tea leaves. While I was making that measurement, I couldn't help thinking that it would be nice if it didn't require either a 50 GHz VNA or equally-expensive training to read.
Equivalent-time sampling gets you out of needing an expensive network analyzer, but it doesn't help with the diagnosis itself. And of course when checking a USB cable you are most likely just after a go/no-go result, not the gory details. That further calls the market economics of such a gadget into question. Still, if somebody offered one at a reasonable price, they'd sell at least one to me.
But for bandwidth can't you just have two simple computers at either end that can send a 100GB file and if it arrives in 20 seconds, you know you have 40gbps of bandwidth?
> But for bandwidth can't you just have two simple computers at either end that can send a 100GB file and if it arrives in 20 seconds, you know you have 40gbps of bandwidth?
Because that is not reproducible and introduces all sorts of other random variables to your test.
Expensive equipment is the only answer here.
Its a bit like when you ask an electrician to install network cable (yuk !).
They consider their job done after a continuity test (if they bother to do a continuity test at all).
Meanwhile, if you put a Fluke on it, you will pick up all sorts of subtle faults that the electrician's continuity tester will never pick up, but will cause subtle and hard-to-diagnose problems when you try to push data over the cable.
Its the same thing with all those cheap USB testers.
They might have all sorts of fancy displays, but in the end they are no substitute for the real thing and will end up lulling you into a false sense of security.
If you buy decent cables from reputable companies (CableMatters, LTT, Apple, etc...) you could end up with a drawer full of high quality mystery cables. A cheap tester is probably all you really need to sort out that mess.
You have to first identify and ensure the two devices and their ports are capable of reliably creating and absorbing that data rate too or you'll never know if it's the cable or the devices that causes the cables to fail. What if your devices can but only intermittently or a software/firmware update messes with it's capabilities?
Dedicated test equipment that can reliably and verifiably test these high speeds is niche and therefor expensive. There's not really a way around that issue.
Testing in that way will only tell you if the two devices work with the given cable. It won't tell you what sort of margins you have. Not all devices are made equal.
A device isn't even necessarily better if it works with one cable when another doesn't, it might just happen to have a slightly lower impedance on its internal traces that happens to better match an out of spec cable, or any other one of a number of parameters.
I came up with a color code based on the wiring: Red for Power Only, Blue for USB 2.0, Green for USB 3 (the ones with the extra pairs connected). I use paint pens to mark every cable I come across with this code. Generally speaking, only the Green ones have special PD emarker chips.
It doesn't cover every possible configuration, but it's good enough for when I'm like "I need a USB cable" vs "I need a good USB cable"
E markers are required for USB3, so that’s why. If you have a cable capable of 100 or 240W, they will also have a marker (it’s required), even if they only do USB2 speeds.
As much as the original author bemoans having to do the labeling themselves, 99% of people don't care or don't have such a mix of cables as to make it a challenge to find one to suit the task.
If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.
I think the issue isn't that it's this huge ordeal for a person to do, but that if billions of people have to do this then that's a fundamental design flaw that could have been avoided.
Interestingly, I have found a very mixed bag of USB-C cables I've collected over the years to generally just work for all my use cases. I can charge my various USB-C laptops at 65W with all the USB-C cables I have on hand. Maybe it's just my habit of just buying cables from known brands (Belkin is normally my go to) but I also have random cables that came with various devices of varying quality and all these also work just fine. I have a 6-port charging hub so I can see the charging wattage and I can easily get 65W to various laptops and a high capacity power bank, regardless of the cable being used. All cables also work fine for data transfer, although I confess I use USB-C for data transfer rarely so it is possible there is some variability there. YMMV but I wonder how much of this issue is just crappy low-end cables?
Every not-broken USB C cable allows for 480Mbps USB 2 speeds and 60W charging. In USB C terms, it doesn't get any more basic than this; that's as low-and-slow the specification tolerates.
The issues come into play with going beyond that. USB 3 speeds? USB 4? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort (4k uncompressed video!) alt modes? 240W charging? These are all practical things that regular people use USB C cables for every day, but they require very specific support from the cables themselves, and that support is widely varied.
Your cables work fine for what you're doing with them, but you're really barely scratching the surface of the kinds of things that can be done. :)
Not that I disagree with you, but I _wish_ "regular people" used 240W charging every day. As far as I can tell it's still pretty niche and hard to get 240W chargers
It’s because you are using the lowest use case for usb (like most people). Literally everything can manage 65w power only.
All of these “usb sucks” posts are about using multiple 4k 120hz monitors dasychained while pumping 140w and a handful of other dongles hanging off which pushes usb to the limit and requires carefully selecting the highest quality cables.
"If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
The problem isn't inherently USB, it's companies producing cables without properly defining specs.
If you want to be certain a USB cable works, buy it from a brand that sells certified (USB-IF) cables with a particular spec you want. For example, Club3D.
Yes, they'll cost more but you can be decently certain that you don't have to fiddle with it. I replaced all USB cables I own with certified ones. Since then, not a single issue with slow charging, display resolutions, frames, or data transfers.
> Any cable that can transfer data faster than USB 2.0 speeds also requires a chip to do so.
I always found this confusing because USB 3.0 Micro-B cables can transfer data faster than USB 2.0 without needing an e-marker, so why do USB-C cables need one if they already have the Tx and Rx SuperSpeed wires?
It seems like the answer is, roughly, "it's complicated".
If you’re following USB-C standard, all cables with faster data than 480mbps and more power than 60W require an e marker, period. Whether devices will still function for USB3 without that marker… that’s another story and will depend on the device.
I'm not disputing that the e-marker is required by the USB-C the standard, I'm saying that conceptually it's confusing that an e-marker is required for USB-C cables but not for a USB 3.0 Micro-B cable with the same wires and data transfer capabilities.
just don't buy cables from generic or awful brands, you can go with some reputable ones like cablematters,startech, caldigit, or satechi, also you can check USB-IF members. For other cables like displayport, just buy only certified cables that can be checked on displayport site, before buying any.
same for thunderbolt, etc.
you may pay a bit more, but they will comply the specs and be higher quality than the other generic brands.
Useful app, funny thread (centipede), and the MacRumors Bartender alternative link arising from the menu bar decision discussion means I might be able to ditch Ice! (reduce spacing instead)
This effectively only tells you what the E-Marker reports though, the actual capabilities of the cable are still unknown.
You can say the cable can do whatever you want on the E-Marker, its not the source of truth.
The problem is, to actually benchmark everything, voltage drop, resistance, actual bandwidth (especially at Thunderbolt 5 speeds) requires a lot of hardware.
It’ll never happen. Measuring to the proper Thunderbolt spec is only possible on literally the most cutting edge measurement equipment. Physics just won’t permit that being a gadget you can buy for $20 of whatever.
That's an ad. There's a lot of cable testers around, most of them are crap. Cheap testers like this one are based on generic chips reading e-markers and aren't even guaranteed to support all quick charging standards. And bandwidth is another matter entirely.
I use one of these to check the wiring of the USB cables I get, especially if I'm getting a weird one. I've always been a little freaked out by the story of that Google employee who posted very trusted USB-C cable reviews to Amazon, then got his equipment fried by one that crossed the wires.
I know things have become much more complicated, but still remember fondly the good intentions of the original USB spec, which, for instances, forbade any extension cables (ignored, as expected, by many), with the reasoning that users should expect that if a cable connects, it should just work. Longer cables would need to be electrically "better", and extensions would eventually cause issues with electrical paths that were too long.
People still remembered the "black art" involved with, e.g., SCSI cables, where long chains would often had issues, and wanted to avoid that.
There are several apps that do something similar and the biggest issue is the marker on the chip it's interrogating doesn't guarantee the cable can actually provide that. The maker can program whatever they want into that chip and the devices will just negotiate and determine what they're actually capable of achieving anyways.
The Treedix cable tester is awesome. Ordered one after reading Terence Eden's positive review* and went through all my cables the day it arrived. My favorite was the cable with only the ground connected; went immediately into the bin.
