Comment by kiwijamo
7 hours ago
Interestingly, I have found a very mixed bag of USB-C cables I've collected over the years to generally just work for all my use cases. I can charge my various USB-C laptops at 65W with all the USB-C cables I have on hand. Maybe it's just my habit of just buying cables from known brands (Belkin is normally my go to) but I also have random cables that came with various devices of varying quality and all these also work just fine. I have a 6-port charging hub so I can see the charging wattage and I can easily get 65W to various laptops and a high capacity power bank, regardless of the cable being used. All cables also work fine for data transfer, although I confess I use USB-C for data transfer rarely so it is possible there is some variability there. YMMV but I wonder how much of this issue is just crappy low-end cables?
Every not-broken USB C cable allows for 480Mbps USB 2 speeds and 60W charging. In USB C terms, it doesn't get any more basic than this; that's as low-and-slow the specification tolerates.
The issues come into play with going beyond that. USB 3 speeds? USB 4? Thunderbolt? DisplayPort (4k uncompressed video!) alt modes? 240W charging? These are all practical things that regular people use USB C cables for every day, but they require very specific support from the cables themselves, and that support is widely varied.
Your cables work fine for what you're doing with them, but you're really barely scratching the surface of the kinds of things that can be done. :)
Not that I disagree with you, but I _wish_ "regular people" used 240W charging every day. As far as I can tell it's still pretty niche and hard to get 240W chargers
Just convince the auto industry to use USB cables for electric car charging!
My desktop “server” with two 4K monitors doesn’t even reach 240W !
What device would I encounter in my day to day which would use 240W charging though?
It’s because you are using the lowest use case for usb (like most people). Literally everything can manage 65w power only.
All of these “usb sucks” posts are about using multiple 4k 120hz monitors dasychained while pumping 140w and a handful of other dongles hanging off which pushes usb to the limit and requires carefully selecting the highest quality cables.
It's surprising to me you've been that lucky with Belkin. They do not have a good reputation. Maybe cables are easy so that's an easy bar to pass.
What 6 port charging hub do you have? I have a broken UGREEN one.