I watched that video yesterday, and honestly I was shocked by what is either just plain stupidity or massive intellectual dishonesty in how they present their comparisons - as if these cables are even remotely comparable. If they had even a shred of interest in presenting an evenhanded and insightful comparison, they would at least have included another thunderbolt cable, but also wouldn’t have acted as if USB 2.0 USB-C cables are essentially cheaply and badly made cables. There are tons of excellent reasons for low-bandwidth USB-C cables to exist, and they consistently act as if thunderbolt is just universally better, as if every cable really ought to be made to that standard.
Laughing at a USB 2.0 cable only having four wires connected? That’s how USB 2.0 works. And USB 2.0 is an integral part of USB-C. Yes, some of those cheap cables have shoddy soldering and low build quality, and that is absolutely worth commenting on - but you can avoid that with a $15 cable, you don’t need a $130 thunderbolt cable for that. And of course the TB cables are thicker, stiffer, have shorter max lengths, are far more expensive, and have other drawbacks. And they act as if the TB cable is universally more durable due to its more advanced production techniques, entirely ignoring how these are necessary because a 20-wire cable with a longer connector on the end is inherently more prone to failure than a cable with fewer, thicker conductors and a shorter plug.
This Thunderbolt cable - as with all thunderbolt cables - is an expensive niche tool for niche use cases. Is it very expensive? Yes. Is it expensive for what it does? Kinda, but also not all that much. Other comparable cables are similarly priced. But also? It just doesn’t have any benefits for the vast majority of use cases, and you can find functionally just-as-good build quality in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.x cabling, which will inevitably be far cheaper and better suited to most people’s needs.
I completely understand and agree that USB-C cables supporting many different data and power transmission standards can be and is confusing. But this video just adds to the confusion, rather than clarifying anything at all, by its simplistic “more advanced is better” narrative. More points of failure and massively increased cost in order to gain features you’ll never use isn’t better. Through some slightly more carefully selected comparisons and presentation techniques this could have benen incredibly informative and useful. Instead it’s so misleading it borders on outright misinformation.
The scans and images produced by them are incredibly cool - it’s just a massive shame that they did such an incredibly bad, clickbaity and sensationalist job of presenting them.