It definitely looks to be one of the better ones. Since many of these products use same generic Chinese platforms, I looked for a similar product on Aliexpress since they have better shipping for me, but didn't find a full analog. Had to use a forwarder to order from Treedix—only to have it shipped in a very roundabout way from China.
Are you buying ones that are "Ultra High Speed" HDMI certified? At least in theory, those should all be able to handle the maximum 48 Gbps bandwidth supported by HDMI 2.1
This is the one I use and I quite like it. I've had it for a little over a year and a half. I used it to sort (or trash) all my cables and to test new incoming cables.
I just got this one a few days ago so it's kinda weird I've seen it mentioned or posted about multiple times since. Guerrilla marketing?
Anyway, it's definitely better than having nothing, and tests resistance as well. I tossed a couple low value/duplicate/high resistance cables because I've got too many just lying around causing clutter. Also helped 'confirm' my good (e.g. TB4+) cables that weren't labeled clearly are indeed good cables - granted, this is only as dependable as the marker chip the manufacturer added.
Nope, or if so my royalty/referral checks never showed up :)
I bought mine back in March of last year and used it to "process" all my cables and was just a happy customer. I've been watching this space (cable testers) for years (on and off) and wasn't interested in the "raw circuit board with led"-versions so once a nicer version came out at a price point I found tolerable I got one.
It's nice to have all my cables organized now (h/t to Akro mills bins, those are a dangerous rabbit hole) and now instead of just buying a new cable [0] when I need one I can go grab one that matches the specs I need.
[0] Call it wasteful, call it lazy, but when faced with "I have a cable that fits the hole and is the right length but I don't know what it's capabilities are" I would often just buy a new cable with the specs I needed/wanted rather than using an "unknown" cable.
If you just want to know what wires sets you have in your USB cables you can get the Gikfun "USB Cable Tester - Fast Check for Type-C/Lightning/RJ45 | Tests Charging Data Transfer | Continuity Check Quick Cable Sorting"
It's only $14.
It even offers test pads you can use to test the cable with a much more expensive multimeter.
I'm not so sure about cheap. All the cheap ones I've tried have been pretty flaky, and ended up in the junk bin. I picked up this guy for work: https://bit-trade-one.co.jp/en/adusbcim/ and it's been pretty good. That was a while ago though, and some of the cheaper ones might have caught up.
I like your "who watches the watchers" reference, but AI's reviewing AI work, and notably, people reviewing people work, are subject to the same problem!
The same principles that worked for auditors tracking risk compliance in the 2000's now work for humans tracking AI-output risk compliance in 2026
Apart from the specs of a cable is there a way to verify the signal quality of a cable? I have lost many days trying to debug random hardware issues and the final answer was to just replace a cable.
I have not managed to stress test it yet, I believe that so far I saw it deliver ~100W max.
I got it for 110€ in some Amazon bundle together with 3 usb cables. Which is about the price of the 140W Apple brick. (We don't get the powerbricks included with the MacBooks.)
But Apple's is much larger, heavier and has a single port.
Started using whatcable.uk app. Been amazing at finally knowing cable speed, but also device max speeds, and everything in between, without having to carry around one of those digital dongles with more limited use.
At a minimum, if plugging it in to a device and measuring waveforms is good enough for your application, you need an oscilloscope with 10 GHz bandwidth or so (don't quote me on that, I don't remember the max speed used by USB). Scopes at that level require a whole lot of R&D and very expensive components so they're really not something you'd want to buy to check your own cables.
If you're talking about reading the e-marker then you can just plug it in to a device and use an app. Google will help you find one for your platform.
If you want a super fast cable and high power thats where they get pricey. "Charge only" cables can often be fairly cheap and perform well even for laptops and high draw devices.
USB-IF certified is a certification that the cable follows the spec, but that spans usb 2.0-only cables up to USB4v2 cables. The tester shows you what the capabilities are.
The cables are supposed to be labelled with their maximum speed (5, 10, 20, 40, or 80 Gbps or nothing if no data) and maximum wattage (60W or 240W).
HOWEVER, I don't remember ever seeing a cable with such a label. I'm sure they exist, but I don't see them. Requiring products to be labelled, and treating mislabelling as fraud, could mostly solve this. It's definitely a real problem.
> Requiring products to be labelled, and treating mislabelling as fraud, could mostly solve this.
There are too many manufacturers to hunt. Basically USB-IF needs to stop almost all shipments in the world. That's not going to happen.
USB spec is completely open and free to obtain. While it allows people to develop and DIY many things, it also attracts bad manufacturers like flies.
Good certified cables with correct markings exist. There are companies like Cable Matters or Startech who bother to actually certify their cables and get USB-IF TIDs. They do cost you quite a bit money though. Here are some:
Just measuring the power info is limited use. I'm sure there's value for some people, but I only need to keep track of 0-2 high power cables.
> Your no-brand 480Mbps USB 2.0 cable is indistinguishable from the super-fast USB 4 cable that can move 40 gigabits (around 5 gigabytes) of data every single second.
One of those is way thicker than the other, at least.
I would love for something to force a speed and power rating on USB-C plugs.
> This already exists. Cable makers can certify their cables and mark them with their data speed and wattage.
Obviously labeling is possible. I want it to be forced.
Whether that's the USB consortium having more power, or a legal requirement, or the biggest stores refusing to carry unlabeled cables.
> If I see an unmarked cable, I assume it’s slow and low-powered…which is good enough for some things.
That's a reasonable way to handle things. Lots of basic cables and only worry about the good ones. And if a cable is so bad that it's missing data wires or is too high resistance to get near 3 amps, it can go in the garbage.
This is really good. The base is open source, and has both GUI and a CLI. For the purposes of this article, identifying what each cable can actually do, that’s covered. There’s additional Pro capabilities that you can pay for.
I don't know how my wife and kids are treating charging cables, but the cables seem not to live that super long in their hands :) So paying premium constantly seemed like a money sink hole for me. Strangely enough once they start to buy their own damn cables instead of me paying, the lifespan of said cables seemed to quadruple. Strange strange universe we live in. :)
it's just psychology, there's not much thought when there just are cables around and new ones come when they break, but when you have to choose and buy ones yourself and look at the price tag and all that, you tend to place more value and significance to that thing and remember how much it costs etc...
I'd say most of us have experienced this ourselves in some form at some point in our lives
then you have a bunch of cables and wires that with all different types of connector that you can 'easily' identify which one is for which device. sounds familiar hah
> But I shouldn't have had to do any of this. It's time cables came with a label of their own, or some sort of color coding.
There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable. There should be a single connectivity/performance spec, and if the cable meets it, it can be called a USB-C cable, and if it doesn't, it should have to be marketed as USB-JUNK or something.
This is what happens when the spec is awful and says "the cable must do 480Mbps, or it must do 40Gbps, or... whatever, have fun!"
Unless you want all cables to be thick, $60, and cap out at 1 meter long, this is not a reasonable standard. 480mbps USB-C is perfectly adequate for many applications. Likewise for 60W cables.
So, call it USB-D or something, if one cable is significantly different (in purpose, performance, form factor) than another cable. Don't just call everything the same label, and let the non-technical buyer beware.
The naming could be better for sure.
Okay, great, it’s called USB-D. Is this a new connector? Or do we now need to resort to labeling cables and checking the label?
Do we do this for every new version and combination of versions for USB? USB-PD? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort?
The computer / phone should auto-detect and tell you on-screen
The hell Apple or Google cares.
Apple should care because customers will blame slow charging times and slow transfer speeds on the phone
I think Apple much rather tells users that this is exactly what they warned them about when they were forced to support USB-C and will advise users to only buy official cables from Apple.
You mean USB-C, the standard that they largely led development of?
They've already done that afaik, like warning about charging at slower speed.
Haven’t ever seen a warning like that in KDE.
Some chargers will re-negotiate depending how many cables are plugged into the adapter. Which is fine, but sometimes makes it tricky to know if it's the cable, the plug, or the number of cables causing a slow charge
Ehem, we already do that. USB-C is an umbrella term and everyone has a homebaked organizing system to tell which USB-C cable can do what, or a homebaked testing routine where we run through 5 cables each time we need to connect something.
