I get the difference between something like USB 2 and USB 3 where USB 3 has more wires but how does one USB C cable manage to transfer data faster than another USB C cable that has the exact same number of paths?
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Not all wires are created equal.
Say you’re driving a car. It has a top speed of 200 km/h. In this fantasy realm, there are no legally binding speed limits. You can freely drive as fast as you feel safe doing so.
The first road you are on is a long, straight, wide, flat, paved highway. No turns. No bumps. No hills. No obstacles. How fast are you gonna go? Perhaps as fast as you can, right?
A second road is a narrow, bumpy, winding gravel road that rolls over hills and twists and turns through dense woods. Are you also going to floor it on this, too? I hope not. You run a real risk of losing control and crashing.
It’s difficult to ELI5 exactly what makes cables differ without throwing out electrical jargon, but suffice it to say that some USB cables have little smooth-paved highways inside them, while other cheaper ones have gravel roads inside them. Same number of paths, different travel experiences. And when computers start communicating over the cable, they can feel the difference. When computers detect a crummy cable between them, they gentleman’s agree to speak at a slower speed, even if they theoretically can talk faster, because speaking slowly and hearing everything correctly the first time is faster than trying to speak quickly, being misheard several times, and constantly trying to error correct.
Also, one should be careful when talking about USB standards. The ones with letters (USB-A, USB-B, USB-C) *only* care about the shape of the plug, while the ones with numbers (USB 1.0, USB 2.0, USB 3.0) refer to the data protocol, which mostly affects the internal “shape” and build quality of the cable. They are somewhat mix-and-matchable. You did specify in your question that we are assuming the “number of paths” is the same number as USB-C is capable of using. But I do want to make an abundantly clear reminder that this isn’t always the case. Just because your fancy plug has 24 spots to attach wires to does not mean all of them are connected to something. Many cables with USB-C plugs may only have four cables in them, making them functionally equivalent to the USB cables we’ve already been dealing with for nearly two decades.
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