Amazon Removes Poorly Manufactured USB Cables

For those of us in the Cable Assembly business we are faced with low cost imports being sold in the UK market place enticing unsuspecting consumers to buy what looks like really cheap cables only to find out they either don’t work or worse fry your circuit boards/ devices.

A recent example of this comes from Amazon who recently officially banned substandard USB Type-C cables after a Google engineer’s quest to test USB-C cables sold on Amazon ended in a disaster when a particularly shoddy one fried his gadgets.USB

Benson Leung bought a USB 3.1 Type-C SuperSpeed cable (it’s since been removed) from Surjtech on Amazon, and proceeded to check it using his Chromebook Pixel 2 and….. BANG  The power and signal wires were switched sending power to the signal that fried his Chrombook!

We have seen this many times before specifically with things like low cost USB cables that use the same size conductors for all cores meaning that the power cores are the same size (26 AWG) as the signal cables delivering overload of current down the cable.

Another example we have seen is cables that simply won’t work such as SVGA to HDMI Cables.  For those in the know you need an active chipset to convert the analogue SVGA signal to the digital HDMI signal.

It is a great thing that Amazon are taking the firm stance on this as we have been seeing these sort of issues for some time.

The most important advise we can offer is to look at the reviews before you make the purchase and don’t forget that you can report the product to Amazon and get it kicked off the marketplace.

It’s all in the detail and I can’t stress this enough that just because the connector is unbranded does not make it bad by default only if your are trying to get away with using lower cost components where the specification is insufficient for the one you are required to meet.

 

No one likes to pay more than is needed so it is always best to take professional advice and ask the experts as this is what we do! Happy Shopping!

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