That's what the article is about. Calling all these cables USB-C and making them look indistinguishable is a very leaky abstraction.
So there are 4 different current-carrying levels, from 2.5A to 5A EPR.
There are 6 different transfer speeds, from 480mbps to 120gbps.
There’s DisplayPort yes/no.
There are 4 thunderbolt genrations, each with its own marker.
Some of those are dependent (480mbps cables don’t have markers), so it’s not a full permutation problem. Only about 20 different combinations are valid.
Is the proposal to have 20 different physical connectors? Or to prune the space down to 6 or so by requiring all cables to be very thick, or to support higher transfer speeds than make any sense for a charging cable?
It’s not a leaky abstraction. It’s a physical interface standard that does not guarantee electrical properties. Same way you can plug a 6A cord and a 20A cord into the same electrical outlet.
That can be solved the same way it was solved for SD / CFe cards. Just have a single mark which guarantees a baseline set of requirements.
- "USB Speed 2" means [20gbps, thunderbolt 3, displayport, 20 watts].
- "USB Speed 3" means 100gbps, thunderbolt 4, etc.
- "Power 100" means 100 watts minimum.
Make a little logo for each standard - "S2" / "S3" / "P100" which can be branded onto each end of the cable. People who care can look at the logos and tell what a given cable can do.
USB3-5A-10Gbps-DP-TB3-C would be pretty gnarly as a label even if it’d still be a Type C at the end of the day.
I mean, if you care about this and it annoys you the fix is very simple and relatively cheap.
Just set a minimum baseline/standardization for the type of cable/capabilities you need for your highest end device. Only keep those cables, give away the rest, and buy a half dozen new cables so no matter which you select you will always get the right one.
I've rarely found I need a "special" USB-C cable outside of connecting Thunderbolt ports. Those are mostly static on my monitors, with one in my laptop bag. They also happen to be decently labeled on the connector with what they are.
Once in a while I get an incredibly cheap horrible one from some throw away style device and I simply toss the cable immediately.
The only exception I can think of are USB-A -> USB-C adapter cables where the device is so cheap it doesn't implement USB-C PD delivery at all and expects a "dumb" 5V connection. That is a charger issue though, not a cabling one. Those devices are luckily starting to become much more rare.
I purged the house of the worst 5W USB-A charges long ago in a fit of rage. Anything that couldn't do 15W was tossed. We still have more 15W chargers than I could ever use in a lifetime.
> Just set a minimum baseline/standardization for the type of cable/capabilities you need for your highest end device. Only keep those cables, give away the rest
I don't have a cable tester, and I don't want to buy one. The companies who make USB cables should be responsible for this testing. I don't want to do expensive homework on behalf of USB cable companies.
Buy nice cables from a trusted brand and bin anything else. You're going to be overpaying though because there's not a lot of reason to be powering your laptop with a 480 Gbps TB 4 USB-C cable.
They are all USB C form factor port cables. The actual functionality being different is a USB spec/labelling failure not one of naming.
Thunderbolt is also a USB C form factor/port, just has better naming and private control over usage.
I have a similar USB tester as the author. It's rather useful and inexpensive. Good bit of homelab kit.
Yes, a new connector would be great. It could be a notch on the standard usb-c form factor, so that usb-c connectors could fit into usb-d plugs.
> Do we do this for every new version and combination of versions for USB? USB-PD? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort?
Yes.
> Or do we now need to resort to labeling cables and checking the label?
YES oh please yes! Give me labels! I'm sick of playing guessing games with my USB cables. Which one should I use for my external drive? This cable is thick! Will it work? Maybe it's only thick so it can send power? It seems impossible to tell, even if I plug it in to my computer. The files are there, I just need to somehow guess that it's a bit slower than it's supposed to go. Another cable feels expensive but its 1m. Will it work? Do I get slower data rates? I can't tell. I hate guessing. Label the cables!
USB-A has many variants and we don’t call it a different connector. Heck, USB-B and micro USB both have 3.0 variants that are physically different and we don’t call them something different either. I don’t see the problem here. This is just semantics, especially when they aren’t even labeled period… people just see a cable and will try plugging it in.
The other USBs are no better TBH. I still remember USB Full Speed and USB High Speed. Do you remember, without looking it up, which one is faster? Same form factor, same physical connector.
USB2 has been backwards compatible from the beginning though. I can’t think of a time in the past… 15, maybe 20 years where a USB cable wasn’t capable of high speed, unless it didn’t have data lines at all.
(And yes, I don’t need to look it up. But also I’m extremely familiar with the USB spec and have been tangentially involved with the USB-IF)
No, but I can tell you which is faster by looking at the color
What are you talking about? USB-A is color coded. You'll frequently see white and blue. Admittedly this is harder with USB-C because the size, but I don't see why we can't label these things. Not labeling just leads to confusion and fraud.
https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/storage/u...
The color coding is optional and ambiguous: Blue is recommended, not required, and there is no difference for 3.0, 3.1 (10gbit) or others. And you now also have red, yellow, green, purple and orange, which have no defined meaning in any standard and are just whatever a manufacturer wants to do. There is nothing preventing someone from selling standard 4 conductor A ports with red coloring.
> You'll frequently see white and blue
I've never seen white; in order of prevalence, I've seen black, blue, red, and yellow. But such colour coding is not standardized, every manufacturer is free to choose their own rainbow.
Sometimes. They’re not required to be labeled, though. I would agree that the blue connector for USB3.0 is more common… but again it’s not universal and certainly not every device ever does this.
There are names for all of the features. It would be cool if there were some sort of color code or physical indication of a cables capability, but one of the cool things about usb-c is that the same connector works for really cheap stuff and really high end stuff. For example, in a pinch I can charge my MacBook (slowly) from a $5 gas station usb charger.
It could be like resistors, different color stripes for each capability: transfer speed, maximum amperage, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc.
USB-C1, USB-C2, USB-C3, etc... we had the CAT naming for a while
> So, call it USB-D or something,
USB-C is the connector type, not the cable. The connector type supports multiple protocols, including for interoperability with other connector types as a cable can have USB-C in one end and something else in the other end and users expect the cable connection to just work the USB way.
The terminology is something like
So a USB-D would imply a different physical connection and end up confusing the consumer even more.
If the cable supports 60w charging or only 25w, if it's full or half bandwidth, those characteristics seem to me like we are talking about grading quality, so a better expansion would be:
And define which quality the cable should present to achieve higher or lower grade levels, depending on the convention.
Why not just USB-C Type 123?
That allows for 999 possible permutations of usb-c cables.
because USB-C is a shorthand for USB Type C
Right... label them differently. Now you're just arguing what the label should be
I have several 1m long TB4 cables (100W, video, 40Gbps) and they’re neither particularly thick nor were they anywhere close to $60.
The best you can get is TB5 (240W, up to 120 Gbps data transfer) and at 1m long they’re $32 or so from CableMatters. Those are admittedly somewhat thicker, but not stiff.
I wish there was a higher baseline data transfer mandated for usb-c. Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask? We had usb 2.0 speeds back when CPUs just barely entered 1 GHz range, it’s practically ancient technology. Admittedly most people never transfer any data over usb, but with this logic we might as well have usb-c that does charging only. Being able to pick any cable and have 5 gbps baseline means that any usb-c cable is fundamentally usable, if slow. 480 mbps is… ugh.
I don’t have an issue with 60W being the baseline, it’s enough for most laptops and the average GaN charger is 65 W (or less) anyway.
> Sure, 40gbps isn’t needed for all cables, but is some piddly 5gbps too much to ask?
5gbps means you add 8 additional wires to every cable, and also would require that both devices on each side implement 5gbps PHYs for their USB (if you mandated it on devices too). It’s a large cost, especially when you’re talking about billions of cables.
And for the applications it not adequate for, a different cable should be used. But instead I have a drawer full of USB c cables and no idea which ones are which.
