Because you’d only buy one. They want you to buy many during your lifetime.
cheaping out?
You unplug and replug the top one more often than the bottom one. It’s not a great comparison.
Also there are more thicker wires in usb c.
Take your usb cable, wrap it around something round of the size of curl you want and hit it with hot air, being careful not to melt it.
You will achieve the springy tangly mess in the picture. Your cable will now be 2/3 or less of the straight length
That’s why I like the chinese brands because you need thick cables for their ultra fast charging tech. Although the fast charging are a bit proprietary so you have to find legitimate ones online when they do break.
If you want the actual answer it’s because you can’t. There is very little voltage going through those cables, and there is no data line at all.
If you wanted to recharge your phone through a cable like that it would take about 10 years.
You can get high quality armoured recharge cables, they’re not even all that expensive, you just don’t get them in the box. Apple don’t even give you a charger these days, so is it really all that hard to believe that they would give you the cheapest version of the cable?
Beat me to it. A lot of times, things lasted longer simply because they were less complicated. A phone cord is two wires. A USB-C cable has up to 16, and there is a lot more bandwidth being sent though them. Not to mention all the fancy handshakes that have to be performed in order for all the various standards the cable supports to actually work as intended. Besides just high speed data, you’ve got things like ethernet, HDMI/DP, Thunderbolt, etc. all going down a single cable. A phone cord only has to send analog voice. Honestly it’s a miracle to me that USB-C even works at all, let alone semi-reliably.
Should a single cable really support so many standards and high data rates though? That puts a lot of limitations on what is often just a stupidly overengineered charging cable.
OK interesting discussion BUT NOT IF THE EXAMPLE IS A FUCKING LIGHTING CABEL!!!
Berylium Copper, which holds its shape like a spring more than the usual annealed copper conductor, is probably not used because of berylioses or contact allergies. But, other than being a worse conductor than copper, it would probably be better cool as a coil.
If you want to pay for cables, go ahead and pay for cables.
Enshitification
Because then they couldn’t sell you a new one for $15 every 3 months.
Can confirm, I buy a 3 pack every year
I use these on all my cables both ends. This cable is 5 years old and still strong. Costed me 1 rupee per piece. Got a pack of 100 for 100rs (~1 us dollar)
What exactly am I looking at here?
cable strain relief
I’m just thinking about the fact that they really GOTTA stop making white charger cables
I know what I’m gonna buy later (assuming a USB-C version exists).
It’s agnostic. You can pretty much put it on any cable as long it’s not too thick.
How are they called?
Usually “cable strain relief”
I have Sennheiser HD 280 headphones. They have a telephone cord for a wire. So good. So worth it. Cable still going strong after 6 years. And get this… when it breaks? I can replace it. They make spare parts. Saved me a ton of money in the long run
I’ve had them for over 15 years. Still on original cable.
Well, think of the data transfer rates. One carries voice, which can be in the kb/s
A lightning cable can carry a few gb/s.
All this extra data weighs down the cable, causing it to fail sooner.
You can solve this problem by switching to light-weight data, or by simply filling your cable with helium to counteract the extra weight!
extra data weighs down the cable
Does it really? I get that you’re taking the piss, and it won’t have any significant or even perceptible impact, but seriously does it?
Like it exists, right? I might just be tweaking here.
I’m gonna end up full Steve here if i think about it much longer
There is a weight associated with the electrons needed to convey information, but it’s negligible.
Beyond that though, we’re not actually so interested in moving the electrons, but in toggling the electric field. Most of the electrons in the wire stay in the wire, and any that leave are balanced by another coming in on the other end. Electrons can move between the atoms, but if your cable is actually changing the number then something has gone wrong, since laptops don’t typically ionize copper.
It’s a pretty straightforward calculation, since amperage is the number of electrons per second, and the cables has a well documented signaling rate.
It works out to a bit weighing about 2x10^-22 grams for a USB cable.Data is essentially just fancy electric current. Current doesn’t really ‘flow’ so much as propogate a wave similar to a newtons cradle desk toy. A physicist might chime in on this, but no, I don’t think data being transmitted actually weighs anything.
Unless you factor in the interaction between any induction effects and the earths magnetic field. But it’s beyond negligible.
The data exists as electricity, and while electrons have mass, there’s always going to be roughly the same number of electrons in the cable. They’re flowing in a loop across the cable, so more electrons aren’t needed for more data. It’s the pattern they move in that carries the data (kinda).
