alt Hacker NewsI actually purchased one of these as this article has surfaced before.
It’s well worth the hype, I used it to audit all my cables (both for home and work) and it’s amazing how many thick and unwieldy cables are actually terrible for data.
For example I purchased a pair of B&W Px8 S2 noise cancelling headphones, which boast a DAC if you connect via USB-C directly, the cable it came with though was thick but only rated for USB 2.0 speeds. These headphones cost more than AirPods Max, which are themselves considered overpriced, and include comforts like nappa leather; so shipping with a chunky cable that doesn’t even carry decent data feels like a bizarre oversight. Apple’s own USB-C cables manage the same power delivery at less than half the thickness with a woven shell. You’d assume a premium product would at least match that.
Honourable mention to the USB-C cables that ship with Dell Ultrasharp monitors (both pre-USB4 and post). Those support basically everything except Thunderbolt 4 despite being unmarked.
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I started buying Belkin TB5 cables which are around $50 a pop. They can easily power a laptop at full load and can stream video at any reasonable resolution/framerate I might need. I've yet to find a need for an NVMe faster than 20 GBps nevermind finding USB4 enclosures, or that the cable supports up to 80. They're also not nearly as chunky as the Dell cables, which are good, but seem to have very rigid shielding.
I keep a few converters for older devices and servers that don't have (m)any C ports, but as far as a consumer "forever cable" goes, TB5 feels close. Certainly the cable's bandwidth is beyond what most people need, unless you're editing 8k video or continually shuffling hundreds of GBs between external disks.
> Honourable mention to the USB-C cables that ship with Dell Ultrasharp monitors (both pre-USB4 and post). Those support basically everything except Thunderbolt 4 despite being unmarked.
I have one of those. They are thick and unwieldy af. Since I've borked the usb connection on my monitor because of static discharge, I no longer use it and figured I'd repurpose it for my digital camera, for which I used to have a short cable that was sometimes annoying. This cable is so freaking think and hard that it'll move my (admittedly somewhat light) camera on the table.
Is there any audio you might play that doesn't fit in 400Mbps?
There are a bunch of similar testers around that do more or less the same thing, e.g. a the ChargerLab Power-Z range or any number of dodgy third-party Amazon/Aliexpress clones. The one thing that definitely doesn't exist though outside of $1,000-and-up USB diagnostic devices is something to report on which of the 800 different ways the downstream device has screwed things up, including failing a basic cut-and-paste of pullup resistors from the spec coughRaspberryPicough.
After the publicity a few years ago of bad USB-C cables they've been mostly fixed, but what hasn't been fixed is the infinite number of broken downstream USB-C implementations. So your charging problems aren't due to the cable, which is most likely fine by now, but because the downstream device is telling the upstream one that it can't take more than 5V 1A. One sure way to tell the vendor has screwed up is when your USB-C device comes with an A-to-C cable to charge it.
> so shipping with a chunky cable that doesn’t even carry decent data feels like a bizarre oversight.
USB 2.0 can support up to 480 Mbps. It’s more than fast enough for any audio stream you can send to a DAC.
Your headphones don’t need USB 3.0 5 Gbps speeds. USB 3 requires extra wires with different properties that need to be controlled more tightly, which can impact cable flexibility. If your headphones used USB 3 when they didn’t need it that would be one more thing to break and more failure modes for the cable.
A USB 2 cable with fewer conductors was the right choice for this product. The fact that you only got miffed about it when plugging the cable into a tester, not from actually using the product or cable, is good evidence that a USB 3 cable wasn’t needed.