A Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C Cable

hey everybody Adam Savage in my cave with John from Luma field and friend of tested and my friend Hardware software engineer Zack ring and we have scans of Apple cables and their imitators using Luma Fields incredible equipment and we are going to get a lesson in the difference between why some cables cost over a hundred bucks and others cost five or six is that PR accurate I think so yeah let's do it dude let's get into this I'm so excited you used to hear that if you paid a lot for a digital cable than you were wasting your money right because it was just a single signal that went up that's right ones and zeros going through so the question with this expensive Apple cable is is it actually any different from the cheap ones does it have some magic in there and to be clear this is a 2 m Thunderbolt and it it is $130 that's right um and this is I love this we us to say for years we've been saying that our phones have more computing power than the Appollo guidance computer but I'm positive now that this cable has more computing power than the Apollo guidance computer computer that's right can we take a is this where we're starting yeah let's take a look inside right so this is a CT scan of the end of this Thunderbolt 4 cable and there's a lot going on in there definitely there it is oh yeah that is a really complex chip so what's interesting with the CT scan is you see the densest Parts in in kind of different uh different colors so you're actually seeing the pads of the ic's like I believe this is an I see here but what all you're seeing is is the pads themselves um you've got we can switch the visualization up here so you've got two power supplies in here um and then this is a big processor this is a BGA processor bul Gatorade processor um but these are all the pads that actually attach it to its little circuit board so this is a this is like a real you know real powerhouse processor in here doing a lot of processing to get these signals into the wire and then probably back on the other end now what does it need to do with the signal if it's a digital signal that's so so coming from the computer you've got um you've got this these these data streams and the the cool thing about Thunderbolt is on the Computing end they actually have pipes directly to certain parts of the computer that are normally highspeed and you have a direct pipe to it through the cable through the through the cable so there's a bus inside your computer called a PCI bus and it handles all of the the video and a lot of the processing uh high-speed Communications and on Thunderbolt ports they have a direct connection to that so you have this pipe coming from the processor coming from the graphics card that comes out onto those Thunderbolt pins and then the hard part is how do you get that over a long distance and on a cable especially long cables like this they act as antennas so they take in a lot of RF interference they take in everything so magnetic RF all kinds of stuff that will interfere with those really really kind of fragile signals and what these process processors do is um they do a number of things to kind of cram a bunch of data down the cable um one of the things they do is they break it up into differential signals um and instead of just having a single wire for each kind of communication path they have two and what they do is they twist them together you know tightly physically there's actually they're twisted pair of wires and then any kind of interference that goes on one wire gets uh also interference on the other wire and what they do is they put the opposite data on both both of the wires kind of um positive and negative so if you have a one on one you have a zero on the other and a zero on one you know so it's it checks itself it has a self-checking mechanism that's why they call it differential so it's like an XLR cable but uh but for Digital Data kind of yeah exactly and then what they do also is they put multiple channels in so they're taking say one stream of data and in order to get a huge amount of it across instead of doing a single set of ones and zeros they break it up into chunks and then they send it in parallel so I just bring this back to the lay person for a second totally because when we're talking about the fragility of these signals I think when people are thinking oh if it's a zero or one what's the big deal but we're talking about gazillions of these right it is sending a tremendous amount of these through per second in order to process video and extreme the extreme stuff has to exactly tons and tons of these ones and zeros and makes it fragile yeah well and I mean it's lots of them it's also that the the the voltage that goes across this is actually very small swings in voltage so it doesn't take much from the outside world like you turn on your vacuum cleaner or a big light or your cell phone is right next to it it doesn't take much to actually get some interference on those those signals so then all of that is helping to filter out that interference clean exactly so we have this processor on here so that processor is doing a bunch of navigating of all these different signals chopping it up into bits putting them down in parallel pipes putting it back together on the other end so it's multiplexing on one end Dem multiplexing on the other and then because it's doing it so fast it needs needs power so there's also power management in this cable adding power to the signal well it's it's it's powering the processor this this processor takes a bit of power so you actually have two power supplies in here probably for two different rails um two two different