USB-C on everything: the dream and the asterisks

Honest answer: USB-C won the port war, and that’s genuinely good — but “it has USB-C” now tells you almost nothing. The connector is universal; what flows through it isn’t. Two identical-looking cables can differ by 100x in speed and 5x in charging power.

What the connector doesn’t tell you

A USB-C port might support:

Data: anywhere from 480Mbps to 80Gbps.
Power: 15W to 240W.
Video: full DisplayPort, or nothing at all.

Same shape. Completely different capabilities.

How to actually tell cables apart

Since you can’t see the wires, look for:

Printed ratings. Good cables label their watts and speed. Cheap ones stay silent.
Thickness. A 240W cable is physically chunkier than a charge-only one.
The brand. This is the one category where buying known-good is worth it.

The practical rule

Keep three cables and label them: one fast-data, one high-power charging, one cheap charge-only for travel. Stop expecting any random cable to do everything — that expectation is exactly what the standard quietly broke.

USB-C is a real win for the planet and your drawer. Just treat “has USB-C” as the start of the question, not the answer.

Keep reading

Tech Cover

Can a phone really replace your laptop yet?

For most people in 2026, a phone plus a desktop mode covers 80% of laptop work — but the last 20% is exactly where it breaks. The honest breakdown.

1 min read · 4 May 2026

AI Cover

Is the new Siri actually Google in disguise?

Apple's WWDC promised a smarter Siri — but a chunk of it runs on Google's Gemini. Here's what's really shipping, what's still a demo, and what it means for you.

1 min read · 12 May 2026

Gadgets Cover

Local AI on cheap hardware: worth it?

Running models locally with LM Studio and Ollama on a modest machine — what works, what's painfully slow, and when the cloud is just the smarter call.

1 min read · 28 Apr 2026