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Your third-party USB Type-C cable may destroy your laptop if you aren't careful

By Koh Wanzi - on 14 Feb 2016, 6:00pm

Your third-party USB Type-C cable may destroy your laptop if you aren't careful

Note: This article was first published on 10th February 2016.

Nexus 6P USB Type-C

If we can all agree on one thing, it’ll probably be that USB Type-C has been one of the best things to come out of the pipeline in recent times. It promises to become a universal connector that we can use to link up all our devices, from monitors and phones to laptops and whatever we care to come up with next. There’s just one problem – that cheap third-party cable you bought off Carousell could end up frying your laptop.

How, you ask? As it turns out, these budget cables may lack certain safeguards that prevent it from drawing too much power, and you want to be especially careful if you're dealing with Type-A-to-Type-C cables. So if you plug one of these cables into the Type-A port on your MacBook Air and use it to charge your Nexus 6P, the cable could end up pulling too much power and leave your laptop wishing for better days.

One Google engineer, Benson Leung, even ended up wrecking his Chromebook Pixel while testing a third-party Type-C cable from Amazon. This isn’t even the fault of the USB Type-C standard and the blame rests solely on the cables. This sort of power catastrophe is possible with any USB cable, but these cheap cables simply fail to account for the higher power draws supported by the new standard.

Fortunately, there’s actually something you can do about this, although it may appear quite a flimsy solution. Google engineer Leung is the only person currently vetting cables, so you can either check for his reviews on Amazon, or head to this spreadsheet or website created by redditors that aggregate his reviews. It’s a quick, although not exhaustive, way to check if a particular third-party cable is going to abruptly kill your precious notebook.

A glance at the list also reveals that it includes recognizable names like Spigen, so don’t assume that buying a “brand name” cable is automatically safe.

Source: The Verge

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