voltage rails um there's all kinds of other things in here they've got these are just capacitors um but you can even look here the way that they put together the cabling is just gorgeous so um if you zoom in and you kind of can see all these different wires is going down you can see the difference oh see they're already Twisted they're already Twisted the the management of how they put it together is just really really well done here we can look at the bottom of this at the the cross-section of of the cable here so this is slicing down the going down that's a great view that is really fun oh and you can see Twisted twisting together and crimped so this this strain relief is really impressive but here's the cross section of the cable so they usually have a ground in the center right and that for power ground and then they ALS Al have a shield that goes around the outside which is grounded as well but that keeps a lot of the the other uh electromagnetic interference from from getting in and a getting out also this is one of the other problems with these cables yeah is they they act as transmitters as well so the FCC has to certify them as safe with all of this other kind of shielding what about these two UNS surrounded little dots are those or no there's there's three of them are they significant that I don't know I actually don't know what each individual line does wait a second 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 that's odd five and one interesting yeah and 20 altogether right including the the ground in the center and the extra uh six 13 18 plus that that's 19 fascinating oh just and then there's structural elements like they have there's all the pieces that make it just like a robust cable right and then this also has to be somewhat like this is actually a nice cable feel to it it's not super like way better than this totally and that's all been designed in at the same time as they're designing for filtering out all of that exactly malar and and then you can also see the twisting that's happening so getting that many cables and are those actually those are those coax cables might actually be coaxial yeah I that each one is a shielded inner core here let's try different way of visualizing I don't know I don't know if it has a Metalized shield around it it's hard to tell there might be a uh yeah or a nylon fill of some sort but it's the same density roughly as the center which is oh the shield and the center are the same density and then between them uh there could be some sort of like plastic an insulator we to strip it apart that would let me change the the visualization here a little bit dude this is fascinating here so we'll we'll restore like Predator Vision just yeah no totally we'll be able to do this with our AR goggles in our yeah so these are all metal um and that's that's basically what you can tell from this so there there's probably the same the same uh type of copper uh in both the center and the and the outside individual shielded cables that's that's amazing so they they've put a lot of engineering just in the the cable itself not the ends so you've got a bunch of smarts in the ends you've got a bunch of power management and you got this really impressive set of cabling and and making those attachments between the board and this kind of complex cable it's not easy so and this uh there's got to be some beautiful machines that manage this machines look at that this pcba is really impressive too I think we counted nine layers in the in the PCB with all these blind and hidden Vias and uh Zach you were telling us something really interesting about some of the traces here so we're we're scrubbing up and down here through the through these pcba and uh right what's going on there there there's a there's a wiggle one two up yeah yeah can we zoom in on that yeah so so you've got these high-speed signals that because you want to make sure that they come to the processor the exact same time because you're you're trying to measure really really short signals really fast signals you actually have to make sure the traces are the exact same in length so the outside of a trace is going to be longer by nature because it takes a longer path so that squiggle is evening up the length it's adding length to the inner Trace to make up the difference this these are increments that are too small for me to parse with fraction of a MIM difference at this at the speed of light because or close to it we talking nanc in this yeah and it just has to arrive at just the right time to get everything to line up incredible so that is so cool I never thought a squiggle would be that interesting even the quality of the joints if you look just the sort of uniformness of the solder joints going across if you look at cheap cables they're Blobby and they're weird and what that does is that changes the impedance on each one and again having a really nice cable every single pin has the same impedance I'm starting to understand why this costs a lot yeah there there's there's a lot of engine not just engineering but manufacturing prowess in such a thing ab and getting all of that uh finesse into such a small and actually flexible package and just the engineering effort over a long period to get all this dialed in that you know they have to pay for that somehow right right so this this is this is the this is the official fast way to to to transfer um can we look at some of the imitations yeah so here we have an Amazon Basics USBC cable and this is well regarded yeah that's right reviewers like it it cost about 12 bucks 12 bucks as opposed that's literally an order of magnitude cheaper than this that's right exactly okay so let's see why yeah