I tried a cheap and expensive Thunderbolt 4 cable

if you're a Mac User you're eventually going to encounter this Windows users will probably encounter that too it's got a little four on it it's a thunderbolt 4 cable what's so special about this is just a USB cable right so this dock is Thunderbolt 4 capable and to take full advantage of it you need Thunderbolt 4 cables but there is a small problem with Thunderbolt 4 cables at least right now I usually buy stuff on Amazon but let's go see how much these are at my local store foreign [Music] Thunderbolt for 129 whoa that's crazy 159 for three meters I'm out of here what the hell I cannot believe the prices on these things believable cable let's see how much these things cost on Amazon here's one from OWC it's a one meter cable 3.28 feet so not very long and it's 32 bucks compared to Apple's 129 so what how could they this 6.6 foot cable is 60 dollars here's one from Anker 2.3 feet even shorter and this one is 45 I am noticing a couple of Cheaper Brands showing up like this one right here it supports all the things it's supposed to support 100 Watts 8K display 40 gigabit per second data transfer and it's it's got pretty good ratings but you never know with these things wait a second now this 20 one is less than a foot long so it's pretty short once we get to almost a meter so shorter than the other ones now we're up to 22 bucks so it's not as cheap as one would think so if you want a name brand Thunderbolt 4 cable you're gonna be ready to Fork out some serious dough gonna make you think twice about buying Thunderbolt 4 peripherals some of those will be backwards compatible with slower speed cables now I'm in the United States and there is another Marketplace that I've actually never used before or taken advantage of and I hear the the prices are pretty good no I'm not talking about Amazon I'm talking about AliExpress there's AliExpress it is a chinese-based uh site and if you have a look here let's go with Thunderbolt 4. the prices are very different here this is a two meter cable for 27 this is like two or three times cheaper than the premium Brands and a heck of a lot cheaper I'm not even doing the calculation because the lengths aren't the same uh cheaper than Apple are these any good look at this one this one is 6.99 for one meter it's 7.99 and for 2 meters it is 8.99 instead of paying 129 U.S for an apple one could you pay 7.99 and get the same quality cable or I'm not maybe the same quality but maybe it'll do what you needed to do and if it breaks you just buy five more of them is that what we're dealing with here or is this complete garbage that you should just avoid all right I'm gonna buy one of these I'm gonna register for AliExpress I've only heard about this I haven't used it let's see if there's any difference I found this one here it has it has one one star review but it's pretty cheap and this one claims to support 8K at 60 hertz the other one though is really cheap only did 5K so um I think I'm gonna go with this one it ships to United States for only 3.69 let's go with the one meter variety oh it's 10 34. now it's really expensive all right and uh I'm just gonna check out let's see what happens here purchase okay all right just a quick update here they have been sending me emails like daily emails I've gotten like 10 of them so far and they look kind of like this and I did place this on September 20th so it's been 10 days since then and today I'm supposed to be getting this package finally by the way their updates are super funny because like Amazon would show you recommended uh items that you might be interested in they do that too but here's what they're showing me there's my cable blah blah blah there's my order you may also like this wig thing or these these red boots they know me so well or these pink hair Stripes sorry I I don't know what these things are for those of you that do know or whatever this is this lady is taking a selfie of herself in the product shot see more items let's just see what they have here okay when I go to the actual site it kind of makes a little bit more sense except for a few of these things like what's up with the hair stuff these little mini ducks are really cute Focus Alex okay I'm getting this thing in today let's see how it does [Music] [Music] so I got a cable coming out of my MacBook Pro going into this Thunderbolt dock it is a thunderbolt 3 dock but it has lots of things connected to it including this monitor it's a 27 inch 4K display Let's uh unplug that and instead I'm going to try this new cable is this thing even gonna work okay it looks like it's actually working now this plug is not snug there's definitely a space there not the prettiest plug but if it works I can forgive that I got this cute little Thunderbolt 4 dock too it has one in and three out for Thunderbolt four I already said Thunderbolt four why am I saying Thunderbolt 4 so many times and it also has a USB 3.2 output as well let's try this out okay it's really dark in here why am I doing this in the dark let's turn all this stuff on I got all these lights I might as well use them right this little thing right here is supposed to tell me the power draw of a device that's plugged into a thunderbolt cable so here is the Thunderbolt cable the expensive one that I had I actually don't remember how much I paid for this one but it was probably around the 30 40 range it's not quite one meter long let's plug this in here and this goes into my MacBook Pro so when plugged into the Thunderbolt dock it's taking 19 volts half an amp and about 10 watts just under 10 watts let's do it with a cheap cable notice this thing is not super flexible and it doesn't stay very well connected there connection wobbles so it makes me not super confident about it I guess if you don't move around too much it'll work folks we're getting pretty much the same readings here no difference there the only weirdness about this cable is that it's it doesn't sit very tightly there in its spot and it Jiggles quite a bit there's there's a lot of give here's an official Apple brick this is the one that came with a MacBook Pro it's 140 watts of course we're probably not going to get that kind of draw but let's check it out [Music] okay yeah it looks like we're getting about the same probably because the computer is not drawing 100 Watts right now the battery is at 100 so it doesn't really need it and therefore it's not drawing as much however we're comparing the cable equivalents right so let's uh let's try the expensive cable now yeah about the same so for power draw it looks like it doesn't matter uh which cable you're using let's try the data transfer rates next this right here is probably one of the fastest external ssds I have it's a crucial X8 I've had this for a number of years it's a 500 gigabyte version let's do a test here first I'll do the expensive cable and I'll connect this directly to my MacBook Pro I'm using Blackmagic disk speed test which is a free app you can use and I'll select that crucial drive and let's start the test okay we're just under 800 for right and we're about 850 for read by the way this is nowhere close to what this cable and what Thunderbolt 4 is supposed to be capable of but nonetheless these are the speeds of some peripherals that you would commonly find like this external SSD there's faster ssds out there of course I happen to not have one let me know if you want to see a test like that and I'll go grab I'll have to buy uh an extra SSD that's faster give this video a like if you want to see that alright let's try the cheap cable is it going to show up there it is it shows up just fine Target Drive crucial X8 open and start well uh slow start 200 well that's kind of weird okay okay now it's back up I wonder what happened with that initial start but yeah now it's working fine 785 here on the right 856 on the read so about the same speeds all right so we did the video test we did the data speed test and we did the power test the cheap cable passes it's not as flexible as the expensive cable I don't know how long it'll last it doesn't stick as well to whatever you're plugged again into but it does the job so I don't know what's important to you but if you can save 30 40 50 up to 120 dollars on a one meter cable then why not now for the Apple branded three meter cable that's a whole different story first of all going that far is a bit sketchy for Thunderbolt Thunderbolt 4 is supposed to support it so it should work but I have not tested the long cable from AliExpress who knows what might happen then also it's a bit weird with the shipping time frames they initially said that my order placed on September 20th wasn't going to arrive until October 22nd a month later but it got there in 10 days so yeah the speed is not Amazon Prime where I get it the next day or the same day or two days later you have to wait a little bit I waited for 10 days in my case but uh mileage may vary if you need a cable that same day go to your local store and buy it over there this is a fun experiment and now I have an extra cable that I can use just in case some other cable breaks and I only spent what 11 bucks on it not bad so if this video is useful to you I appreciate a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel I'll see you next time [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: Alex Ziskind

Views: 235,712

Keywords: software development, programming, macbook, macbook pro, thunderbolt, thunderbolt 4, thunderbolt 4 cable, thunderbolt 4 dock, aliexpress, aliexpress finds, usb-c thunderbolt 4

Id: akefhbjWAXc

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022