Actually, different cables should be called something different.
But they ran out of names. The S in USB still sucks. Just try to transfer a lot of small files over USB.
That's still an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason. Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs? There is zero reason why 480mbps USB-C should exist when we already had 480mbps USB-A, except for misguided designers prioritizing aesthetics over usability.
Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
This isn’t a great example because, on the ‘other side', car chargers also have different size cables between the ‘charger’ (EVSE) and the car, with the same plug used on them all (especially with NACS, which doesn’t even differentiate between AC and DC plugs). They rely on negotiation to tell the car how much power it can draw. No-one complains about this.
We are lucky we don't need to transfer (so much) data over these. Just imagine looking for Gen 2x2 or Gen 2 SuperSpeed charging station.
In a world following your proposed rules, we’d never get to 480Mbps USB-A, because we already had 4-wire 12Mbps USB-A ports with just D+/D- and power and creating 480Mbps USB-A from that would be “an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason” and not all 12Mbps capable USB-A cables would support the 480Mbps spec.
Except usb-c will have a baseline level if working even with your very lightweight cheap flexible usb2 60w cable.
Adding connectors to obstruct functionality, to make each specific use physically incompatible with every other use, was hell. No thanks.
Usb-c rocks, it's flexibility is amazing, and anytime you need a serious business use, good cables are well labelled. This is just yet another HN lightning rod issue where all the very narrowly intolerant particular people come out in hordes, but it's just not really an issue. And everyone else is living much more happily.
> anytime you need a serious business use, good cables are well labelled.
Unfortunately, many not-good cables are also labeled similarly as good cables (fraudulently).
> Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs?
They largely do. I’m not sure I understand your point? The amount of current pulled by the car in an EV is dictated by the car (equivalent to the PD controller on USB-C) and the amount of current max is indicated by the EVSE (which, is sort of like an emarker). When you plug that EVSE into the wall, there is absolutely nothing telling it how much current it can pull.
"absolutely nothing" is overly strong wording for a plug-in EVSE.
The standardization of the receptacles tells how much current is safe to pull. "This receptacle is 50A rated and can supply 40A continuous" is given by the 14-50 receptacle shape.
But you can buy an EVSE capable of pulling 40 amps and plug it into a 20A rated receptacle. It will happily pull 40 amps until the breaker pops. Most EVSEs that are plug in have adapters to do explicitly this purpose.
It’s not hard to make a functional standard, the USB folks just don’t care, IMO. If they had simply worked on better naming, things would be much more clear.
(now they’d need to do something crazy like USB-C 40G PD60 as a name in order to fix things, unless the next version of USB is a clean break)
Now they’ve made a mess of things, and cables AND connectors are all over the place.
How would better naming make things more clear when manufacturers don’t want to put labeling on cables, generally? Even if it was a USB-IF requirement, that doesn’t have any teeth. Ports tend to be decently well labeled, but you can only cram so much into these things.
Now that EU made USBC a power standard I expect the 4k/8k/16k, 3.0/3.1/3.2, and 5/10/20gbps to be replaced with 60/120/240watts.
This way it's simpler to enforce a standard across the industries
Why would speed capability be replaced with power capability? They are orthogonal capabilities intentionally so you don’t have to overbuild cables in either direction if you don’t intend to.
I think you didn't put a lot of research in before making this recommendation. Labels make more sense because the top tier USB c specs are darn expensive.....
> There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
Then USB is forever frozen in time, unless we start using new connectors.
This was the tradeoff we got when standardizing on one connector. The protocol versions change (USB, USB-PD, Thunderbolt), the cables that go between each connector change based on the needs of the spec they supports. But the connectors stay the same.
In my opinion, this was a poor tradeoff and now we’re living in the hell we asked for.
If you want every cable to support the latest and greatest of whatever exists as of right now, you can do that. By all means, buy Apple’s USB-C Thunderbolt 5 cables. They’ll run you $70 apiece but you’ll be buying a cable that makes no compromises.
My personal approach is to just use whatever cable came with the device for anything for which that’s convenient and plausible. For mobile devices with relatively limited charging speeds over USB-PD and for which portability and durability are typically important, I buy the latest Apple woven cables. For high-bandwidth devices I spend the big bucks on the Apple Thunderbolt 5 cables. I discard any cables of unknown provenance.
> just use whatever cable came with the device
the problem comes when the device and cable get separated, and the cable is "helpfully" organized into the bin with the rest of the USB-c cables.
Oh how this brings back memories of finding all my cables all rolled up and tucked together as if a cable is a cable.
> now we’re living in the hell we asked for
N=1, but my quality of life has greatly improved. Literally all devices I use daily (laptop, phone, mp3 player, Bluetooth speaker, headphones) I charge from a single cable.
I'm still grateful for this unification every time I charge my phone via the laptop charger.
I'm also happy we have a single connector but, n=1, I have a couple things that will not work with all cables.
I have no idea why, nor have I bothered to find out, I just marked the cables they came with (which are USB-A to USB-C) same as GP did.
>I have no idea why, nor have I bothered to find out
The reason is simple; your device violated the USB-C spec by saving $0.0000002 of BOM cost
> your device violated the USB-C spec
I heard there are more than one USB-C specs.
Exactly this. Or charge my laptop via the phone cable, sure, it's slower, but it still works.
Now we live in a world where any cable can connect any two devices, but what happens and what’s supported is a complete and total crapshoot. The more devices and cables you own, the more chaotic things become.
I have devices that take USB-C cables but won’t charge if the cable supports USB-PD.
I have a monitor that supports Thunderbolt 3 and two Thunderbolt 3 laptops. It took me multiple tries with various switches and Thunderbolt cables to find a combination that worked.
I have had multiple other situations like this, and the only practical solution I’ve found is to aggressively get rid of cables of questionable provenance, unless you can keep them permanently connected to or associated with the device they came with.
I suspect I’m running into this sooner than most because I’ve gone all-in on USB-C. I have gotten rid of every device possible that used USB micro or USB-A.
For simple electronics that just need to charge? Fine, sure, outside of random cable/device pairs charging slower than expected, it’s nice. For anything that actually depends on features on the cable or on a combination of features supported by the devices on each end? Total chaos.
There is no hell. Just buy a couple of good cables and life is nice
USB-C is just a connector. A cable can be a USB-C connector USB 3.0, power delivery 3.1 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector Thunderbolt 4 cable, or it can be a USB-C connector DisplayPort 1.4 cable.
IIRC you can also run USB 2.0 over a c port
You can have power-only cable (no data transfer) because the PD protocol does not use any usb data wires.
Yeah, and it also can be a RS-232 compliant serial link cable with 4 wires that are RX, TX, GND, and a +5V for good measure, attached to a USB-C head, can't it? I mean, that'd be totally fine, right?
Yeah and that's the confusing part. Just imagine saying "Yeah this is german power plug, but it might support just 120V, but the device will negotiate once you plug it in.
Because the spec is applied for either $1 Chinese toy or $10000 Apple Mac studio. Such dynamic range requires a lot of detail
Spec range is not the issue, its the inept thinking of designers that people should qll become little detectives and find out themselves what which cable does. Which is ridiculous assumption and judt doesnt work in real life.
Clear big labeling saying version, speed, watts or similar mix so everybody can quickly glance and know whats being sold. Whatever chinese crapware has mislabeled is another topic.
You mean this: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_pow...
> There shouldn't even need to be a label. A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
I think you are confused. USB-C refers to the connector type, not the cable, let alone the protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
Also keep in mind that the standard supports cables with USB-C connectors in one end and USB-A connectors in another end. What do you expect the USB-C end to do?
Do people really not remember the hell of every device having it's own cable which was incompatible with all the others? Going around to a friend's house and finding out, no, they don't have the cable that can charge your phone.
It is a strict improvement to be able to transfer data or charge at degraded speeds, compared to not being able to plug it in at all. Wanting all your cables to end up entirely incompatible just because you don't want to bother checking labels (modern cables come with clear ones, I have ones that clearly say 40Gbps/240w on them) is, frankly, silly.
