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Comment by i_am_ralpht | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, the Lightning cable seems to be a bit flaky itself, getting 1.5 stars from 1646 reviews on Apple's store: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD818ZM/A/lightning-to-usb...

Hopefully Type C will be better than Micro-B and Lightning. Also, Type C can deliver 100W of power, which I'm not sure Lightning could do...

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The only people who ever review items like cables are ones who ran into failures, so that’s a very skewed sampling.

Online product reviews have self-selection bias, yes, but it is not true that cables are reviewed only or even mostly by people who were not satisfied. For example, on Amazon we can see a 4.5 star mini USB cable with 679 reviews [1]. Similarly, Monoprice has a 5 star USB extension cable with 160 reviews.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-USB-Male-Mini-Cable/dp/B0...

[2] http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=...

And the Apple Lightning cable has four stars with nearly 4k reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-to-USB-Cable/dp/B0097B...

Either there's a big difference in quality between the cables Apple sells on Amazon vs the Apple Store, or there's something else going on.

No, the negative reviews on Lightning cables mostly have to do with people complaining they have to buy new cables.

With the lightning cable the problem is with the reinforcement between the connector and the cable. And it's a problem Apple has had with pretty much every cable they've ever made.

The actual connector itself is pretty damn good.

When your cat chews up the cable, of course you're going to leave a bad review. Get it together Apple!

The soft-touch plastic used on Lightning cables has the amazing property that stress failures look just like the cable was chewed on. Not even joking. It basically disintegrates and falls apart.

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