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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

"Consumer-grade" reliability really should be the highest-grade reliability. Cables get cantilevered by standing desks, rolled over by office chairs, bitten by dogs, chewed by babies, shoved in pockets and skiied with, and sat on.

The people who designed USB-C were probably lazy people sitting in office chairs all day and never got out enough to see what real consumers do.

I break about a USB-C cable a week. Never happened with headphone jacks, barrel connectors, IEC power connectors, and the like -- those are real consumer grade stuff, especially IEC.

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Definitely shouldn’t be anywhere near highest reliability. Professional equipment has to stand up to a lot more use—like a camera you use every day, made with more metal and with thick rubberized grips. If I have a personal camera, I’ll take care not to drop it. If I’m a professional photographer, the question is how often it gets dropped. If we’re talking cables, “professional” grade (to me) means the connectors are going to get hundreds of cycles per year, and the cables might have to snake across the floor and get tread on five days a week. In general, “pro” grade stuff can be bigger, bulkier, more expensive.

Then there’s stuff built for public spaces. ATMs, books in the public library, turnstyles at the metro, etc. All designed to be in close contact with people who either just don’t care or are actively trying to damage it.

TBH I don’t know what the grade below consumer-grade would be.

Jerk grade reliability, this stuff will explode if stepped on

I would say that the grade below consumer grade is “functional prop” grade.

There’s a type of consumer electronics available on Wish/AliExpress/etc., which is designed for people who want to appear at a glance to be using a certain expensive device, for status-signalling reasons. The devices only have to be real enough to allow you to pretend to be using them without drawing suspicion, and only have to be rugged enough to last until the device being mimicked isn’t fashionable to have any more (at which point you get a new knock-off aping the new cool thing.)

Surprisingly, these devices do work! They wouldn't be convincing otherwise. (How can you seem to be using the best new phone if you have to pull out a different phone to check your text messages? How can you seem to be playing a Switch or a PS4 if it doesn't turn on and show pictures and sound on the screen/a TV?) It's just that they work as terribly as you can imagine, given that costs are optimized to meet the minimum needs of someone playing pretend and no more.

Mil-spec?

Military people just sit in canopies and hit buttons these days.

Consumers are the ones that will actually have cables bitten, chewed, stomped, sat on by unfit, heavy civilian asses, jammed into wheels of office chairs, rammed into by strangers' hips in coffee shops when your connector hangs off the edge, dunked in cereal, splattered by kitchen grease, smashed into rocks at Yosemite, and shoved into bags while plugged in after a slow TSA checkpoint and needing to sprint as fast as possible to a departure gate.

Very different set of ruggedness requirements. Most cables of the 80s and 90s were completely fine in these civilian environments.

If the consumer device breaks, the owner typically consumes a new one.

If the pro device breaks, the pro typically consumes a competitor's product. If the mil device breaks, the mil typically won't order 85,000 of them.

It is in the company's interest to ensure that the consumer device breaks.

Prototype?

Get a good quality cable. I break USB-C cables maybe once every year and a half, less often than I broke headphones or microUSB.

I break Anker PowerLine+ cables all the time, not sure what's better.

The connector design itself is shit, and the rubberized housing of the connector isn't mechanically supported as any self-respecting consumer-grade cable should be, all torque transfers to the PCB and that's horrible design.

I use IKEA nylon cables and they work perfectly fine.

There's no reason the torque has to transfer to the PCB. That's just poor design. My phone's USB-C port is sleeved by the chassis for example, and so is the one in my GaN charger. There is zero torque transfer to the PCB, the chassis or frame takes all of the load.

You can't rely on the cable to cancel the torque anyways, rubber yields and the normal force at the housing will pull the connector out slightly allowing for torque to still be applied to the connector, you have no choice than to brave either the female, male, or both ports to the chassis in some way.

I don't think I've ever broken a USB-C cable. How is everyone destroying them?

Personally it's definitely my fault, they get stuck under stuff or I used my phone a lot while charging.

What in the world are you doing to those cables? I’ve been using USB-C full time since 2017 and I’ve never broken one.

I go outside a lot. I think most likely the people who designed USB-C just sat in offices all day and didn't care at all to go ask skiiers, hikers, farmers, horseback riders, and bikers what their day was like.

There comes a point where you have to take responsibility for your lifestyle, and recognize that nothing lasts forever. I too have never lost a USB-C cable, but I don’t move that cable much. When you move things a lot, they break. C'est la vie.

No, I disagree, I think consumer products should be designed to withstand consumer lifestyles.

The designers should take responsibility for it, and I pay them for that.

Headphone jacks worked great until they made goddamn headphones plug into USB-C as well and then they started breaking. Technology to withstand consumer lifestyles did exist until USB showed up.

I can totally commiserate with you on the headphones. Not even kidding, at one point I suspected that the powers that be got rid of 1/8 inch jacks just to electrocute political dissidents and enemies of the state by the push of a button. Is it really so far fetched? Thunderbolt can push 3 amps (please correct me if I’m wrong - I’m going by the USB-C spec), and .1 amps is lethal. Bzzzt!

Anyway, I’m not trying to get down on you - I was just pointing out that nothing is intended to last forever. I once considered buying a military grade reinforced laptop that was way under specced just because I wanted to take it wherever I wanted and be able to bang it around.

The truth is that electronics are easily damaged. Take fiber optic cables for instance. If you bend them ever so slightly too far they will stop working, because the throughput medium is glass. It’s just the nature of the medium.

Arguably, we are the most advanced machines on this planet, and yet if we slip and hit our our head, our machinery could easily be put out of commission. I think it’s fair to expect machinery to fail outside of its intended use case. Have you ever bent a piece of copper wire back and forth and feel it get warm before it breaks? That’s just the nature of the material. It is what it is, you know?

I’m not saying that you’re wrong to want or expect sturdier constructs - because they are often available for a price (using less abundant materials). I’m just saying that if you want that it’s probably not going to be consumer grade, and it’s not going to be cheap.

Products should be designed to withstand consumer lifestyles, but some consumers will be outliers.

The ones who sit in an office all day ARE the outliers, and unfortunately we put the task of design in their hands.

The majority of the world gets out and does things. Physically.

I’d disagree pretty strongly that the majority of laptop buyers[0] are going out there and doing things. If anything, we’re trending more in a sedentary direction as a species.

Also, as an active person myself I’ve never had a problem with USB-C; I don’t use my laptop out hiking and fishing, and I’m kind of confused who in the world is riding horses or bicycles and also fiddling with their consumer electronics at the same time.

And while maybe USB-C is less durable than headphone jacks, I can also say that wired headphones suck when you’re being active. I can’t even count how many times a door knob ripped out my earbuds and sent me into a fit of rage. I switched to Bluetooth and never looked back.

0 - Of course the world’s poor are active, but they’re also not the target consumers for USB-C devices.

> I’m kind of confused who in the world is riding horses or bicycles and also fiddling with their consumer electronics at the same time

Please don't dismiss things just because you don't do them.

I go on long bike rides with navigation on and that drains the battery quickly, so the needs to be constantly plugged into a portable battery pack, while in my pocket. This extremely common.

Consumer-grade" reliability really should be the highest-grade reliability.

Consumer-grade has hints in the name that it is intended to be consumed and purchased again.

Business doesnt like making products that last for long life ad it means there is little chance of them buying another.

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