The following new members joined in August:
Most of us probably have a collection of random USB-C cables that have arrived over the years with various devices and peripherals or were purchased quickly as needed. Apart from the difference between smooth and braided cables and the colors—most of mine are either white or black—they’re nearly impossible to tell apart. Someone who is more obsessive than I might have labeled them when they arrived, but I suspect most people just toss them in a drawer, box, or bag. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours (yes, I still keep some things in 3.5-inch floppy boxes).
But not all USB-C cables are created equal. Even beyond the difference between Thunderbolt and USB, USB-C cables can support a wide variety of power and bandwidth specs. For instance, Apple is notorious for shipping “charge-only” cables that support data only at slow USB 2.0 speeds of 480 Mbps. And there’s no way to know at a glance what the random cable that shipped alongside some device can do.
Hardware testers exist—some of my Apple Consultants Network friends carry this Treedix USB Cable Tester—but for most people, they’re overkill. Instead, download the WhatCable app, which gives you a vast amount of information about your cables for free. A paid WhatCable Pro tier ($13.99/£9.99) lets you name cables and shows what each port, cable, and device combination can do and has negotiated.
Using WhatCable is trivially easy—you just launch the app and scroll through its reports on each cable/device that’s attached via USB-C. It shows you the port in use, a headline (“Thunderbolt / USB4 • 3W charger” in this case), a brief description of what the cable can do, and boxed summaries of the cable’s capabilities for charging, throughput, and display quality. After that, it lists all the details it can discern about the cable and what it knows about the connected devices (an Apple Studio Display in this case). If you’re a glutton for technical punishment (“please sir, more specs!”), click the Show Technical Details switch at the bottom.
Those Apple “charge-only” cables? They look a lot different in WhatCable, as you can see from this one connecting my iPhone 17 to my Mac. You really don’t want to use one of these cables to connect an external SSD.
In this case, it doesn’t matter what cable I use because the iPhone 17 itself is limited to 480 Mbps. That became obvious when I switched to my go-to OWC Thunderbolt 4 cable. Even though WhatCable correctly identifies it as a Thunderbolt cable capable of 40 Gbps, the app notes that only USB 2.0 is active because of the iPhone 17’s limitations.
It was also illustrative to plug in an Anker USB-C hub with several USB-A ports and then attach an old OWC hard drive that turned out to be limited to USB 2.0’s 480 Mbps and a SanDisk flash drive that supported USB 3.0’s 5 Gbps. I wouldn’t have guessed the hard drive was that slow just from looking at it.
I could keep working my way through the rat’s nest of USB-C cables in that bag, but you get the idea. WhatCable also includes macOS widgets so you can see what’s connected at a glance and can trigger notifications when cables connect or disconnect. You can choose between a normal windowed app or a menu bar popover, and Terminal wonks can even run it at the command line.
As long as you’re running macOS 14 Sonoma or later on a Mac with Apple silicon (Intel-based Macs are out of luck), I encourage you to download WhatCable 1.4 today and take a spin through its documentation for more details. If you regularly work with many USB-C cables, consider WhatCable Pro for its additional identification and diagnostic capabilities.
ADAM ENGST 26 August 2026
Since March 2026, we’ve been enjoying our Hyundai IONIQ 5 for the most part, including several long road trips that were improved by the application of additional tech, notably the A Better Route Planner app and service (see “My First 700-Mile EV Road Trip—What Worked and What I’d Change,” 24 April 2026, and “How Planning Made My Second Long EV Trip Stress-Free,” 10 July 2026).
We just got home from a long trip to Vermont to visit some college friends and for Tonya’s cousin’s wedding party, and I wanted to share a few more observations about the IONIQ 5 and long EV trips.
As with our last trip, I wanted a sense of where we’d need to charge as we drove to our destinations (two of them) and then home. Building a round trip in A Better Route Planner (ABRP) confirmed we would need to charge only once while driving to and from Vermont, but it again felt a little clumsy because there was no way to match the stops with the days on which they’d take place. (ABRP was also requiring a login on each launch, which I suspect is a conflict with the iOS 27 beta.)
Nonetheless, seeing the state of charge at each stop was tremendously valuable, because we could make sure we arrived at each charging station with a comfortable buffer. On the way home, we chose a less-traveled scenic route that required charging at a Tesla Supercharger site that would have been the last charging option for 100+ miles. That gave us pause at first, until we realized that if something was wrong with that Supercharger site, we could reroute at that point to standard interstate driving, where there were many more fast chargers.
One annoyance we hadn’t planned for was how weak or nonexistent cell service is in rural Vermont and northern New York. We thought connectivity was problematic in the Finger Lakes region of New York, but we can’t complain compared to where we were driving last weekend. Needless to say, ABRP didn’t allow route planning or changes without Internet access, and even Apple’s Maps had trouble because I hadn’t thought to set offline maps for those areas.
The lack of service affected other activities too. Our friends’ fiber Internet connection was down the entire time we were visiting, so with no cell service, we were completely offline. Tonya found that unsettling, since we hadn’t alerted family members that that might be true. It didn’t turn out to be an issue at all, but it was illuminating to see what it felt like to lose Internet access unexpectedly for nearly a day.
