Apple even placed a small piece of hardware in one of the circuit board tracks inside its Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable to ensure the data tracks are the same length. Lumafield/ZDNET
Apple is notorious for charging a premium price for… everything. And its cables are no exception.
Take its Thunderbolt 4 Pro cables, which cost a whopping €79 for a 1-meter cable, €149 for a 1.8-meter cable, and €179 for a 3-meter cable (interestingly, it’s difficult to find a 3 meter Thunderbolt 4 cable from another supplier).
Compare these prices to Amazon Basics, which only costs $10.
Well, a cable is just a cable, right?
Well that’s not true.
“Overall the Thunderbolt cable is amazingly precision engineered”
A company called Lumafield used an x-ray scanner to examine different cables, and when they examined the Apple cable, they saw a high level of engineering and attention to detail that was quite unimaginable. Indeed, this cable supports Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 data transfers at speeds up to 40 Gb/s. It also supports DisplayPort video output. It also supports DisplayPort video output and to top it off, it can deliver up to 100W to devices for charging,
To achieve this, Lumafield found that Apple’s cable was an engineering marvel.
For example, the cable entering the connector is crimped in eight different directions to fully protect the connector. Each of the connector’s 24 pins is independently mounted on a 10-layer circuit board, and there is even a small element in one of the circuit board tracks to ensure that all data lines are of the same length, which provides the best possible performance and reliability.
“Overall,” writes Lumafield, “the Thunderbolt cable is astonishingly precision engineered.”
Let’s compare it to the 10 euro cable, which is fine for general use, but is on a whole different level. This cable is a USB-C to USB-C 2.0 fast charging cable designed for charging speeds of up to 60W and data transfer speeds of up to 480Mbps. This cable uses a plastic shell for shielding, and it only has 12 pins used in the connector tip.
It therefore seems in fact in both cases that you get what you pay for.
Source: “ZDNet.com”