What’s interesting about this is the possibility that a bad USB-C cable can fry a laptop. Clearly the cable is the culprit, but is there something about the standard that allows a mis-wired cable to direct power to where power should never go? That’s one bad cable.
USB Type-C cable so bad it fries Google engineer’s Chromebook Pixel
Imagine you plug a computer with a more traditional power supply into the wrong voltage. There’s a puff of smoke and it stops working. “The computer’s fried!” you say.
“Well, yeah,” someone says. “But it’s probably just the power supply.”
The power supply did its job, within the bare minimum competence it had: It died to protect your computer.
So the USB controller chip, too. One would think they’d put the fuse outside it, but they don’t. Crazy. The cable is still “frying the computer,” but the USB controller acting with bare minimum competence.
Doubt it’s socketed.
Note in this case, the thing can’t even boot because the USB charge controller is also involved in the boot security process (and the keyboard controller).
Just frying the USB ports would be bad enough…
That’s kinda hilarious. Way too many eggs in one basket, then.
…not that I’m excusing the cable. Just saying there really should have been a fuse there.
cheap cables will be the end of things
so do not buy cheap cables. This is like a Firewire 5Gbps/USB3+ cable here… skimping on a quality cable or (standard) is bad news.
The nice thing with most Chromebooks is that the data is in the “cloud”. I’m guessing he can make that money back in a few minutes (or an hour – after taxes) of work – or maybe Google can replace it? (yeah, not really a question)
I do find this a bit amusing …
From the article — “To find out what sort of devilry had fried his gear, Leung then analysed the cable with a breakout board and a multimeter. What he found was really quite shocking: “it appears that they completely miswired the cable. The GND pin on the Type-A plug is tied to the Vbus pins on the Type-C plug. The Vbus pin on the Type-A plug is tied to GND on the Type-C plug.””
And someone else bought a cheap Lightning compatible cable and died – when they were using the cable and talking on the phone. I do not find that amusing at all…
There is a kind of person who proudly uses the cheapest cables and thinks Apple’s MFi certification is some kind of scam to force you to buy $19 Lightning cables. But this event kind of vindicates Apple when you consider there are 1 billion iOS devices that charge via their USB cables and this happens to a Chromebook Pixel, which is rarer than diamonds.
Must say, if there is only one port on a computing device, I would rather it was Lightning than USB-C.
Cables should not destroy computers.
The problem is USB-C in general. Its a bad design, primarily because of trying to fit a bunch of disparate issues into one.