Are you sure there’s nothing else going on there? I have two Gigabit adapters (UGREEN and CableMatters) that have been working fine for almost a year now. I have a third UGREEN model that hasn’t caused any trouble either, but admittedly that one’s rarely in use.
Mostly this was a caution about random defects in these cheaply, mass produced items. I just added a line about that for clarity in my post.
Long time Mac user (since 1984/12/10) but first time message poster here so please forgive any mistakes I may make.
I have stumbled on several USB-C issues even with my persistence remain a mystery:
- A dodocool hub that I purchased would fresh out of the box frequently (hundreds of times/day) go offline (an SD card plugged into it would give the “Disk not ejected properly” message on both a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro.) It also exhibited the same condition on my son-in-law’s high end, custom-built Windows 10 PC. dodocool customer service was very polite, said the hub was defective and sent me a new hub. On the MacBook Pro the new hub exhibited the same symptoms but on the Mac mini it has been working flawlessly for more than 1 year.
The “defective” one sat in my junk box until about 3 months ago until curiosity got me going again. A local dollar store sold a USB-C female to USB-A male “converter” for $2 so I had purchased a number of them on spec. I plugged the hub into this converter and the converter into a USB-A port on another USB-C hub that is plugged into my MacBook Pro. It has been working flawlessly since.
- I purchased a Fasgear 6’ USB-C extension cable. On the packaging was a note:
“When you connect Apple devices with a multifunction USB-C hub, our cable may fail to work. Please flip the female end of the cable to work well.”
In fact the cable worked flawlessly regardless of flipping the female end but being the curious sort I sent an e-mail in April to Fasgear asking for more information and got “crickets.” A WWW search (which I am admittedly lousy at) came up with nothing.
The European Union is forcing USB-C on the world (yes I know the scope is really less than the world but I like to exaggerate for effect) and it really intrigues me that I am lucky enough to hit 2 seemingly inexplainable issues.
There’s one little quirk with USB-C I didn’t mention. They should be designed to be fully reversible: you flip the cable and it works exactly the same. However, it’s clear there are some out-of-spec cables that do not work correctly. It’s not an Apple thing. If the cable has to be flipped on a Mac and not on another device, that would be the cable being out of compliance and other devices being more generous. Apple worked very closely on the USB-C spec, so there’s no issue of it not being compliant.
USB-C does have a difference between USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2: 3.1 Gen 1 uses one set of of the two sets of reversible pins on the cable no matter which way the cable is swapped: so one set on one side is always not in use. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 uses both sets of reversible pins for data to achieve 20 Gbps.
Apple has, so far, only supported USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB4. It makes no mention of USB 3.2 Gen 2 or Gen 2x2. So there may be a gap in there in chipsets and support that some cables fall into.
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