USB-C head-to-head teardown - Lumafield
The reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another. We do a teardown of Apple's Thunderbolt 4 and its competitors.
They compared the $130 TB4 Apple cable to $5 junk cables, but I wish they included some $40-80 competitors in the comparison. How does Anker fare?
Yeah but honestly, it's only the very worst cable that the Apple one truly looks good in comparison to. For the other ones, it's better, yeah. Sure. 5-10 bucks better. Not 110+ better.
All of the others were just USB 2.0. Comparing them to a TB4 cable is kind of hilarious.
Anecdotally, I personally love Anker stuff and exclusively buy cables and chargers from them.
I have a USB-C cable that was around the $40 mark, and it has bulky and robust connectors that likely house some electronics in them. I originally bought it to my mom as a charger/data cable, but she didn't like it, so I use it to occasionally connect my phone to my monitor. It transfers USB and 2.5K video signal without an issue with superfast charging as a bonus, and also braided. Not sure if it would fare at TB4 speeds.
Kind of curious about the Cablematters TB4 cable also as it seems to be of comparable quality to the Apple cable.
...this cable accumulated 29 one-star reviews on Amazon and was discontinued the day after we bought it.
"Yes! Somebody real bought it! Quickly pull everything before they sue us." 😅
Does anyone know of a decently priced, fully featured USB C cable that I can just buy a bunch of? I have to keep track of which high speed data cable came with my external SSD, which cable is USB 2.0 only, and which cables support high speed charging which kind of defeats the "one cable to rule them all" point of USB C
That was pretty cool. $129 for a cable is excessive, but I guess there is a lot of engineering in it.
I make custom cables for the film industry. Some of the cables I make are ave $250 and they’re not even smart cables. Those UsB cables are not just a wire they’re a communication interface embedded in them.
I feel like cable type really doesn't matter for me since USB-C is mostly gonna be used to charge, and data transfer is something I hand off to WiFi or Bluetooth. That said, I don't buy cheap ass cables for a reason. But I also don't spend a small fortune either.
This article feels like an ad for Apple cables, Amazon Basics cables, and an expensive ass CT scanner I'll never need and hope to god they're giving those employees dosimeters.
Nice read!
I especially liked the part with the wiggly trace for better signal integrity. Always good to see design theory in practice.
Interesting read!
All I want to know is how much for one of those CT scanners?
I thought the thumbnail was an illustrations of some minecraft skins for a second.
More about showing off neat CT scans. I wouldn't read too much into it given the sample of cables looked at. I personally had no idea industrial CT scanning was a thing!
