WhatCable
Know what your USB-C cable can really do
Details
- External ID
- 1153432
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- WhatCable
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- May 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 266
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5625
- Tags
- Hardware, Menu Bar Apps, Apple
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 1:22 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 1:22 a.m.
Description
Why is my MacBook charging slowly? WhatCable shows USB-C cable speed, charging power, and e-marker data in plain English so you don't have to guess.
Enrichment
- Theme
- cross-device control and OS utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- identify usb-c cable capabilities
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Reading USB-C cable e-marker chips, negotiated power delivery (PD) contracts, and data lane configurations requires low-level OS drivers and direct hardware access via USB host controllers.
What it would actually take: Building WhatCable requires a native desktop application (in Swift/Objective-C for macOS or C/Rust for Windows) interacting directly with low-level kernel APIs (like IOKit / IORegistry on macOS) to query the USB/Thunderbolt controller and communicate over the USB-PD Communication Channel (CC line). The hard part is dealing with platform-specific hardware permissions, interpreting undocumented vendor PD vendor-defined messages (VDMs), and interfacing with hardware where the host controller exposes e-marker data.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 56 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #29 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 194 days after the earliest competitor.
- WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables · hn · 2026-05-01 · 566 upvotes · similarity 0.84
- Portable Monitor Connection Checker · ph · 2026-09-12 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Stop Destroying Your Charging Cables · hn · 2026-04-26 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- 56Ah NMC Pouch Cell · ph · 2026-09-21 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- WattMate · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- We built an open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer and programmable sink · hn · 2026-08-05 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- A Software-Defined USB PD Charger (ESP32, FPGA, Open Source Hardware) · hn · 2026-03-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- NetSpeed · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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