Griffin Technologies

Leung said he plugged the cable into the Twinkie as a pass-through and his Chromebook Pixel, which wreaked havoc as soon as he turned his system on.

As part of the team who worked on the Pixel C, Google engineer Benson Leung took it upon himself to survey the myriad USB Type-C cables being sold, particularly on Amazon, for their compliance with the USB specs and accuracy, not to mention safety.

It is expected that eventually, USB Type-C ports, connectors, and devices will be ubiquitous. That's definitely a bummer, but the worst was yet to come - the cable actually fried the USB-C ports on his Chromebook Pixel. Neither would charge or act as a host when I plugged in a USB device such as an ethernet adapter.

Upon further analysis, Leung found that the cable had killed the Chromebook's embedded controller, a chip that manages tasks such as keyboard initialisation, USB charging, and reading temperature sensors.

He goes on to add that the cable is "fundamentally dangerous" and that customers shopping about for a USB Type-C cable should probably avoid this brand, or at least until Surjtech gets back to him and addresses the problem. Because ChromeOS verifies all hardware at startup, the laptop now boots into recovery mode every time it starts and "no amount of software recovery" will revive it. It has also taken permanent damage and is now effectively dead.

Upon closer inspection, Leung discovered that the Surjtech cable was "completely miswired".

While it's unfortunate the Leung's laptop had to effectively bite the dust, this is exactly the kind of proof we need that bad cables can cause major issues. The offending cable is now unavailable from Amazon. But as more and more roll out and we all aren't able to rely on our old stash of cables anymore, it'll be tempting to try and pick up new Type-C ones on the cheap. On top of that, a 10 kΩ pull-down resistor was used instead of the required 56 kΩ pull-up resistor, and SuperSpeed wires were completely missing, preventing this cable from functioning at its advertised USB 3.1 speeds. But his experience should be not for naught if it makes consumers become more selective in their USB Type-C purchases. The latest generation of USB cables might be universal and capable of delivering much more power to our devices, but not all of them are working as intended.