I had a bike light that charged over USB-C. I thought I was going nuts when I couldn’t charge it with any combination of cables and chargers I had. That is until I dug up the cable that came with it, a cheap looking yellow USB-A to USB-C cable. With that cable, I could charge it from anything.

Something I've also see some shitty peripherals do is only hook up one side of the USB-C connectors. To get it charging, you'd need to orient the cable right.

Absolutely baffling, but it only happened to me for brands where I should've figured.

It annoys me so much when new electronics do this because the fix is both well known by now and only requires 2 dirt cheap components on the circuit board (5.1k resistors to ground on the CC lines).

As a hardware engineer among other things, that was one of the first things I learned about interfacing with USB C. How do so many consumer devices keep getting this wrong in the year of our lord 2026?