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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

Indicator recommendations are routinely ignored. There are already color codes for type-A ports, and there's the "lightning bolt" indicator for Thunderbolt USB-C ports, but PC manufacturers ignore them when they want their laptops to have a certain look and feel (e.g. gaming laptops want red or green everything, Apple wants aluminum everything, etc.).

Cable manufacturers are going to do whatever is cheapest.

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Since the design philosophy behind USB-C is "it must always seem as though it should work", I think we'll need something like the old "tube testers" a few of us still remember.

Decades ago, when your TV was behaving badly, you would take the back off (unplug first!), pull the vacuum tubes out, and take them in a bag to the nearest convenience store. They had a "tube tester" the size of a washing machine. You'd plug each tube into a connector, one at a time, press the "test" button, and the needle on the dial would show good/poor/fail. The body of the tester was a cabinet containing replacement tubes you could buy (and which you could even test right there).

We might need to start using USB-C cable testers. Plug in a new cable, get a good/poor/fail analysis of each potential USB-C feature, then you mark your cable yourself with some labeling scheme.

God damnit - TAKE MY MONEY!

I've been having to implement tons of my own testing because no cable ever works the way you think it will. I've got a giant pile of thick super beefy USB-C cables which only transmit data at USB 2.0 speeds. Which per the USB standards committee is apparently Working As Intended, but that is definitely not ok.

I'm down to work on this idea.

I remember some drugstores had these when I was growing up. My grandpa had two of them in his garage; where he had bought the machine and the stores' collection of tubes, when they were falling out of fasion.

Excellent idea.

I remember going through the tube testing ritual with my Mom. Good times. It was really interesting to me, how my Mom could take things apart and figure things out.

(She taught me that the inside of a TV was dangerous, and kept the screwdrivers up where I couldn't reach them.)

Yeah, it's a bit of tragedy.

Resistor style stripes on cables would be fun, a stripe for each feature such as bandwidth, power, etc; perhaps already suggested (and ignored). Though complement for ports would be trickier.

Embossing symbols in the style of thunderbolt might be the way to go, even if the standard is not fully adopted.

Ha, I love the color idea.

This is terrible for colorblind people.

For accessibility, assign specific texture patterns on the outside of the insulation for different capabilities. Then you can tell the capabilities by running the cable through your hands.

I actually have started down this path for my own cables -- the nylon braided ones are lower power etc.

My first attempt was different colors for each device, but was too tedious.

Three categories - low power, high power slow USB2, and 100W Thunderbolt.

- Low power: generic cables from wherever

- High power slow: cables that came with reputable charger (the vendor's cable, like Apple or Samsung; my favorite 3rd party charger is https://www.ravpower.com/products/rp-pc112-gan-tech-61w-wall...)

- Thuderbolt: I buy from https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt

> each feature such as bandwidth, power, etc;

Honestly that's about all you need.

Even just a bandwidth indicator would be suitable 90% of the time.

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