WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
Details
- External ID
- 47972511
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 566
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9951534733441034
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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: https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS utilities and system tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- usb-c cable inspection utility
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The app is a lightweight macOS menu bar utility that queries Apple's native IORegistry/System Profiler USB-C Power Delivery and Thunderbolt descriptors and displays them via a simple Swift/SwiftUI UI.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Dedicated USB cable testing device (mentioned as purchased alternative), usbee (Rust port on GitHub)
Concerns raised: Too many releases in short time (quality concern), Missing some features in current implementation, Accessibility standards compliance on macOS unclear
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 177 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 178 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 165 days after the earliest competitor.
- WhatCable · ph · 2026-05-24 · 266 upvotes · similarity 0.84
- Portable Monitor Connection Checker · ph · 2026-09-12 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- WattMate · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- LighterMac · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- mectrics · ph · 2026-07-31 · 268 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Ember · hn · 2025-12-06 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Stop Destroying Your Charging Cables · hn · 2026-04-26 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- MacMonitor · ph · 2026-09-21 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.