Is there an updated list for verified good USB-C cables? | Hacker News Reader

Is there an updated list for verified good USB-C cables?

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53 pointswslh57 comments

Yeah make sure the cable is USB-IF certified, you can find the list here (don’t trust Amazon product descriptions):

https://www.usb.org/products

About USB-IF:

“USB Implementers Forum, Inc. is a non-profit corporation founded by the group of companies that developed the Universal Serial Bus specification. The USB-IF was formed to provide a support organization and forum for the advancement and adoption of Universal Serial Bus technology. The Forum facilitates the development of high-quality compatible USB peripherals (devices), and promotes the benefits of USB and the quality of products that have passed compliance testing.”

Like one of the Reddit commenters, I just order cables that are listed on Intel's Thunderbolt site, like this one:

https://www.thunderbolttechnology.net/product/cable-matters-...

I’ve been recently looking for a <$20 USB-C cable that can connect from my display’s non-TB USB-C port to my laptop. This means a reputable brand, 5Gb/s+ USB3 speeds, DP alt mode support with 4k@120Hz capability, around 100W PD, and 6ft+ length. It’s nearly impossible to filter by these specs, but I managed to find two cables that fit all criteria and confirmed to work in person:

* https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24731

* https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-201303-BLK-1-8m-Compute...

Ultimately, though, I found that my existing 0.8m Apple TB3 cable had higher quality connectors (much firmer click and sturdier hold), so I’d just compromise on the length. I ain’t spending $150+ on Apple’s longer USB4 cable, but it’s probably the best option on all fronts other than price.

Anyone have any idea which USB-C cables will work for CarPlay? Using the cable that came with my IPhone 15 Pro doesn’t do the job for some reason, but a cheapo $3 cable from the dollar store works around 1/3 of the time.

People seemed to hate the Apple Lightning standard, but I never seemed to have this kind of problem before...

Odd, since it’s common knowledge that many carplay devices dont work with anything but apple “original” cables, mine included.

What would be the analogous USB C “original” cable that definitely works?

I'm sure Apple can sell you one that will work?

USB-IF Certified

Bumping up sample size to N=2: I had some cheap no name Lightning cables from Amazon and CarPlay worked fine for me.

Anker cables work for my CarPlay head unit. Others I had troubles with.

I don't have any problems with an Anker Powerline+ A-to-C cable, 0.5m.

I've bought some Anker cables in the past which worked as advertised. Also IKEA over here sells cheap but good quality USB cables (beside excellent LED bulbs), but whichever brand you choose, be careful of fakes and relabeled junk; It is quite easy to get scammed when buying online from non well known sellers on Aliexpress, Ebay or Amazon.

Interestingly (considering how highly I rate their brand overall) I've bought Anker cables that did not work as advertised and could not carry their claimed current to charge my MacBook Pro. Based on the reviews, this seems to affect a minority of customers, so I seem to have been among the unlucky ones. I've gone back to buying the absurdly expensive Apple cables due to this issue.

> be careful of fakes and relabeled junk

How exactly?

Choose your retailer with care

Having spent a while searching to no great success, I'd really like to see flexibility/bend radius listed as well; though naming for sizes is enough of a problem so I won't hold my breath.

I'd like to Velcro an Sandisk extreme SSD or two to the back of a 16" MBP but I'm failing to find a USB-C cable that's short enough to not get snagged and flexible to not drag on the port (the one supplied with the SSD is stiff enough to stab someone).

The Anker 643 silicone USB-C cables are fantastically flexible and would be the perfect consistency, but they're only 1.5/3m and only USB2 speeds (100w power though). Can anyone recommend anything or are you doing similar?

USB 3.0 cables are thicker because they have more wires. Pretty much by definition a thinner 3.0 cable is going to be substandard.

I recently got a usb-a to usb-c cable from Ikea, I was surprised they sell cables... got them 3 months ago so can't tell how durable they are, but they feel solid and I can charge my equipment using fast charging mode.

I got two of them also, close to two years old. One USB-A to USB-C, silicon coating. It is really nice, still works perfectly. Have a USB-C to USB-C also, braided coating. It got very stiff just after 4 or 5 months. It still works (charges with up to about 45W), but it is more like a (1.5m long) stick, rather than cable.

