Third-party USB cables could fry your devices

USB Type-C has been one of the best things to come out of the pipeline in recent times. It promises to become a universal connector that we can use to link up all our devices, from monitors and phones to laptops and whatever we care to come up with next.

There is just one problem - that cheap third-party cable you bought online could end up frying your laptop.

As it turns out, these budget cables may lack certain safeguards that prevent them from drawing too much power, and you want to be especially careful if you're dealing with Type-A to Type-C cables.

For instance, if you plug one of these cables into the Type-A port on a MacBook Air laptop and use it to charge a Nexus 6P phablet, the cable could end up pulling too much power and leave your laptop wishing for better days.

One Google engineer, Benson Leung, even ended up wrecking his Chromebook Pixel while testing a third-party Type-C cable from Amazon.

This is not the fault of the USB Type-C standard - the blame rests solely on the cables.

In fact, this sort of power catastrophe is possible with any USB cable. But the thing is that older cables do not draw as much power as that supported by the cables for the new USB standard.

There is something you can do about this, although it might come across as a pretty flimsy solution.

Google's Mr Leung is the only known person currently vetting various cables, so you can either look out for his reviews on Amazon, check an online spreadsheet (bit.ly/1o2wbiS) or peruse a thread created by Reddit users that aggregate Mr Leung's reviews (bit.ly/20tEV2P).

It is a quick but not exhaustive way to check if a particular third-party cable is going to abruptly fry your notebook.

The list also flags several brand names whose cables have not been "approved" (or at least not yet). So do not assume buying cables from recognizable brands is a safe bet.

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