Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to. Plug in a cable and it tells you in plain English what it can actually do: charging wattage, data speed, display support, Thunderbolt, etc. Built in Swift/SwiftUI. Open source, free, no tracking. GitHub:
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
WhatCable What can this USB-C cable actually do? A small macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do, and why your Mac might be charging slowly. USB-C hides a lot under one connector. Anything from a USB 2.0 charge-only cable to a 240W / 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 4 cable, all looking identical in your drawer. macOS already exposes the relevant info via IOKit; WhatCable surfaces it as a friendly menu bar popover. What it shows Per port, in plain English: At-a-glance headline — Thunderbolt / USB4, USB device, Charging only, Slow USB / charge-only cable, Nothing connected Charging diagnostic — when something's plugged in, a banner identifies the bottleneck: "Cable is limiting charging speed" (cable rated below the charger)…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.