Their cables are great, but assembling them sucks.

ELI5: what does an excellent cable mean vs. an average vs. a terrible one, in terms of elements, construction, and building process?

You might want to see Adam Savage’s video about why, say, Apple’s $130 3’ Thunderbolt cable (the pinnacle of cables) actually is not overpriced. It also gives a sense as to what a quality cable is like.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84&pp=ygULYXBwbGUgdXN...

That article mixes up Thunderbolt cables with basic charging cables so it's terrible about actually informing you about quality.

For example, a quality charging cable doesn't have Thunderbolt amplifiers in it - even the artisanal Apple ones. It doesn't cost 120$ either. It's just... quality for feature set it has. Usually more like 30$.

Even worse, the fact that you think that 130$ is reasonable for that cable is proof just how misleading it is - there are signficantly cheaper Thunderbolt cables from other brands with same capabilities (and same fancy chips you can ooh and aah via Xray like in that other article) below 100$.

I understand your point, but could you give more information about the original question? I think the video posted by OP is incredible in terms of analysis (CT scan!) but it would great to follow the thread through "normal" cables without electronics?

My point: the article you've posted is useless for help anyone understand cable quality. Even worse, it's actively misleading by making a non-sensical comparison between two different things.

Do not post it in context of trying to determine cable quality.

Am I now clear enough? :)

Two different things with the same connector, and with the Thunderbolt cable easily able to take on all responsibilities of a USB-C cable, means they aren’t that different. A Thunderbolt cable basically is a overpowered USB-C cable at the end of the day.

I suggest you find a better resource or stop playing semantics.

> Two different things with the same connector, and with the Thunderbolt cable easily able to take on all responsibilities of a USB-C cable, means they aren’t that different.

That is... not actually true. Let's ignore the fact that Thunderbolt cable will probably be 2-5x more expensive and thicker. But as soon as you get past a certain very short length (~0.5m), it'll need active amplification and those active repeaters tend to not support alt modes properly and have issues with certain USB3.2 devices as well - making them outright worse or even non-functional when used with non-Thunderbolt devices (which is most of devices - the Thunderbolt chipsets are staggeringly expensive).

But sure, scroll down and tell the person that's asking for a CarPlay cable to buy a 130$ cable to connect their USB2.0 phone to USB2.0 car for a USB2.0 protocol :)

I am not that user, I am the one of ELI5 so please share your information to educate people without the knowledge. Thanks!

In general, it's "cable that does what it says on the tin" - e.g. if it says "I support charging at 100W and USB3 at 20Gbps", it actually delivers that stabily and preferrably for more than a week of use :)

In general, I've had good experience with braided cables that clearly advertise their capabilities on the box from different vendors, but I mostly don't buy these things on Amazon anymore. Too many false advertisements, so I'm not sure if my recommendations are useful.

I guess known brands like CalDigit, Anker and maybe Cable Matters might work.

Anecdote: My wife and I both got the 15 pro recently. At the apple store they had to run an update. My wife’s phone started updating minutes before mine with a regular sized cable. They brought over another identical laptop with a much larger chunky cable to update my phone. Mine finished first. I don’t know what cables they use at the apple store but that was a close to controlled conditions as you get with two new phones updating from the same type of laptop with the only difference being the cable.

Quality (materials, construction) and specs (bandwidth, max wattage) are separate questions. I got the impression wslh was asking about the former

In theory yes, but there are plenty of cables that outright lie about their specs and there are probably plenty of people buying the wrong specs and then complaining about slowness. For example, the iPhone update anecdote could be caused by USB-C 2.0 vs. 3.0 (3.0 supports faster data transfer).

Maybe I am just lucky but I don’t need a lot from my usb c cables and have not had issues. The minimum requirements for a c-c cable according to the standard is USB 2.0 data and 3A/60W fast charging. Every cable I have bought has preformed at least to that standard so usb c has treated me well.

Great topic but aren't we still protesting reddit, or has that just fell off the radar?

