I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?

I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.

The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.

If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.

It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.

I bought from Best Buy.