In addition to the different formats, there are different levels of quality of USB cables.
Mark got a new phone last year (or was it two years ago?) with a slightly different, larger, USB type C plug. I had to buy adapters on eBay (they were cheap - a few cents apiece) so we could use our existing fleet of USB (type B?) cables that seem to accumulate like dust bunnies. You buy some e-trash and it comes with a USB cable and a wall-pack transformer. Eventually, they overrun your life. You end up with a drawer full of them.
No wonder Apple decided to ditch the accessory Apple cable with their newer phones. Apple users already have dozens of them. Why add more?
What was interesting to me, though, is that all phone cables are not alike, and I am not talking about the boring differences in formats and plug types. The quality of the cable varies widely across the board.
Usually, I leave my poverty hotspot (working fine, thank you - 100GB for $25 a month, beat that, cable companies!) plugged in all the time. So the battery is never below 100%. Once in a while, while travelling, I forget to plug it in, or it gets unplugged. So it goes dead - to 0% - and I have to plug it back in. This is where it gets interesting. If I plug it into a cheap-ass USB cable, it won't charge - or it will charge slowly - only up to 5% after a day (!!) and then discharging down to zero if I am streaming video.
I go to plug it back into the cable it came with and within an hour, it is up to 68% and by two hours, 100%. The same is true for our phones - if they go all the way dead, the only way to charge them up with a cheap-ass USB cable is to turn them OFF and let them slowly charge overnight.
Recently, I was trying to download video from our crash camera to my laptop. I put the memory chip in the phone and downloaded the video to the phone memory. But it was too large to e-mail to the laptop to play or upload to YouTube. So I tried plugging the phone into the laptop using a cheap-ass USB cable and not surprisingly, the laptop didn't recognize that anything had been plugged in. The phone did show it was charging - slowly.
So I tried another cable and immediately, the laptop recognized the phone as a data storage device and I could download the video onto the laptop. Clearly, the first cable had only charging wires installed and no data wires. The second cable was properly pinned-out.
I kind of knew this in the back of my mind, but since I don't plug my phone into other devices for data transfer, I never thought about it too much. I realized that some USB cables were better than others, in terms of charging, but that's about it.
I am guessing that the cheap-ass cables have very thin wires to save money and thus cannot handle much current. Similarly, some of the wall-pack transformers seem to generate more current than others - you plug into one and it never seems to charge, while another gives you an instant boost. Oddly enough, sometimes the smaller ones seem to have more power.
Then there is longevity - a common complaint by Apple users, who note that these types of cables tend to break near the plug end, where they are constantly flexed and eventually break. We have a couple of "extra long" charging cables we bought at a truck stop (no doubt they lack data wires as well) and they seem to charge fast, but you have to be careful with the ends, as they appear to use solid copper conductors for wiring, and they break if you bend them too much.
We've tried the wireless charging techniques - you can buy wireless chargers for a few bucks at the checkout lane at Walmart. They work, but are slow, and it is hard to use the phone when it is sitting on the charging disc.
Sadly, I do not know if there is a rating system for these cables - much as there is a tire treadwear rating system for tires. The cables are sold by type and model, and there are sites out there that "review" cable types (mostly shill sites to upsell you to a fancy cable). And no, no one is paying $10,000 for a USB cable. That article in particular was very unhelpful. Get a good quality cable and a "thick" one - wtf? Could they be more specific?
You would think simple things like wire gauge would be displayed on the packaging (as well as wire type - aluminum, copper, braided, solid, etc.). Maybe some do, but I have never seen a phone cable sold with the notation that it has 24-gauge braided copper with gold-plated contacts or whatever. They seem to be sold on length and model type (USB B, C, Apple, etc.). Some of the more expensive cables do list how much power they can handle (60W, 100W). I suspect the cheap-ass kind only handle 5-10W or so, given how long it takes them to charge a phone.
Republicans hate regulations, of course, and they would argue the "free market" should decide how to label products. And maybe, down the road, the free market will. But the kinds of cables I see on the store shelves are lacking any information to discern quality and construction type. Maybe some basic information like that would help in deciding which cable is the best value overall.
Or maybe I need to stop buying my cables at truck stops and dollar stores!