> they don't have the cable that can charge your phone.
Nokia was the USB-C of the 90's.
If you owned a Nokia someone in the room would always have a charger and offices would be full of spares at random desks.
It's called Thunderbolt.
then how do you update capabilities/the spec? like 240w usb PD?
> A USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable should be a USB-C cable.
This would completely defeat the point.
There is a range of needs for cables. Some devices have simple needs for power/data transfer/extra functionality, and some devices have more. A $3 USB-powered lamp does not need a cable for gigabit data transfer and 100W charging - this cable would be more expensive than the product. Similarly, new features & performance levels will emerge and we want to be able to use these in new cables backward compatibly.
Given a range of needs, you have two options:
- A single cross-compatible connector, but with a range of capabilities
- Different types of connector for every capability
We used to be in the latter situation, USB-C is an attempt to do the former. Having different capabilities for same-shaped cables is the goal.
Labelling would be great, but standardizing one single spec for all cables would defeat the point.
But the current situation is I can take two devices with a USB C connector, connect them with a USB c cable, and they won’t work. Is that really better?
Yes. This is the worst case scenario: You don't have the required cable.
In an alternative world with no unified connector, you also likely don't have the required cable. The result is the same.
It's just that in this world, the worst case scenario happens a lot less. There is often a fallback when you don't have the required cable and you get some functionality. But, most people most of the time the cable they have does what is needed.
In the alternative world I use the cable that came with the device and I can tell apart from the other 10 black cables.
In almost all cases they will work, just slowly. There's always some power, and almost always some data (power-without-data cables exist, but they're very rare, mostly a specialist security thing).
If the power isn't enough to power a device, that's annoying, but it's strictly better than when we had a unique power cable per-device. We've replaced "carry a charger per device" with "carry one charger for your highest power device, and it can do everything else too". And even with just a low-power cable you can usually trickle-charge overnight or something.
The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support. Would it be better to have a whole different USB-C2 spec which requires display support (and so is significantly more expensive)? If the connector is the same you have the same problem (it's just labelling) and if it's not that sounds like you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
You’re somewhat underplaying it - plugging a cheapo random Chinese knock off cable into my MacBook is effectively useless. Plugging a 480Mb cable into a thunderbolt dock is effectively useless.
> The only optional feature you'll run into that may or may not work at all is monitor support.
Between charging, data transfer and monitors we’re now at the three primary uses for USB that may or may not work at their advertised performance depending on what combination of devices you use and what connector you use. And to be clear, trickle charging a high power device is “degraded” in the same way that GitHub was “degraded” yesterday.
Yes I do think a different spec is the right solution - why should the charging port for my electric toothbrush accept a cable that’s plugged into a Nintendo switch dock on the other end? Something like USB 3 MicroB is an example of how a “high featured” device can share with the power delivery.
> you've just invented display cables which your monitor almost certainly supports today anyway.
Which my laptop doesn’t have a port for anymore!
There should be proper error correction. So you will have "this is a fast cable" versus "this is a slow cable", and NOT "this is a good cable" versus "this is a broken cable". Unfortunately, the second situation is the one we're in.
This is basically Thunderbolt and why most of cables I buy are either braided charge cables or Thunderbolt 3/4 for data. They’re usually labelled with their version too.
You do have to worry about active bs passive after 1m or so length.
I am not a fan of the USB-C spec, the naming of all the sub specifications/versions is a nightmare.
A label is fine. With USB the risk is that the thing doesn't work as well as it could. It's been the situation forever with extension cords that they have the wire gauge printed on them, and in that case the risk is that if you choose the wrong cable you will burn your house down. Labels are good enough.
USB-C is literally just the name of the connector. USB-A can also have varying speeds across it... and B. These are all connectors, not speed ratings.
There is usb 1, 2, 3, and 4 that are more of a statement on the performance capability.
LTT has created true spec cables with the actual spec mentioned on the cables but they can not keep up with demand despite being expensive get sold out as soon as new stock comes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfovjw7Ts_U&t=974s
By chance, has anyone tested Cable Matters' cables?
I just bought a couple of their Thunderbolt™ 5 cables. They seem like a reputable company that would make their cables true-to-spec. Thanks in advance!
I've not spec tested them, but astronomy gear is notoriously picky about USB cables and since I switched all of my cables to cable matters a lot of weird behaviors just stopped happening
They are excellent.
I bought a 3-meter long USB C cable from them for data and display transfer, which turned out to be the only USB C cable of that length capable of driving my display at its full resolution and framerate. However, after a year of use, it stopped transferring any sort of data. So while they're probably up to spec, the quality isn't necessarily what their pricing may suggest.
Support allowed me to send it back for replacement as a "one-time exception", though I was well within the common 2-year warranty period in the EU.
We had good results testing Cable Matters stuff here at work, but that was for non-critical use so I didn't go too hard on the tests. (Actually, I didn't go too hard on any of it since it was mostly make-work from a manager trying to cause trouble, but still....)
I was quite impressed by GlobTek (available at Digi-Key) and have been buying those when I need something nice. Their USB-C line are some of the best I've seen, not that I'm a connoisseur.
I have some that I got to connect to my MBP, which supports TB5. Unfortunately my MSI MPG 321URX doesn't properly support it, so half of the time the DisplayPort over USB negotiation doesn't work, and the monitor doesn't connect properly.
Apparently the majority of non-TB devices will have trouble with it. I can't even use the cable to charge my phone when attached to a wall wart!
> I can't even use the cable to charge my phone when attached to a wall wart!
It sounds like maybe you have a defective cable? When I first used the cable, it didn't charge my phone until I made sure it was plugged in all the way.
I managed to get a few and so far am impressed. They are definitely on the chunky side but that probably comes with the durability
My concern is stiffer cables are likely more likely to rip USB ports off the PCB. A lot of devices provide very little support to the USB port which is basically just hanging off pads on the PCB, so a stuff heavy cable could provide a lot more bending force to rip it off.
Phones and macbooks have it done right where the outer portion of the port is built in to the device body, but most other devices don't do this.
They’re chunky, but very flexible. There’s basically no memory effect to them either, so they don’t try to curl up on their own.
Yeah even the shorter lengths (thicker) are way more complacent than I expected.
I’m slowly replacing every cable in the house and cars. I’m up to 7 and counting.
They are not TB5 compatible though, and if you are going to drive monitors through it, or connect external GPU, 120Gbit (TB5) is much better than 40Gbit TB4 gives you. If you are willing to pay a bit more, consider TB5 cables from CalDigit, StarTech, CableMatters, or Apple.
I can't find it anymore, but I'm pretty sure that the only reason they don't say it support TB5 is because they would need a license to say so.
You’re thinking of TB4 which only requires 40Gbps.
TrueSpec cables that advertise 40Gbps work fine as TB4 cables.
TB5 is 80Gbps so TrueSpec isn’t capable.
I used LTT's 40 Gbps cable to connect my ThinkPad X270 to a USB-C monitor and it worked fine. I guess neither device there is TB5, but just wanted to share that those cables do at least support DP-alt mode (or whatever it's called).
They also crackle out of the package, or at least the 5 I got did. Kind of sound like the thin glow sticks a bit.
Could that possibly be shielding?
I can't say I've seen it on USB-C-esque cables (except maybe a thunderbolt cable a while back?) but I've seen some cables use a type of aluminum or mylar-looking foil between the outer rubber sleeve and the inner sleeves and wires.
That shield is a drain wire combined with either a woven braid (most effective at lower frequencies) or a solid aluminized mylar foil (most effective at higher frequencies), or, for the best cables, both together.
A USB-C cable really should be shielded. Here's a cross-section I took of a nice full-featured USB-C cable: https://ibb.co/svR5Yvyr . You can see the VBUS/GND (fat red/black), the SS pairs (white plus red/blue/yellow/brown, each one foil shielded on this cable), the USB 1/2 pair (white/green), and then the CC and SBU stuff is the remaining wiring. Notice how not just the whole thing is braid+foil shielded, but the SS pairs are individually shielded; that's really important at these speeds, and what you want to see on a good cable.
