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WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

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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

HN · launched May 1, 2026 · 566 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views

Niche: macos menu bar utilities · 312 launches, 20 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 312 launches in macos menu bar utilities →

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 : 396 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 397 (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
  • Wacchi · ph · 2026-10-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.62
  • ChargeWatt · ph · 2026-11-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.57
  • Dotmeter · ph · 2026-11-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
  • backburner · github · 2026-10-01 · 630 upvotes · similarity 0.51
  • Voltyn · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • Portable Monitor Connection Checker · ph · 2026-09-12 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • BatteryBud for Mac · ph · 2026-10-10 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.49

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.