4th times the charm. You’ve provided no evidence for indifference. My point remains, given industry standards indifference would be highly unusual and not at all a safe assumption.

The vast majority of high volume consumer manufacturers use cost accounting practices which would absolutely be tracking and attributing the usb cable costs and the whole point of that accounting practice is to constantly be thinking about minimizing costs of even the smallest inputs, all the way down to the individual screws used. Yes, they’re thinking about how to save 1/100ths of a cent from each screw.