A few weeks ago we echoed the price of a Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable: 149 dollars for less than two meters. This opened a debate: who would pay that much money for a simple cable? And many users responded: “me”. Photographers and professionals who work with data (audio, video, image) know that the higher the quality, the faster the transfer speed.
The new iMac M4 and the new Mac Mini M4 both feature a new connection: Thunderbolt 5. And this more advanced generation is faster, too. The question is always the same: Why pay 79 dollars when you can pay 4.95 on Aliexpress? The answer may differ but we will tell you what this cable is capable of and it is up to you to decide whether it is worth it or not.
A Thunderbolt cable for the price of a low-end Android phone
This is the reality: for 79 dollars you can buy a Thunderbolt cable or buy one of those phones that you see in shop windows and which are great to give to a nephew. As the brand illustrates,
“This 1 meter black braided designer cable rolls up without tangle and supports Thunderbolt 5 data transfers up to 120 GbpsThunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 transfer data up to 40 Gbps, USB 3 transfer data up to 10 Gbps, DisplayPort 2.1 video output and up to 240W of charging power.
With this cable you can connect monitors, whether a Studio Display or the Pro Display XDR but also base stations, external drives (hard drives, NAS stations) in addition to being able to make the most of the USB port of the latest iPhone 16 Pro and iPad models. And although we don’t know its interior yet, we are confident that it will be far from the standard USB-C cable that can be found in any bazaar.
What Apple’s Thunderbolt 5 cable offers
As the brand itself says, it offers incredibly fast data transfer, with a theoretical peak of 120 Gb/s, although in practice it is usually a little slower. To get an idea, it transmits a 4 GB 4K file simultaneously. And when we say simultaneous, it means literally, from one place to another. Actually, is so fast that the bottleneck will be imposed by the receiving disk and its limitations in reading and writing. When transferring via USB 4, the speed is reduced to less than half, 40 Gb/s.
The real virtue of this cable is that it has an energy transfer capacity of 240 W of power. What does this mean? This can charge any MacBook laptop and transfer power to any other device, even high-performance UltraWide monitors. Actually, The brand itself insists that it accepts DisplayPort 2.1 (HBR3) video output..
And if you want to make the most of this energy supply, know that Apple also specifies that it accepts a connection of up to six daisy-chained Thunderbolt (USB‑C) devices. As always, you pay a lot. And what is expensive is appreciated and used.
I bought one for a very simple reason. Regardless of the speed of my Wi-Fi connection, when I stream 4K HDR movies with Dolby Atmos audio or music in lossless quality (DSD 128, typically): there are always problems bufferingconnection drops, latency and more. Problems that I solve by connecting my MacBook Air directly to my LG OLED TV. For this simple reason I consider that I have already paid for the cable.
Of course, if you worked as a digital photographer, if you had to move the raw materials of a photo shoot from one computer to another, or if, as a musician, you had to store a large library of sounds and recordings, Logic effects from an external computer. an internal drive, this cable It would be a must in my configuration. And there is no discussion possible. This is not because we are paying for the “Apple brand” but because we are paying for the best data transfer cable that currently exists on the market. And without grandiose promotions like “24K Gold Plated” or “99.99% Oxygen Free”. Simply put, a technologically accurate and robust cable that I know will last for years.
Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable (1.8m) (new model)
*Some prices may have changed since the last review
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