Hi, I'm Bernie Thompson I'm the founder of pluggable technologies so USB-C and
Thunderbolt 3 are great but they can be really confusing and you know one of
the things that we've gotten consistent feedback from customers about is
confusion over cables and unfortunately USB-C cables and Thunderbolt 3 cables
actually look identical it's a USB-C connector on both sides even if it's a
Thunderbolt 3 cable and of course if it's a USB-C cable but the cables are
actually not the same. Inside the cables are manufactured and tested to a
different spec and there's actually identifiers within the cable that let
computers and peripherals know whether it's a Thunderbolt 3 cable or just a
regular USB-C cable. So Thunderbolt cables all have this Thunderbolt logo
which it has in this case a 3 below it you won't have any USB-C cables that
will have those kinds of markings so and here's some other examples of
Thunderbolt 3 markings and kind of what they mean on each cable. So you can you
know look for that labeling on the edge of the cable to help you to but still
very confusing and really the best thing to do in the end is to make sure that
the cable that you bought with your dock or your accessory is is the one that you
use with it so how does this play out well you know here we have our Plugable
Thunderbolt 3 docking station the TBT3-UDV if you plug that into this
MacBook Pro here it's going to charge the MacBook Pro and you're going to get
a bunch of extra ports same thing on the windows laptop you plug it into that one
charges the laptop a bunch of extra ports extra displays on you know for
either of these laptops that's with the cable that's included with the
Thunderbolt 3 dock. However, if you set that cable aside you know you kind of
got a pile of USB- C cables and you just pull a random one out this is what can
happen. So, right here we've got the MacBook Pro power brick, MacBook Pro 15
inch and we've got the charging cable that comes with it because USB-C can
carry a charge or can connect devices. So here it's charged only and in fact
Apple has created a charge only cable that can't carry any data at all. So now
if I take this out and I plug this into the dock and then plug that into
the MacBook Pro it fits but it does nothing at all because this cable is
only able to charge and is not capable of carrying any data signal and
certainly not Thunderbolt 3. Now fortunately because there's identifiers
in the cables that computers can actually tell that this is what's
happened but the messages haven't always been clear. In this case the message
you'll see is "Cannot use the Thunderbolt 3 accessory please connect the accessory
to a thunderbolt port on this Mac." Wow, as a user you're going well I did, I did
connect it to a Thunderbolt 3 port right there, but unfortunately it's actually
the fact that the cable is not a Thunderbolt cable that's triggering that
error, it's able to see that but it's not quite sure what's going wrong.
Equivalently if I did the same thing on the window side the message is even a
little bit more confusing it's a the error message on current versions of
Windows 10 is this "Thunderbolt device functionality might be limited make sure
the Thunderbolt device you're connecting to is supported by your PC." So if you
ever get either of these messages on a Mac system or on a Windows system what
you want to do is kind of make sure that the cable that you've bought with your
product is the same cable that came with it.
So pluggable cables have a label on them that let you know which product the
cable goes with. So in this case with the pluggable TBT3-UDV make sure it's a
cable that's labeled for that. So there you go Thunderbolt 3, USB-C cables could
be Thunderbolt 3 could be USB-C or could be charging only hard for you to tell
just by looking at them so you have to you know take care and kind of match the
right cable with the right peripheral in the right laptop. Hope that helps if you
have any questions at all please ask we'll be happy to answer.