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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.

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