Here at the Verge, one of our hardest weeks every year comes in January.

It's CES, the consumer electronics show, and it's such an intense tech conference that

we spend just a ridiculous amount of time planning out what gear we're going to bring.

It's vital that we have tools that we can rely on, our cameras, our phones, and our laptops

they all have to work. And if there's any way we can make the stuff that we stuff into

our bags simpler or more importantly way less, we're going to take it.

So in 2016, I was very excited to have a tiny 12 inch MacBook and a Google Nexus 6P. The

laptop weighed next to nothing, and the phone had a massive screen. Both my phone and my

laptop charged with the exact same cable, which was perfect. I was super ready for CES.

Until suddenly, in the middle of that hectic week, the single solitary USB-C port on the

MacBook stopped working. I couldn't plug my camera in, I couldn't sync files, I could

barely get the laptop to charge. And it was all because of a faulty cable.

My Nexus 6P did what it was designed to do when I plugged into the MacBook. It asked

for all the power that it could get to fast charge. And so then the cable provided it,

and that ended up frying the laptops USB controller.

When USB-C first started, the only way to know for sure that you were buying a safe and

reliable cable was to follow a Google Plus group and hope that you could come across the

reviews of a single Google engineer who was running tests on everything that was available.

According to the USB Impletors Forum, the official group that defines USB, there were

only 61 certified USB-C cables at the time. The rest were just unlabeled junk. It was

like playing Russian Roulette with your laptop.

It's five years later now, and you're not likely to fry your computer with a cable,

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