Thread: Kindle Paperwhite cable, is it a regular mini USB cable?
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Old 01-01-2018, 02:38 PM   #21
sjfan
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Join Date: Sep 2017
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington View Post
This is the first I've ever heard of that, can you point to some articles?
The fact that USB C has been in widespread use for years now and you haven't heard of it is pretty telling.

TLDR: It’s a theoretical problem with any USB cable, not just C, but it’s probably not worth worrying about in real life in 2017 (let alone 2018).

Any USB cable (A or C) could potentially be damaging if miswired. It’s more of a problem with modern higher-power USB specifications (USB 3.1, Qualcomm Quick Charge, etc), which happen to overlap with most USB C/3.1 implementations but aren’t limited to them.

https://www.cnet.com/news/usb-type-c-cable-problems/ discusses in the context of USB-C, and links to the list that Google engineer Benson Leung made of well-tested cables known to be safe (worth consulting since using a good cable helps ensure fast charging time).

As the article notes, even with bad cables it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll damage anything. Leung found one USB A-to-C bridge cable capable of damaging his laptop during his testing, and there were 2 early reports on Amazon of bad USB A-to-C bridge cables damaging USB ports back in the early days.

They were unable to find any such reports in the past 2 years, USB C or otherwise, and none of the reported cases were with ordinary USB C (or USB A) cables.

Quote:
But though Monoprice ships 1.6 million cables a month — inexpensive ones, too — he couldn't recall a single instance of a bad cable frying a computer…
Neither could John Drengenberg, the longtime director of consumer safety at Underwriters Laboratories (UL) or Brad Saunders, the chairman of the USB-IF coalition that develops the USB standards to begin with, or Lee Atkinson, an HP engineer who's been working on USB ports since they were a brand-new idea. Atkinson had a one-word answer: "Never."
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