Compare with two USB 2.0 cables: https://ibb.co/BHz4v1mx and https://ibb.co/GfpJmgbx ; the first one has the shield braid, as it should, but everything else is nicer on the second one. Cables!
I have a few of these cables, pretty decent although I think the USB-C ports are a bit too thin? They feel lose in multiple of my devices
Multiple people I know, and myself included, have experience failure of their USB-C port on their phones.
I don't think they are really durable enough.
Didn't they not care enough and not put vendor id on their cable. Which results some devices rightfully refusing to operate at high powers... Or am I miss remembering something.
Related discussion “The USB Situation” (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950993
re: https://randsinrepose.com/guides/usb/usb-guide.html
Apple sells this $30 (0.5m) CalDigit cable https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs9d2zm/a/ and this $70 (1m) Apple cable https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mdw94am/a/
There's also some interesting discussion of Thunderbolt 5 cables on reddit (6 months ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1r84q54/
As always, these testers (the affordable ones) are capable of testing continuity, and, I guess, the cable chip report.
If you want to test bandwidth, that's a five- or six-figure bit of gear.
This keeps needing to be pointed out every thread this appears on. Plenty of cables have eMarkers that claim "40Gbps" or whatever speeds, or support 240W PD...but absolutely cannot deliver either of those. And none of these consumer level testers can test either of those claims.
Resistance measurements can cursorily test claims of 240W but resistance changes with temperature which changes with current...so unless your tester puts 5 amps down the wire for 5 minutes and then tests resistance it's not a very good test.
Yeah — "the eMarker said 40Gbps" is basically the same problem as trusting the print on the jacket.
For home use I've ended up treating real capability as an empirical property of the specific cable+port+device combo: does this exact cable drive this monitor at the mode I want, under load, for an hour? If yes, it gets a colored heat-shrink band and never leaves that use case. Everything else is a phone/charge cable until proven otherwise.
That’s a very practical approach.
I had a cheap no-name cable which claims 3.1 speeds (and thus needs a marker), though it lacks all differential pairs and borks every usb connection (after I cut it, it was obvious). No clue why it contains a marker chip but doesn't have any conductors. Likely for usb-pd but you do not want to put any power though it anyway as the conductors were cheap copper clad aluminium.
It’s much cheaper to just buy your cables from Apple or LTT knowing they tested them on a 6 figure testing rig.
I throw out every usb cable that comes bundled with devices because they are literal junk.
I use the ones provided by Apple and it’s been pretty good so far.
Why on earth is so much more expensive than an arbitrary pair of devices that could max out a cable?
Think about it.
You need to generate a precise, calibrated, 40GHz signal, transmit it, then precisely measure the returned signal for phase, amplitude, and waveform integrity -at that speed.
Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that run at that speed, are damn expensive.
Someone could do an equivalent-time sampling instrument for not much money, if the market were there. It's probably not, though.
Time sampling isn’t enough.
You need to at least look at waveform integrity (which can be approximated, by doing things like looking for harmonics).
For example, you may send in a 40 GHz square wave, and get back a wave full of ringing, or a sine or sawtooth wave. It’s damn difficult to maintain clean square waves, at that frequency. The cable could also double as a microwave antenna.
Since it’s digital information, some waveform alterations are OK, but not too much. You need fairly clear state transitions. Ringing, or waveform distortion, can introduce extra (or fewer) transitions; thus, completely changing the data.
That's not really what I mean. You don't have to diagnose the signal, just the medium, which can tell you what will happen to the real signal. It requires a fast edge (or a very broadband sweep), but nothing much beyond that.
E.g., here's what a bad connector at the far end of an SFF-8654 cable looks like on a TDR: https://i.imgur.com/AiLnSuC.jpeg . This type of plot can be interpreted as impedance versus distance along the line. It could be made with a small handheld instrument, but currently a human is needed to read the tea leaves. While I was making that measurement, I couldn't help thinking that it would be nice if it didn't require either a 50 GHz VNA or equally-expensive training to read.
Equivalent-time sampling gets you out of needing an expensive network analyzer, but it doesn't help with the diagnosis itself. And of course when checking a USB cable you are most likely just after a go/no-go result, not the gory details. That further calls the market economics of such a gadget into question. Still, if somebody offered one at a reasonable price, they'd sell at least one to me.
But for bandwidth can't you just have two simple computers at either end that can send a 100GB file and if it arrives in 20 seconds, you know you have 40gbps of bandwidth?
> But for bandwidth can't you just have two simple computers at either end that can send a 100GB file and if it arrives in 20 seconds, you know you have 40gbps of bandwidth?
Because that is not reproducible and introduces all sorts of other random variables to your test.
Expensive equipment is the only answer here.
Its a bit like when you ask an electrician to install network cable (yuk !).
They consider their job done after a continuity test (if they bother to do a continuity test at all).
Meanwhile, if you put a Fluke on it, you will pick up all sorts of subtle faults that the electrician's continuity tester will never pick up, but will cause subtle and hard-to-diagnose problems when you try to push data over the cable.
Its the same thing with all those cheap USB testers.
They might have all sorts of fancy displays, but in the end they are no substitute for the real thing and will end up lulling you into a false sense of security.
If you buy decent cables from reputable companies (CableMatters, LTT, Apple, etc...) you could end up with a drawer full of high quality mystery cables. A cheap tester is probably all you really need to sort out that mess.
You have to first identify and ensure the two devices and their ports are capable of reliably creating and absorbing that data rate too or you'll never know if it's the cable or the devices that causes the cables to fail. What if your devices can but only intermittently or a software/firmware update messes with it's capabilities?
Dedicated test equipment that can reliably and verifiably test these high speeds is niche and therefor expensive. There's not really a way around that issue.
Testing in that way will only tell you if the two devices work with the given cable. It won't tell you what sort of margins you have. Not all devices are made equal.
A device isn't even necessarily better if it works with one cable when another doesn't, it might just happen to have a slightly lower impedance on its internal traces that happens to better match an out of spec cable, or any other one of a number of parameters.
https://www.whatcable.uk/
Yes, very useful to see what a cable is capable of. Mac only.
And two linux ports:
https://github.com/Zetaphor/whatcable-linux
https://github.com/abrauchli/usbee
I came up with a color code based on the wiring: Red for Power Only, Blue for USB 2.0, Green for USB 3 (the ones with the extra pairs connected). I use paint pens to mark every cable I come across with this code. Generally speaking, only the Green ones have special PD emarker chips.
It doesn't cover every possible configuration, but it's good enough for when I'm like "I need a USB cable" vs "I need a good USB cable"
I use this tester: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF95VL2Y
E markers are required for USB3, so that’s why. If you have a cable capable of 100 or 240W, they will also have a marker (it’s required), even if they only do USB2 speeds.
As much as the original author bemoans having to do the labeling themselves, 99% of people don't care or don't have such a mix of cables as to make it a challenge to find one to suit the task.
If you care, then care enough to do small, practical things for yourself. A little loop of tape. Paint marker. Even just sorting them into drawers/boxes/whatevers by type.
I think the issue isn't that it's this huge ordeal for a person to do, but that if billions of people have to do this then that's a fundamental design flaw that could have been avoided.
I thought blue indicated USB 3.0?
Interestingly, I have found a very mixed bag of USB-C cables I've collected over the years to generally just work for all my use cases. I can charge my various USB-C laptops at 65W with all the USB-C cables I have on hand. Maybe it's just my habit of just buying cables from known brands (Belkin is normally my go to) but I also have random cables that came with various devices of varying quality and all these also work just fine. I have a 6-port charging hub so I can see the charging wattage and I can easily get 65W to various laptops and a high capacity power bank, regardless of the cable being used. All cables also work fine for data transfer, although I confess I use USB-C for data transfer rarely so it is possible there is some variability there. YMMV but I wonder how much of this issue is just crappy low-end cables?
It's surprising to me you've been that lucky with Belkin. They do not have a good reputation. Maybe cables are easy so that's an easy bar to pass.
