USB Cable Woes

I have purchased a whole lot of USB cables on Amazon. Most were for charging, but I have some USB 3.0 cables for data transfer as well. If you search Amazon, there is literally a million different listings (ok, maybe not one million). They came in different lengths, colors, material, and connectors, but it is likely 99.9% of them are made in China. China makes a lot of stuff, but quality control is usually terrible. Sometimes if you have a Western brand name that cares about quality, they will spend extra money on improving processes and auditing to make sure the products do not suck. If it is a local Chinese manufacturer selling, then all bets are off.

For example, I bought a set of six USB-A to Lightning charging cables. They were color coded by length, and covered in a braided nylon looking material. At first, they worked well, but it is very difficult to screw up a charging cable. Over time however, the cables started failing one-by-one. I just had the fourth cable out of six fail, as in plug in to AC adapter, plug into iPhone, and… nothing. I believe I bought the set of cables less than a year ago. I cannot be sure because the listing was removed. It was still there when the third cable failed a few months ago. I know this because I tried to find the listing to leave a one star comment, but there was something wrong with Amazon’s site so nothing happened. Now the listing is gone so I cannot even leave a nasty message for the shitty vendor.

I have always had good luck with Anker for chargers and cables so I will likely stick with them in the future, even though it is a bit more expensive. That is worth not having to buy new cables every time the cheap stuff fails. I know this does not fit the theme of this blog, but I need to vent so here we are…

==========

Each time a cable from this batch fails, I get a message on my iPhone that says “This accessory may not be supported.” The only option available is Dismiss. I think the connectors in the USB-A connector are either designed wrong, or manufactured poorly. Some of the conductors in the plug must be interfering with each other, leading the iPhone to think you are plugging in a mysterious accessory instead of just a dumb charging cable.

==========

Instead of search through my order history, I searched the entire site and could not find the same cable set. Maybe too many people complained about buying crap that Amazon had to remove the seller. Good riddance.