Sometimes documentation can be redundant. Strip down an Anker USB cable and you'll find four coloured-coded wires: red, black, green and white. Presumably this

Sometimes documentation can be redundant. Strip down an Anker USB cable and you'll find four coloured-coded wires: red, black, green and white. Presumably this helps during the assembly process, but it also makes repair work a breeze. UK and EU mains wiring is similarly colour coded. Software developers will joke about self-documenting code that's so clear it doesn't even need comments. Maybe this is the hardware equivalent? The only axiom that holds true is a cable’s wiring is only how it probes out, and whether that is correct or not is an exercise for the engineer to determine. - Top image search results for USB wiring show green and white flipped, and they are not wrong, because they often are. The standard is only between the connectors, the exact wiring doesn’t matter if it works. - Cheap cables won’t have a black wire, they reuse the cable shield as ground return. Funnily enough, cheap cables also use a cheap shield bread which isn’t flex appropriate, so 95% this will fail first. - Cheap products that come with their own appropriately cheap USB cable often take liberties with USB standards, such as actually using the connector shield as ground return and leave the ground pin disconnect, because they know their product does this internally. You will have a great day when you pull this cable out of your draw.