let's see what's going on in here so here's a CT scan of this Amazon Basics cable this is what I expected this is what I imagined in all cables actually was traces going to wires that go yeah that's right and you know it's it's pretty straightforward um first thing you notice is it has fewer pins than the Thunderbolt yeah they're not taking advantage of all the pins that they C that's right and something else that you notice here if you if you kind of crop in is that the pins aren't independent across the uh across the connector the the pins some of the pins are connected they're jumped directly from one side of the connector to the other well this is how they uh make it interchangeable so so you can put it in either way put in either way and this cable doesn't care it doesn't look like there's any postprocessing of a signal in this this looks like straight wire to wire to the other connector to wire there are no other Active Components in this cable it is just a PC board that makes the connection between the connector itself and the cable so if you're using this cable just for charging this and this shouldn't show you much of a difference am I right maybe oh okay maybe the Thunderbolts doing you think the Thunderbolt might be able to move a little more electricity more efficiently well I mean charging is is just a physics problem and and you look at the the thickness of the wire you look at a bunch of these other things you know the standards if if this meets the US standard then it should be able to supply the same you know up to 5 amps at uh 20 volts if it's a a USBC connector um or 5 Vols it whatever it is um it you know it should meet that um having more physical copper is probably better even if some of this is used for communication looking at the actual wire diameter if we're looking at those uh some of those Center conductors they're just bigger um so you're going to get less voltage drop between one end of the cable and and the other with a bigger cable M and you were saying uh that you see a lot of variances in solder blobs I see hug differences in variances with these cables here well this these are these are the power so this is these are the the power these are going to be the the data lines but just looking at how they're soldered on they're kind of Blobby and just at that yeah they're they're not done in the same just beautiful fashion and even the way they come Twisted together if you look at how they come off the board it's kind of halfhazard and crimp together probably even by hand who knows yeah look you can see voids in the solder here where it didn't get all the way through the stranded wire oh look at that yeah so yeah there's there's Pockets um now there's nothing to say that there's any aspect of this cable that would harm your machine it just might not move dat it's definitely not going to move data as fast and might not move power as fast well so the harm usually doesn't come until you've used the cable for a long time and it's gotten bent it's gotten twisted and some of these little Vo voids are manufacturing defects and that's why a cable wears out and then once you have something has a flaky connection then it can damage Hardware because when the the cable breaks it could short out it could cause heat it could do all these different things so the cable shorts out and could cause real problems whereas again all of the engineering for the strain relief and shielding of this is going to make that a much less likely occurr exactly and and you can see just the way this thing is actually put together um it's yeah it's just so much less uniform um and there's just less to it that's an amazing I mean it it looks incredible right looking at something very very small yeah there's a lot of copper braided together here to form the the jacket of the of the cable and then there's a a little void inside uh two of these wires they may have like a nylon thread going through them or something yeah this is actually you can see this is a a twisted conductor so it may it may also just be a hollow spot but it'd be fun to actually be able to zoom all the way down you may that may disappear yeah so let's go ahead and scrub down the connector here cross sections yeah it should oh there we go yeah you see them start to start to assemble look at them twisting amazing oh yeah so that is you're right that is a void through the whole the whole cable yeah very impressive um all right so we have a couple of extremely inexpensive uh connectors here as well these are uh $3 $3 connectors that you find on Amazon they get poor reviews they're they're cheaply made in different ways which is which is an interesting thing to to be able to look at this one went off the market immediately after I ordered it it it's been discontinued so who knows so this one doesn't even have a circuit board y right this one they are literally soldering the wires directly to the connector itself wow it was designed to go onto a circuit board but they've done it differently and they only use one side so this is probably only works in unless let's see are these pins connected together up here they're not no they're totally so it only works in one orientation it only works in one orientation yeah and the and the other pins are there probably to give it some mechanical you know connection but they're just floating and wow and the jacket of the connector is floating as well in uh in in other uh in the other cables it's connected to uh to the power supply system um and in this one it's not so it's just completely isolated it's floating in the plastic enclosure of the of the connector right so they just over mold the plastic over everything to kind of hold it in