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I have three of these I've collected over the last 3 years, and none of them work anymore.
Is this the new USB-C future we were promised? With a single-point of failure for everything as the number of ports on laptop decreases year-on-year?
It's maddening how flawed USB-C is. In terms of reliability, I've had to replace the usb port on my phone already after 3 years (at least it's possible to do that with my phone), and I've had every USB-C dock fail on me.
And they're also bad with interoperability. I've got several cables and devices, each of which uses C connectors but quietly refuses to interface with for reasons that are known only to the manufacturers. Is this a data and power cable, a power only cable, or a secret third option? Time to test every single one and promptly forget. And sometimes my devices have further preferences about which power cable will work.
We were all deceived. One standard to rule them all.
The cable thing is simply due to physical limitations. If you want a data cable with the fastest data rate it will be maximum 1m (or ~3ft for the metric challenged) and quite thick and stiff. A cable exclusively for charging can be quite long and thinner so it can be coiled smaller. Then there are various middle grounds with slower data rates, which sometimes are too slow for certain applications (e.g. Android Auto).
If you buy a short, thick and expensive cable rated for thunderbolt 5 you can use it for everything, but you may not like the form factor.