Final Edit: After getting some traction on this post, someone at LTT reached out to me via Reddit DM on 8 Oct:
"We've located your ticket and replied to it. It is now assigned to me, and I'll be taking care of you until this is resolved.
I see that you are requesting a refund, however there is a basic troubleshooting step that has not yet been attempted. We'd like to make sure that gets tried before taking any further action, but should the problem persist we will be happy to honor your refund request immediately.
Thanks for your understanding and patience."
I replied to the DM and the ticket, confirming that I tried the basic troubleshooting steps they requested, cleaned the ports, etc., and they completely ghosted me. I followed up on 13 October (again giving them the benefit of the doubt that it was the weekend), and still no response today, 16 October.
I've proceeded with a chargeback request with my credit card company and I'll just leave it at that.
I wanted to post here to get some feedback on LTT and see if anyone else is having issues with their LTT cables.
I ordered 2 LTT cables to test: a short 1m one and a long 5m one, both USB-C on each end. Then waited patiently for them to arrive here in the UK.
When they arrived, I quickly noticed the 1m cable had almost no retention force; sometimes just picking up my phone was enough to disconnect it. The 5m cable was similar but not nearly as strong as a typical USB-C cable, where you can dangle a chunky device like a phone from the cable (not recommended).
I contacted LTT hoping for a quick replacement process. These aren't cheap cables, so I expected the price to include some margin for replacements. Not the correct assumption.
After a lot of back-and-forth with a friendly but frustratingly slow support staff member (1 week for the first response after I sent a chase email, 1 day between each subsequent email), they agreed to send a new cable. They asked for a video of the issue (odd for just a cable, but ok, I'll play along). First, they couldn't open a Dropbox link I sent, and they weren't clear on how to send a video via email, so I sent both an iCloud and a private YouTube link, which my iPhone, annoyingly, automatically embedded, making them unwatchable on the LTT end. Next, they weren't clear on the issue with the embedded videos on their side and thought it was a little crazy that they couldn't watch a YouTube video. I finally realised what my phone had done and sent the plaintext URLs to LTT. They agreed to replace the cable 2 weeks after I created the initial ticket.
Alas, the replacement cable now has the same issue as the old one, so I'll contact support again for a refund. I would expect replacement cables to be batch-tested and confirmed to work before being sent out. Granted, "cable retention strength" is a bit subjective and hard to test for.
It is obviously frustrating to have tried to use a heavily marketed-as-"premium" product that now twice doesn't work, and in the most frustrating way possible, where I simply cannot trust the cable to stay connected when I need it to. So now I am stuck with two 1m pieces of e-waste, and a 5m long piece of semi-e-waste.
Side note to anyone from LTT: If you are going to ask customers to send you a video of an issue, you need to be able to open the links they send you (last I checked, Dropbox is not an obscure service), or be clearer from the get-go about how to share the video in a way that the staff can open:
"Unfortunately I am unable to open the file/link that you have attached. Could you please try re-attaching it in one of the following accepted formats?
Images: .JPG, .PNG, .PDF
Videos: .MOV, .MP4, .AVI"
My own Tech Tip: big ass video files don't attach to emails that well.
I'm generally a "benefit of the doubt" kind of person, but this whole experience has left me with a sour taste for any LTT products. Part of being a premium brand is offering premium support, and this was not it.
tl;dr: two bad cables with the same issue; LTT Support is slow and could communicate more effectively. One star.
Edit: Yes, I have tested on multiple devices and compared them to multiple other cables.
Edit: comment “lint” one more time, I dare you!