What 6 port charging hub do you have? I have a broken UGREEN one.
Every not-broken USB C cable allows for 480Mbps USB 2 speeds and 60W charging. In USB C terms, it doesn't get any more basic than this; that's as low-and-slow the specification tolerates.
The issues come into play with going beyond that. USB 3 speeds? USB 4? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort (4k uncompressed video!) alt modes? 240W charging? These are all practical things that regular people use USB C cables for every day, but they require very specific support from the cables themselves, and that support is widely varied.
Your cables work fine for what you're doing with them, but you're really barely scratching the surface of the kinds of things that can be done. :)
Not that I disagree with you, but I _wish_ "regular people" used 240W charging every day. As far as I can tell it's still pretty niche and hard to get 240W chargers
What device would I encounter in my day to day which would use 240W charging though?
Just convince the auto industry to use USB cables for electric car charging!
My desktop “server” with two 4K monitors doesn’t even reach 240W !
An arm Mac mini server in my basement has averted 4.9w over the last month.
It’s because you are using the lowest use case for usb (like most people). Literally everything can manage 65w power only.
All of these “usb sucks” posts are about using multiple 4k 120hz monitors dasychained while pumping 140w and a handful of other dongles hanging off which pushes usb to the limit and requires carefully selecting the highest quality cables.
Does HN allow spammy posts written for the sake of sharing an affiliate link? Surprised to see this here.
You can read the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Might find this one relevant:
"If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
The problem isn't inherently USB, it's companies producing cables without properly defining specs.
If you want to be certain a USB cable works, buy it from a brand that sells certified (USB-IF) cables with a particular spec you want. For example, Club3D.
Yes, they'll cost more but you can be decently certain that you don't have to fiddle with it. I replaced all USB cables I own with certified ones. Since then, not a single issue with slow charging, display resolutions, frames, or data transfers.
> Any cable that can transfer data faster than USB 2.0 speeds also requires a chip to do so.
I always found this confusing because USB 3.0 Micro-B cables can transfer data faster than USB 2.0 without needing an e-marker, so why do USB-C cables need one if they already have the Tx and Rx SuperSpeed wires?
It seems like the answer is, roughly, "it's complicated".
https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1ow1tpf/why_d...
https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/13j0gev/do_us...
If you’re following USB-C standard, all cables with faster data than 480mbps and more power than 60W require an e marker, period. Whether devices will still function for USB3 without that marker… that’s another story and will depend on the device.
I'm not disputing that the e-marker is required by the USB-C the standard, I'm saying that conceptually it's confusing that an e-marker is required for USB-C cables but not for a USB 3.0 Micro-B cable with the same wires and data transfer capabilities.
just don't buy cables from generic or awful brands, you can go with some reputable ones like cablematters,startech, caldigit, or satechi, also you can check USB-IF members. For other cables like displayport, just buy only certified cables that can be checked on displayport site, before buying any.
same for thunderbolt, etc.
you may pay a bit more, but they will comply the specs and be higher quality than the other generic brands.
Verge recently posted this (free) app for testing on Mac's: https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/963759/whatcable-usb-c-cabl...
They are just catching up with ShowHN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972511
Useful app, funny thread (centipede), and the MacRumors Bartender alternative link arising from the menu bar decision discussion means I might be able to ditch Ice! (reduce spacing instead)
It's not actually free, it's $14 to unlock all the features.
Can't actually read the Verge without a subscription either.
This effectively only tells you what the E-Marker reports though, the actual capabilities of the cable are still unknown.
You can say the cable can do whatever you want on the E-Marker, its not the source of truth.
The problem is, to actually benchmark everything, voltage drop, resistance, actual bandwidth (especially at Thunderbolt 5 speeds) requires a lot of hardware.
Using a USB-C Test Controller ($13,000), connected to a Pro Keysight Infiniium oscilloscope ($258,809) is the proper way to test it. https://www.keysight.com/au/en/product/N7018A/type-c-test-co...
well, that's disappointing; someone needs to miniaturize that and reduce the cost massively
It’ll never happen. Measuring to the proper Thunderbolt spec is only possible on literally the most cutting edge measurement equipment. Physics just won’t permit that being a gadget you can buy for $20 of whatever.
Yes and no..
Oscilloscope is needed for things like frequency response.
but most consumer care only the power loss and bandwidth only.
That's an ad. There's a lot of cable testers around, most of them are crap. Cheap testers like this one are based on generic chips reading e-markers and aren't even guaranteed to support all quick charging standards. And bandwidth is another matter entirely.
Yeah, I found it odd that the author started talking about bandwidth and data concerns, but then testing part is only about power-transfer.
I use one of these to check the wiring of the USB cables I get, especially if I'm getting a weird one. I've always been a little freaked out by the story of that Google employee who posted very trusted USB-C cable reviews to Amazon, then got his equipment fried by one that crossed the wires.
https://www.tindie.com/products/bittradeone/usb-cable-checke...
But when I care about performance, I just get a cable from Anker and don't worry too much about it.
BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS: WHERE CAN I GET ONE OF THOSE TINY GREEN MILK CREATES IN THE PHOTO?
> green milk crates
Looks like https://makerworld.com/en/models/1515018-110x110mm-square-st...
More like https://www.printables.com/model/1148683-stacking-storage-ba...
No handles.
I know things have become much more complicated, but still remember fondly the good intentions of the original USB spec, which, for instances, forbade any extension cables (ignored, as expected, by many), with the reasoning that users should expect that if a cable connects, it should just work. Longer cables would need to be electrically "better", and extensions would eventually cause issues with electrical paths that were too long.
People still remembered the "black art" involved with, e.g., SCSI cables, where long chains would often had issues, and wanted to avoid that.
I coded this as an exercise https://apps.apple.com/app/cable-detective/id6765963737?mt=1... - reads everything it can about the plugged in cables and devices, feeds it to Apples internal AI.
In the latest version it even doesn't crash the computer anymore after rapid plug/unplugging action.
There are several apps that do something similar and the biggest issue is the marker on the chip it's interrogating doesn't guarantee the cable can actually provide that. The maker can program whatever they want into that chip and the devices will just negotiate and determine what they're actually capable of achieving anyways.
The Treedix cable tester is awesome. Ordered one after reading Terence Eden's positive review* and went through all my cables the day it arrived. My favorite was the cable with only the ground connected; went immediately into the bin.
*) https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/gadget-review-treedix-usb-c...
It definitely looks to be one of the better ones. Since many of these products use same generic Chinese platforms, I looked for a similar product on Aliexpress since they have better shipping for me, but didn't find a full analog. Had to use a forwarder to order from Treedix—only to have it shipped in a very roundabout way from China.
I'd like a HDMI cable tester as well, I can't seem to find one that works well with my high refresh monitor.
I have had this problem with a 4K tv. I just bought an 8k certified cable. Overkill usually solves a lot of those issues in my personal experience.
Are you buying ones that are "Ultra High Speed" HDMI certified? At least in theory, those should all be able to handle the maximum 48 Gbps bandwidth supported by HDMI 2.1
Is there a cheap, reliable tester that someone can recommend that will test multiple USB cable types (A, micro & C)?
$45 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DYJL5Z67
This is the one I use and I quite like it. I've had it for a little over a year and a half. I used it to sort (or trash) all my cables and to test new incoming cables.
I just got this one a few days ago so it's kinda weird I've seen it mentioned or posted about multiple times since. Guerrilla marketing?
Anyway, it's definitely better than having nothing, and tests resistance as well. I tossed a couple low value/duplicate/high resistance cables because I've got too many just lying around causing clutter. Also helped 'confirm' my good (e.g. TB4+) cables that weren't labeled clearly are indeed good cables - granted, this is only as dependable as the marker chip the manufacturer added.
> Guerrilla marketing?
Nope, or if so my royalty/referral checks never showed up :)
I bought mine back in March of last year and used it to "process" all my cables and was just a happy customer. I've been watching this space (cable testers) for years (on and off) and wasn't interested in the "raw circuit board with led"-versions so once a nicer version came out at a price point I found tolerable I got one.
