WhatCable reveals the truth about your USB-C cables
WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
WhatCable is a macOS menu bar app that diagnoses USB-C connections by reading what the Mac actually negotiates, not what the packaging claims. It shows charging speed, data speed, display quality, and the weak link in the chain, and flags cables that don't meet USB Power Delivery specs. Free and open source, with an optional Pro version for deeper diagnostics.
Claims are useful. Observed behaviour is better.
- bestouff
I'm using the hardware tester from Treedix in which you have to plug both ends of the cable and which tests a lot of things, I'm quite fond of it.
I have a basket with a lot of USB-c cables and without the tester I can't remember (nor guess) which one does what.
- lxgr
Great utility.
The only wrinkles for me are that Macs apparently don't interrogate cables when they don't have to, i.e., when the power adapter supplies <= 60W (not sure if that's a USB-C protocol or an Apple implementation limitation) and that the website copy is full of GPT-isms, which makes me suspect that some of the output might be assumed instead of empirically validated as well.
- jwr
What would be really interesting is if I could connect a cable to two ports on a Mac and have the Mac test the cable.
- pogue
Is there something like this for Windows/Linux?
- robot_jesus
I'm curious if this also works for USB-A to USB-C. The use case: My Suburu has USB-A inputs and only allows wired Carplay. When I upgraded my iPhone and ditched Lightning, I had to try 6 different cables from my cable drawer to find one that supported data transfer.
I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.