Dear gadget vendors: I like gadgets (at least good ones). I buy lots of them. I will probably continue to do so as disposable income allows. But I have a plea:
Please stop including a USB cable in the package with your products.
It’s unnecessary, it’s wasteful, it’s a giant hassle when the said cable is lousy (as it all too often is) and the cost of the “free” cable adds to the overall cost of your product.
I sat down a couple evenings ago with the intention of connecting my e-reader to my desktop computer so I could load up some new books. This involved more drama than it should have, since I had to try four different USB A to Micro USB cables before I found one that would work reliably.
This led me to sit down with my cable stash and some test equipment. I quickly discovered a couple things:
- I had just over a hundred USB A to Micro USB cables. (I need maybe a dozen at most, including things like dedicated cables for go bags.)
- Very few of those hundred cables were actually any good. (Excluding the Anker Powerline cables I’d purchased individually, only something like 10% passed tests for continuity, shielding and current carrying capacity. Of those that passed, most did fine on subsequent data transfer tests.)
A sizeable minority of the bad cables had only the power pins connected and no continuity on the data pins. (In other words, they looked indistinguishable from USB cables and may coincidentally be able to — slowly — charge some USB devices, but are not in fact USB cables at all.)
I have now pruned my collection to a handful of known-good cables. I still have plenty to go around and spares to lend, lose or hack apart for projects. And I know when I grab one, it’ll work on the first try every time.
If you sell me a crappy USB cable bundled in the price of the product I want, you have just made my life harder, not easier. I now have to dispose of that cable responsibly (or risk it getting into the bag of known-good cables by accident, and then I have to test them all again).
It is (at the time of this writing) 2018. We all have USB A to Micro USB cables. If we don’t, they are not hard to find or expensive.
I love that, for the time being, we’ve standardized on Micro USB for charging and data transfer on portable gadgets. Interoperability is great! I only need a few cables for a bunch of devices. If I lose or break a cable, it’s easy to replace. Yay, standards!
If you ship a cheap cable that coincidentally works with your device but that doesn’t comply with the standards, you break interoperability. I don’t need a mountain of cables that randomly work sometimes. That isn’t better than a few cables that always work. (This is only going to get more exciting as we move to USB C, where a badly made cable can actually fry your expensive toys.)
Why am I complaining about free stuff? It isn’t — I know I’m paying for the unwanted cable as part of the cost of the device with which it’s bundled. I’m paying to package and ship the extra weight and volume. We’re all paying the hidden environmental costs of manufacturing and disposing of this bit of e-waste.
Stop with the bundled cables. Please stop. I’ll provide my own.
I get that some marketing weenie probably thinks it’s a better user experience if everything you need is in the box. He’s wrong. He’s wrong, and bad, and should feel bad about what he’s done.
My aging, mildly tech-phobic relatives? They. Have. USB. Cables. Already. (They also have the Internet, and failing that, the grocery store, pharmacy or gas station — all of which sell USB cables.)
All the above applies to chargers, too.