Someday, they will make a cable that defeats all other cables, and it will cost $1.40
When you switched all of your devices, correctly, to USB-C, you were not prepared for the cabling situation.
A cable is not just a cable in this world. Some of them can move power through them; others cannot. Some of them can move lots of data through them; others cannot.
In short, there are USB-C cables and then there are Thunderbolt cables. Both of them use the same port, even though they operate on different standards. Thunderbolt cables are backward compatible with USB-C, so if you buy a Thunderbolt cable, it does support USB-C and also other things.
Thunderbolt cables have a little logo on each side of the plug so you know that they are Thunderbolt, and a number that is between 3 & 5 as of press time. That number indicates how recently it was released, and how fast the cable is. USB-C cables do not have this designation, and they have no standardized marking system to denote what they do.
So if you buy a USB-C cable, you don’t know what it does at all. The only way to find out is to get a cable tester and check yourself. In doing so, you’ll also need to learn a bunch of arcane wisdom about USB-C cabling in order to know that the cable you’re holding will not, in some cases, literally fry your laptop.
You could do all of this, or you could buy Thunderbolt cables, none of which have this problem.
And so you know where this is going. Every single cable in this house is a Thunderbolt cable, and every single cable in this house will get upgraded the moment a device enters it that supports the latest standard. In practice, that means a tiny handful of recently purchased cables are Thunderbolt 5, the latest standard, where products supporting it started coming out in October 2024. The rest are Thunderbolt 4 – until I buy a Thunderbolt 5 device, at which point I will suddenly end up with a lot of spare cabling on my hands.
I went through my home and assessed every place where I keep a Thunderbolt cable:
Server: 9x
Media computer: 2x
Pack load: 4x
There are three exceptions where I keep eight 140W-certified 6-foot Anker USB-C cables: the three chargers, in my bedroom, first floor, and garage, where I keep my devices charged. I never move these chargers; I will never need to swap these cables for anything else.
15 cables sounds like it’s not a huge deal, but the price adds up. Thunderbolt cables are comparatively expensive. Apple’s first-party cables are infamous for costing a lot, largely because they have tiny computers inside of them to manage the load at longer lengths.
The two brands to pursue for Thunderbolt are Cable Matters and (above all) OWC. You should always buy the latest version of Thunderbolt, since they are backward compatible. Beyond that, there is no functional difference between cables that I’ve been able to figure out.
Why you opened this email
Look, people. I just wrote 587 words about cabling because nobody is in charge anymore, because there is a real danger to buying the wrong cables or using stock cables, and because we literally built corner-cutting into a cable standard that will likely persist for a generation. In doing so, we are doing several things:
Creating an e-waste nightmare. Every device ships with a cable, none of which we can trust.
Misleading the public into thinking that they can blindly just rawdog cabling.
Causing people to have to be vigilant about something as trivial as the cables you plug into your laptop, after literally a half century of our not having to worry about this.
Creating an economic separation between those who can afford to buy a lot of cabling for their complicated setups, and those who cannot.
Causing nickd to write text about cables. Cables.
This is a disaster of our own making. In the previous plug standard we had, none of this was ever a problem. But hey, at least there’s a solution, if a baffling & expensive one.