At least that’s my simplistic view of it. There’s probably some technicalities I’m glossing over, but I think the point stands that a cable carrying more data isn’t heavier due to that data.
It’s only 4 wires, only 2 of which carry data. A 6ft cable transferring at a max usb speed of 80gb/s moving at the slow end of signal propagation through copper of .5c would have less than a kilobyte on it at any time.
Calvin’s Dad Explanation Award
Thanks, Cave Johnson.
He’ll get the nerds in the lab to cook something up.
FYI:
Greenpeace pressured apple to stop using PVC in their plastics around 2007
Apple realised they could gain PR while making more money by having customers needing to rebuy new cables.
You don’t need PVC to create durable cabling.
And give up the opportunity to get applause for planned obedience? That is not how you capitalism.
Its quite telling that ever since apple got forced to use usb-c the quality of their cables made a huge leap. It’s almost like the availability of competing cables is good for innovation or something.
planned obedience
Might want to proofread that
Whats the matter with PVC specifically?
Can’t burn or recycle it without releasing chlorine
Supposedly greenpeace calls it “the poison plastic” and “the most enviromentally damaging plastic”
Gonna have to ask them for their scientific sources.
Personally i think plastics are fine if the product is actually durable. I take good care of my things. My 15 year old ipad mini is practically mint and if it wasnt for “making it more enviromental” i would still be using its original cable also.
Personally i think plastics are fine if the product is actually durable
My problem is this just kicks the can down the road. Some day, no matter what, that plastic is becoming waste. Maybe it gets recycled, but most likely, it doesn’t. If it doesn’t need to be plastic, it should not be plastic. Questioning if it’ll last long enough is just asking if it can last long enough to be someone else’s problem.
Definitely a good point if if doesn’t actually need to be plastic, i highly prefer natural materials overall. But thats not always practical.
I dont get the “someone elses problem” though. If the item is still perfectly usable then why would the next owner not also just want to use it? I personally value a hand me down that “served” my family for ages over “new thing”
If it is broken then it can get a new life by getting recycled.
Under current consumerism the pattern is that shit breaks and you buy it new, which causes us to psychologicly devalue the item (and thus materials) as it ages, i believe this is why so many plastics end up non recycled.
If items where durable, reliable, repairable. People will be more capable to perceive their value and be more concious about what happens to it after it breaks because losing it will hurt. Not quite like but somewhat similar to how we care about what happens to remains after death.
Also things being repairable increases the awareness of the materials because your working with them.
I dont get the “someone elses problem” though. If the item is still perfectly usable then why would the next owner not also just want to use it? I personally value a hand me down that “served” my family for ages over “new thing”
Because eventually, inevitably, there can’t be a next owner and it becomes garbage. Then, you’re right back to contributing to plastics pollution because while you can say that
If it is broken then it can get a new life by getting recycled
The reality is that a huge portion of plastic doesn’t get recycled.
If items where durable, reliable, repairable. People will be more capable to perceive their value and be more concious about what happens to it after it breaks because losing it will hurt. Not quite like but somewhat similar to how we care about what happens to remains after death.
I think you’d need a massive cultural shift to make it plausible, not just different stuff. And while we should be recycling, I don’t think it’s the right emphasis right now because recycling is largely an attempt by the oil and plastics companies to put the onus on us for the environmental harm caused by their product. It’s an attempt to fabricate an excuse to produce things out of plastic that really don’t need to be, and we’ve fallen for it. Of course we should recycle all the plastic we use, but we still shouldn’t be using plastic anywhere we don’t have to. There’s a reason the saying is “reduce, reuse, recycle”. They’re in order of priority, and recycling is the last defense. We need to start by significantly reducing the amount of plastic we use.
This is the paradox. I still have old cables from 20+ years ago, the new stuff degrades. At least the woven/braided cables seem like they might last longer.
It’s not a paradox. There is a reason why those old cables don’t degrade, and it’s the same reason why fish are full of microscopic shredded plastic that will never go away.
I understand what you’re getting at, although I think that I maybe have had the majority of plastic removed from my body with how much blood was removed from me. Actually it wouldn’t surprise me if I was a blood bank for the ER when I was in the hospital last year.
The plastic is in your water and food. If you have organic mass, you have microplastics in you.
I not sure what to think when you phrase it that way. Are you a follower of the Omnissiah? I have a good amount of metal in my organic mass.
