[bobbiechen]

Who would buy, e.g., a laptop that refuses to work with most existing cables / devices? What do you gain from having a flash drive fail to work because you can't send video over it?

I can see the value of having this test suite for you to run personally, when you want to test. Or having someone certify capabilities and publish the test results for a particular piece of hardware.

But I can't imagine anyone (especially a non-tech-savvy person) using it by default and without an escape hatch - it should "just work".

[kelnos]

I think the point is that if every device did this from the start, there wouldn't be a market for anything but cables that work for everything (because a cable that doesn't work for everything then works for nothing), so all cables would just work, for everything.

That sounds pretty unrealistic to me, though.

[pentae]

Looked at the other way, who would buy a faulty cable that doesn't meet this self-test specification? That would be a feature imo. Cable makers will need to all start meeting the specification very quickly or nobody will buy their cable.