Lumafield, maker of manufacturing-minded industrial CT scanners,
studied this question across three dimensions. After scanning Apple's top-of-the-line cable, a
$10 Amazon Basics model, and USB-C cables costing $5.59 and $3.89, Lumafield had no definitive answer other than "
we buy cables that meet our needs" and that "there’s plenty of room for clever engineering and efficient manufacturing" inside a seemingly defined spec like USB-C.
But we can say that if your goal is to buy one cable that will hold up to abuse, work with the power and data speeds of today and a reasonably distant tomorrow, and remove cables from your list of things that might be the problem?
Lumafield's images show why Apple's alpha-cable might just be worth it.
[...]
All this is encased in hard plastic, laid over a stainless steel shield fully bonded to the connector, and a single-piece strain crimped on eight sides at the cord's meeting with the connector. The cable is, as Lumafield puts it, "a stunning piece of precision engineering."
The
Neptune Industrial X-Ray CT Scanner is 6 feet wide and costs $75,000 per year on a standard contract, including advanced imaging and diagnostic software and support. By putting Apple's Thunderbolt 4 Pro USB-C cable inside, Neptune was able to see literally everything that went into it. You can look at it, too, in
a web version of Lumafield's Voyager software.