place but there's no other mechanical connection so so in the others there was actually if you if we jump back you can see a crimp that goes around the cable I did see that at the base this is just all plastic so instead of so in this there's a there's the metal crimp so the shield comes all the way through the case and crimps around it and then and that's inside of here and that holds these or in orientation together whereas this they did all the soldering and then put this in a tool and shot the plastic around it's just that s relatively soft plastic holding everything together which is again fine for the next five minutes but over a life spin it's going to wear come cool at different we've all got those cables that have that Fray You know last last inch yeah or that you touch the cable in your phone binging oh yeah this all right now here's an interesting one this is also a really cheap one about $3 gets poor reviews um but it's cheap in a different way uh interesting so this has all 24 pins uh um more pins than even the the $12 Amazon Basics connector sure uh but most of them aren't connected to anything they're just sitting there they're they're they're fastened to the PCB here so this uses a PCB like the more expensive cables yeah um to to connect the pins to the to the wires um but it just has four wires just like the the other really cheap one um and the other pins are simply not connected to any traces on the PCB so so this is really fascinating so this might just be for power right um it's possible that they're just using this to um there's there's no data transmission it is just for charging and there's some tricks there's some tricks that they use some of the other wires for to negotiate how much power this particular you know device has so they had to connect some of them but otherwise it just doesn't do any data Transmissions just for charging I mean I guess if you're charging $3 for it you're pretty sure that whoever's buying it isn't using it for high quality data transfer but clearly they're not I mean I would I would wager that if you interviewed a th people about USBC cabling and said what are you going to do with it 95% are going to be using it only for charging yeah right like that is a that is the most primary so this use case works great right you might never even discover that that none of those pins are connected to anything yeah and here again the the uh the jacket of the connector is uh is in fact fastened to the rest of the system but only to the PCB not to the not to any kind of metal enclosure uh like you saw with the more expensive so it's not shielding so all of the high-speed data that isn't going through this there's no shielding involved so um you know because there's no data going through it can pass FCC certification in emission without shielding there's just no data there to actually transmit interesting and FCC isn't concerned with whether it's actually able to transmit data they're only interested in what's coming out of the table Yeah spirus emissions like that's that's their concern that's hilarious wow it had also crossed my mind that you know with all of these pins that aren't aren't doing anything I wonder if this is made in a factory that is also making Thunderbolt cables or Thunderbolt knockoffs and this could be an instance of it just being cheaper have a single design and a single process for fastening pins onto a PCB and then you change the the PCB layout itself you substitute that in or out but maybe that's cheaper than using fewer pins on connectors that don't need all the pins fascinating I mean again all of this is let's be clear this isn't like people like twisting their mustaches to rob you certainly there are those people but the people doing all of this engineering are simply tasked with solving a problem that day in a factory what's that oping right right they're optimizing what their bosses are telling them to optimize uh these are these are still using impressive machines to do incredible micro work but this is allowing us to see the the variances even in that tiny work that's right even this even this cheap cable is incredibly intricate you know and they've made smart trade-offs uh to make the cable do what what it promises for $3 uh to an Amazon buyer can I just say what makes me sad about this is that when they came up with USBC we were already in modern times we could have allocated a certain markting system so we knew what each one did and why and what was inside each one instead they're just blank slates sorry that was my USBC rant yeah you were supposed to I share your Ang I didn't expect that I was going to come to what feels like a robust answer for the cost of a of an apple cable but this is an amazing dive and people can actually scroll through these scans themselves yes yeah that's right exactly they can a link in the description yeah perfect fabulous John Luma Fields you're continually bringing us wonderful views and Zach I appreciate you as the Navigator through this strange landscape this is amazing I I'm I'm impressed this is a great view something I've never got to see so thank you cool that's always fascinating to go deep into these little things everyday objects and they turn out to be really really complex really really cool awesome

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 3,051,348

Keywords: tested, thunderbolt 4, apple thunderbolt 4 pro cable, thunderbolt 4 cable, apple thunderbolt 4, best thunderbolt cable, apple thunderbolt 4 cable, usb-c, usb, expensive, lumafield, scan, ct scan, iphone 15, iphone 15 usb-c, thunderbolt 3, tech reviews, tech review, test, vs

Id: AD5aAd8Oy84

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023