It's nice to have all my cables organized now (h/t to Akro mills bins, those are a dangerous rabbit hole) and now instead of just buying a new cable [0] when I need one I can go grab one that matches the specs I need.
[0] Call it wasteful, call it lazy, but when faced with "I have a cable that fits the hole and is the right length but I don't know what it's capabilities are" I would often just buy a new cable with the specs I needed/wanted rather than using an "unknown" cable.
If you just want to know what wires sets you have in your USB cables you can get the Gikfun "USB Cable Tester - Fast Check for Type-C/Lightning/RJ45 | Tests Charging Data Transfer | Continuity Check Quick Cable Sorting"
It's only $14.
It even offers test pads you can use to test the cable with a much more expensive multimeter.
I'm not so sure about cheap. All the cheap ones I've tried have been pretty flaky, and ended up in the junk bin. I picked up this guy for work: https://bit-trade-one.co.jp/en/adusbcim/ and it's been pretty good. That was a while ago though, and some of the cheaper ones might have caught up.
The whole space is so scammy that I'd pay for a good USB-C cable tester
But how can we know which tester is good and which one is scammy?
With a USB-C cable tester tester, of course.
I’ll bust your trace buster buster!
I like your "who watches the watchers" reference, but AI's reviewing AI work, and notably, people reviewing people work, are subject to the same problem!
The same principles that worked for auditors tracking risk compliance in the 2000's now work for humans tracking AI-output risk compliance in 2026
for throughput, you can use a stopwatch and a big movie transfer from one end to another
qui custodiet ipsos custodes?
A consumer grade tester test only the continuity and read the chip.
To actually test for the bandwidth those are hell expensive.
Now people starting test for the chip, those scammers will install more fake chip ...
I swear ive read this exact same thread with the exact same truepsec cable mention with the exact same amazon link for recommendations.
So many words, so little content.
I stick with Anker -- IMO they've been reliable for chargers, cables, etc.
Apart from the specs of a cable is there a way to verify the signal quality of a cable? I have lost many days trying to debug random hardware issues and the final answer was to just replace a cable.
The Anker Prime 160W power brick shows the maximum wattage of the cables you plug in. It is also surprisingly small.
I don't think there's a USB-C charger out there that can actually pump out anything close to their rated maximum.
At $150 (“on sale” from $184?), wonder how close it comes: https://anker.com/products/a2687-anker-prime-charger-160w-3-...
I have not managed to stress test it yet, I believe that so far I saw it deliver ~100W max.
I got it for 110€ in some Amazon bundle together with 3 usb cables. Which is about the price of the 140W Apple brick. (We don't get the powerbricks included with the MacBooks.)
But Apple's is much larger, heavier and has a single port.
Anker did a great job with their image comparing it to the Apple charger. Gave me a good sense of size and wattage.
And it’s much lighter? Nice, wishlist!
Started using whatcable.uk app. Been amazing at finally knowing cable speed, but also device max speeds, and everything in between, without having to carry around one of those digital dongles with more limited use.
Is there a similar one that could test also max data transmission available on given cable?
At a minimum, if plugging it in to a device and measuring waveforms is good enough for your application, you need an oscilloscope with 10 GHz bandwidth or so (don't quote me on that, I don't remember the max speed used by USB). Scopes at that level require a whole lot of R&D and very expensive components so they're really not something you'd want to buy to check your own cables.
If you're talking about reading the e-marker then you can just plug it in to a device and use an app. Google will help you find one for your platform.
Today my phone said "Charging slowly" and it wasn't charging at all.
I miss MiniUSB. MiniUSB was always good to me.
If you want a super fast cable and high power thats where they get pricey. "Charge only" cables can often be fairly cheap and perform well even for laptops and high draw devices.
Isnt this what "USB-IF certified" is supposed to guarantee?
USB-IF certified is a certification that the cable follows the spec, but that spans usb 2.0-only cables up to USB4v2 cables. The tester shows you what the capabilities are.
Yes, there's even a spec here: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_log...
The cables are supposed to be labelled with their maximum speed (5, 10, 20, 40, or 80 Gbps or nothing if no data) and maximum wattage (60W or 240W).
HOWEVER, I don't remember ever seeing a cable with such a label. I'm sure they exist, but I don't see them. Requiring products to be labelled, and treating mislabelling as fraud, could mostly solve this. It's definitely a real problem.
> Requiring products to be labelled, and treating mislabelling as fraud, could mostly solve this.
There are too many manufacturers to hunt. Basically USB-IF needs to stop almost all shipments in the world. That's not going to happen.
USB spec is completely open and free to obtain. While it allows people to develop and DIY many things, it also attracts bad manufacturers like flies.
Good certified cables with correct markings exist. There are companies like Cable Matters or Startech who bother to actually certify their cables and get USB-IF TIDs. They do cost you quite a bit money though. Here are some:
https://www.cablematters.com/pc-1532-123-usb-c-20-charging-c...
https://www.cablematters.com/pc-858-123-usb-if-certified-usb...
https://www.startech.com/en-de/cables/1m-40g-usb4-cable
https://www.startech.com/en-de/cables/s2cepr1m-usb-cable
For those who seeks a data speed, it's not. It's about power ratings, not data transfer.
I have completely stopped buying USB. I only rely on thunderbolt cables and hubs now.
Just measuring the power info is limited use. I'm sure there's value for some people, but I only need to keep track of 0-2 high power cables.
> Your no-brand 480Mbps USB 2.0 cable is indistinguishable from the super-fast USB 4 cable that can move 40 gigabits (around 5 gigabytes) of data every single second.
One of those is way thicker than the other, at least.
I would love for something to force a speed and power rating on USB-C plugs.
> One of those is way thicker than the other, at least.
I bet there's at least one brand with extra–thick plastic insulation.
> I would love for something to force a speed and power rating on USB-C plugs.
This already exists. Cable makers can certify their cables and mark them with their data speed and wattage.
I buy only certified, marked cables. If I see an unmarked cable, I assume it’s slow and low-powered…which is good enough for some things.
> This already exists. Cable makers can certify their cables and mark them with their data speed and wattage.
Obviously labeling is possible. I want it to be forced.
Whether that's the USB consortium having more power, or a legal requirement, or the biggest stores refusing to carry unlabeled cables.
> If I see an unmarked cable, I assume it’s slow and low-powered…which is good enough for some things.
That's a reasonable way to handle things. Lots of basic cables and only worry about the good ones. And if a cable is so bad that it's missing data wires or is too high resistance to get near 3 amps, it can go in the garbage.
It's interesting that I was downvoted on HN for saying the same thing about how frustrating it is that seemingly identical cables are not identical https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908214#48917477
Instead of using a dedicated device, on Macs you can also use the WhatCable app:
https://www.whatcable.uk
This is really good. The base is open source, and has both GUI and a CLI. For the purposes of this article, identifying what each cable can actually do, that’s covered. There’s additional Pro capabilities that you can pay for.
Sure, but that doesn't allow the author to share an Amazon affiliate link for a product.
I just pay a premium to a reliable source: Apple
Regardless of tests they do charge my most energy hungry devices and everything else
Many of us are privileged enough to make our lives easier in this way and haven't thought about it
I don't know how my wife and kids are treating charging cables, but the cables seem not to live that super long in their hands :) So paying premium constantly seemed like a money sink hole for me. Strangely enough once they start to buy their own damn cables instead of me paying, the lifespan of said cables seemed to quadruple. Strange strange universe we live in. :)
it's just psychology, there's not much thought when there just are cables around and new ones come when they break, but when you have to choose and buy ones yourself and look at the price tag and all that, you tend to place more value and significance to that thing and remember how much it costs etc...
I'd say most of us have experienced this ourselves in some form at some point in our lives
hmm, how about just being able to infer the features of a cable by it's physical form factor? oh wait...
then you have a bunch of cables and wires that with all different types of connector that you can 'easily' identify which one is for which device. sounds familiar hah