Comment by cesarb
4 years ago
IIRC, that particular cable was one which had its power wired to the ground pin and ground wired to the power pin. No standard can help you if the cable is that badly made.
(The effect of that miswiring is to apply a negative voltage, around -5V, to a chip most probably designed for a range of -0.5V to 20.5V; which results in a short circuit through at least the ESD protection diodes within the chip, and possibly other parts of the chip too.)
Yep, a batch of cables having the super basic power pins wired backwards tells you basically nothing about the standard, no matter how often people try to use it as evidence of complication.
And the docks that were frying switches were putting 9 volts on a signal pin, also obviously wrong.