I had this happen to me once with an HDMI cable I bought for my monitor, which I thought was defective until I found out that it worked on my TV. It was then th

I had this happen to me once with an HDMI cable I bought for my monitor, which I thought was defective until I found out that it worked on my TV. It was then that I remembered that HDMI has several speed grades, and my monitor happened to have a high enough resolution that not all HDMI cables would work with it. Happily, the HDMI cable I had been using on my TV worked on the monitor, so I just swapped the cables and all was fine. So this issue is not exclusive to USB. In fact, with USB the situation should be better, since all cables except the slowest ones are supposed to have a built-in chip describing how fast they can go. So in the MacBook example, in theory it should be able to detect the issue, switch to a lower resolution, and present an on-screen warning telling you what happened and why.