Even the subs protesting reddit forgot that

I'm just amazed at our inability to keep to our word, why would any company care to reconsider their decisions if even highly informed and agitated consumers go right back to them?

A vocal minority cares, the rest actually doesn't care enough. Companies obviously know this.

No, Reddit threatened to replace all mods who didn’t open back up. Since a lot of mods spent sometimes upwards of a decade building their communities, they preferred to reopen with barebones effort rather than hand it over to people with zero experience (who were likely looking to exploit the communities for personal/financial gain).

I left mine closed as long as possible, got tons of hate DMs and people harassing me in various other subreddits, then eventually opened back up with one additional mod who does all of the actual moderation. I check modmail every other day or so through old.reddit to make sure things are functioning and to show some mod activity so I can’t be removed… just in case Reddit doesn’t suck at some point in the future.

I’ve commented 3 times in the last 4 months in subreddits totally unrelated to the one I “run”. I used to try and reply to every single post in my community, which was a pretty easy task in Apollo. If Apollo was like running through ankle deep water, the official app is like trudging through a waist deep swamp. It’s awful and I hate it. How are reddit employees not totally ashamed of the work they put out and embarrassed by the company they work for?

I definitely quit using it. Do people use the official app and watch the ads and drink verification cans and whatever?

I def use Reddit a lot less than I used to, but I caved and installed the official app. But now I use it sparingly because it such a shitty experience.

To be honest I tried to go the federated universe route and I just could not get past the federated gates before I found a home. I tried to join a beehaw instance and got denied access for some reason. Felt like an orphan ever since, especially since google reddit seems to be the only way to get good answers out of Google. I hope it does get more user friendly as there are people of all expertise that may not even be able to get into a federated group.

I pay $4/mo for Narwhal 2 and it's pretty great. (I used to use the original Narwhal before the subscription pricing which they had to axe.)

Same; my 13 year old account is now dormant/dead.

If I have to use the official app to use the site, why use Reddit at all? I had a decade of RiF/Apollo perfection, taken away from me and all I'm offered is an official app that's not as good and covered with ads? Nope, still haven't gone back. It's been nice, I'm glad to be rid of it.

Having paid for and enjoyed Narwhal and Apollo, I really hated the official app. After some digging, I found https://github.com/lo-cafe/winston and that's working for me. It's not simple - you have to generate your own Reddit app id and secret, be able to Xcode from source and have a valid Apple ID to install the IPA, but it's worth it to me to spite the enshittified app.

I deleted my account and only lurk when it shows up on my search as a reasonable answer for a complicated question.

Fun fact: I only realized this week that my Advent of Code Login was Reddit's OAuth.

I was mostly a mod protest, not a user protest.

But mods get their power from their subscriber count (like influencers).

So when users started complaining that they don't care about the protest, and more importantly, started looking for alternative related subreddits which were not part of the protest, the mods backed down and stopped the protest, fearing that they are loosing their power (subscriber count).

I guess it depends on who “we” is. Personally, I have seen a lot of comments about how spez sucks (I tend to agree) and everyone should delete their account (some of the subreddits are invaluable and closing all of them would either dissolve a lot of niche communities or just displace them to Facebook, which I would consider far worse than Reddit). But I don’t recall any consensus about not linking to Reddit. I would disagree, in any case.

Surprising that no one has made an Amazon list that one can just open and buy a reliable cable from.

That would be an invitation for counterfeit cables to squat on those ASINs.

how can a counterfeit cable overtake an ASIN used by a legit cable?

If the counterfeit is cheaper it should win the buy box AFAIK.

Interesting. I know nothing about this, but if anyone can just offer a counterfeit product under the ASIN for the official one then it's certainly no bueno. Surprised (or may be not) that Amazon doesn't crack down on that?

Most upvoted comment recommends AmazonBasics. Ouch.

Many AmazonBasics products are high quality. If their cables are bad you need to provide evidence.

I trust that Amazon own products will function, because they don't want the returns. I don't expect them to have any frills, or look nice, but if I just want the job done then they're reliable.

Pretty unreliable products. I usually avoid amazon basics, but i have higher expectations from things.

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