Apple’s expensive cable doesn’t look much different from a cheap cable for a few euros. However, there is a huge difference between a standard USB-C cable and a Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable when you look deeper than the surface.
This is what the USB-C connection looks like. The connector of Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable is similar in design, but the technology is significantly more sophisticated. Arda savasciogullari / Alamy Stock Photo
Apple’s the cable selection includes the confusingly expensive Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable. In Finland, a one-meter-long piuha costs around 80 euros, 1.8 meters long costs 150 euros, and a three-meter one costs almost 200 euros.
At this price, you could already get an affordable smartphone.
It is a highly polished data and power cable that supports Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 standards. Apple promises a data transfer speed of 40 gigabytes per second, and the cable transfers electricity with a power of one hundred watts.
From the outside, USB-C cables from different manufacturers look quite similar to each other. Lumafield, which manufactures X-ray scanners designed for industrial use published images however, revealing the differences between Apple’s luxury cable and cheap USB-C sticks.
If you look closely, the connector on the Apple cable looks very different from the connectors on the cheap comparisons. The Thunderbolt 4 Pro connector has 24 pins, each of which is individually attached to the connector’s circuit board. The pins are connected by wires to the nine different layers of the laminated circuit board.
There are places on the circuit board where two wire paths run parallel, making bends. The route on the outer curve becomes slightly longer, which can ultimately affect the data transfer speeds. For this reason, small extra bends have been made on the straight section of the shorter route to compensate for the length difference.
A protective cover made of stainless steel is attached to the connector, surrounded by a hard plastic case. The strain relief squeezes the cable from eight sides. Lumafield describes the cable.
So it’s quite an example of engineering skill.
X-rays of cheaper cables show fewer connector pins. For example, the ten-dollar Amazon Basics cable has only 12 pins. Some of these are connected to each other, so it was not necessary to solder them all separately to the circuit board. This is likely to be cheaper and simpler than Apple’s high-end cable implementation.
The Amazon cable also has a steel protective sheath with a simple two-part strain relief integrated into it. This has a plastic case on top.
The cheapest cables, costing a few dollars, have no circuit board and no metal protective cover at all. The outer shell is also soft plastic. There is also no proper strain relief, but this function is handled by a rubber extension of the case molded around the cable. The connector of the cheapest cables has only eight pins, of which only four connect to the cable.
The carefully designed internal structure of Apple’s various charging and data transfer devices in relation to cheaper and potentially less secure competing solutions is certainly not a new thing. For example, the blogger Ken Shirriff presented the contents of Apple’s five-watt mobile phone charger back in 2012 in his blog post that received wide attention.
You can familiarize yourself with Lumafield’s interesting X-ray images of various usb-c cables on the company’s website. Apple’s cable can also be viewed With the Voyager web appwhich shows a 3d model of the cable being translated.
Lumafield is also presented their project on the messaging service X (formerly Twitter).