From a product-engineering perspective ... why do third-party charging cables wear out so fast?

[Sam_Stone]

@Melbourne

So you haven’t designed that cable at all: you are depending on some other design engineer.

And you take a chance. How well do you think that cable will hold up to consumer use? How well do you think the appearance will match your consumer product? How well do you think the color will match your product?

You go to the supplier’s data sheets, and you pick the cable that has the properties you need.

This is not rocket science. Companies like Monster want you to think that cables are some kind of black magic requiring extensive engineering. They are not.

Apple spent a lot of money on the lightning connector, but that was money spent on R&D for an entirely new, bidirectional, active cable. Of course that costs big money. And lightning cables are expensive because they have proprietary electronics in them and have to be licensed from Apple.

But if you are talking about a standard USB cable or other cable with a common design, your development costs are zero because there is a wide range of solutions available to OEMs from dedicated cable manufacturers, at all levels of quality. You simply shop for what you need. All that matters is in the specification sheet. And if the company sells you sub-standard cables, you buy from another one.

You can, depending on who you buy from, get answers to some questions (like "How many insert/remove cycles will it last?), but only because some other engineer has done the work.

So? The design and development costs of USB cables have long been amortized away. They cost an OEM almost nothing. Cables that use a new proprietary or patented system are a different matter, but that’s not really what we are talking about.

On the other hand, if there is only a single machine in a co-operative farm outside Shanghai, there won’t even be answers to those questions. Apple knows the answers because they and their suppliers have an actual design and test cycle, which they can afford because of volume.

If the quality really matters, you don’t buy from an unnamed ‘co-operative farm outside Shanghai’, you go to a company like Belkin, which has a reputation to uphold and which does its own design and testing to make sure it doesn’t sell garbage.

And if you want your own reliable cable, buy one from a good manufacturer instead of keeping the crappy little cable that came in the box with your device. Those cost pennies, and you can treat them as throwaway products.

Of course, Apple is an outlier here. If we are specifically talking about Apple lightning cables, that’s an entirely different thing as that connector is still under patent and you have to have a license from Apple to make them. They also have a bit of electronics inside them to handle the bidirectional switching. Also, the design may be a little suspect, with the pins wearing early and oxidizing, and the tiny wires connecting the electronics cracking. The rumor is that Apple is moving away from the lightning connector in the future, and that may be because it has fundamental flaws they don’t want to admit to but don’t want to deal with any more.