Later in the weekend, Tonya and I went on a short trail run, which we had planned to go around the Sugar Hill Reservoir. However, since our phones were in SOS mode the entire time, we didn’t have enough mapping support to trust ourselves with a loop, so we dropped down to a simple out-and-back. Besides, when you find yourself on something called the Sucker Brook Historic Trail, do you really want to find out that you’re the sucker?
Even though we’ve had the IONIQ 5 since March, I just discovered my favorite feature: speed limiting (called Manual Speed Limit Assist in the manual). I’ve received only a handful of speeding tickets in my life, but each one has mortified me because they’ve all been due to missing a speed limit change. (In case it’s not obvious, I hate making mistakes, especially those that are both easily avoidable and expensive.) I have long wanted a feature that would prevent me from speeding while otherwise letting me drive normally. The IONIQ 5’s speed limiter does exactly that.
To enable it, I long-press the Driving Assist button (a short press turns on cruise control). That also sets the speed limit to the current speed, and a rocker switch lets me increase or decrease it in 1 (short press) or 5 (press and hold) mile-per-hour increments. There’s also a Speed Limit Assist Offset setting that lets me add 0, 5, or 10 miles per hour to the acceptable speed limit so I can drive up to 60 in a 55 MPH zone, for instance.
We had chosen to take the scenic route home through the Adirondacks from Vermont, which put us on winding, hilly roads that were actively fun to drive, especially in comparison to the boring interstates where the IONIQ 5’s automatic features could probably have done all the driving on their own. It’s easy to see self-driving on interstates being commonplace within a few years.
However, with the speed limiter in play, I could zip around the curves and cruise through small towns without worrying about inadvertently speeding. Each time a speed limit changed, the IONIQ 5 would either adjust the speed limiter automatically or suggest that I do so with an up or down press of the rocker switch. I couldn’t figure out why it changed automatically in some situations but not others. The manual says the automatic changes happen only on roads of 45 MPH or higher, but I’m not sure that was the case.
Regardless, I was able to drive entirely naturally, except when my acceleration would have exceeded the limit. The car stuck to the speed limit even when my pressure on the accelerator varied slightly. However, if I floored it, the IONIQ 5 would ignore the limit and let me accelerate freely, beeping to alert me that I was exceeding the set speed. The one time I needed to pass a car going well below the speed limit, I briefly turned off the speed limiter to avoid its beeping, gunned the IONIQ 5, and blew by the Sunday driver with a G-force-inducing burst of electric torque. Nothing beats EV acceleration.
This is only tangentially related to our latest trip, but on the negative side, I now have a least-favorite feature in the IONIQ 5 as well: the parking assistance warnings. Whenever I pull into or out of a parking spot, the IONIQ 5’s Parking Distance Warning displays how far I am from nearby objects with a diagram that shows green, yellow, or red around an outline of the car. It also beeps with increasing urgency as the distance to an object narrows.
The diagram is great—I like seeing the sensor data that tells me that I’m getting very close to something that’s going to ding the paint. But the beeping! The only thing that could be more stress-inducing is a parent, spouse, or DMV instructor yelling: “YOU’RE GETTING CLOSE! YOU’RE GETTING CLOSER! YOU SHOULD REALLY STOP!” Although there are settings that allow changing the volume of other warning beeps (including turning them off in favor of haptic vibrations in the steering wheel), those settings don’t apply to the Parking Distance Warning beeps.
Worse, the warnings don’t take the context into account. If I’m in reverse and backing out of a parking space, I don’t want to hear beeping related to things in front of me! That’s especially annoying when reversing out of a garage where there’s always something in front.
There is a way to turn off the warnings—press the Parking Safety button on the center console—but that has to be done every time, and if I’m backing out of our garage, as we do every time I drive the IONIQ 5, we can’t turn it off until I have shifted into reverse, when I should be focusing on pulling out, not pressing buttons. It’s a terrible, horrible, awful, no-good interface.
But wait, the parking situation gets even worse! Those of us who live in the country or park at trailheads—such as on our run last weekend—often have to park in tall grass or weeds. The IONIQ 5 has a Parking Collision-Avoidance Assist system that slams on the brakes when it thinks I’m going to run into something while parking, either in the front or back. So I see red on the parking diagram, hear increasingly urgent beeps, and then, even though I can see full well that it’s just grass behind me in the rear view camera, the car slams on the brakes and refuses to let me back up further. It’s so abrupt that I think I’ve hit something, but no, it’s just the tall grass.
Luckily, I can override the feature by pressing and holding the Parking Safety button for a few seconds. If the brakes have already kicked in, I may also need to press the brake pedal at the same time. That’s hard to remember after I’ve been beeped at constantly.
Both of the parking assistance features are optional, and I may turn them off once I feel I have a better intuitive sense of how big the IONIQ 5 is and how it fits into parking spaces. But for now, as much as these features go overboard, I think they may reduce the likelihood of damaging the car or something else while parking.
This is another instance of how cars should act more like computer software in providing options, given how much they are defined by behaviors that aren’t encapsulated in hardware. The settings exist; Hyundai just won’t let me control them.
Because the 2026 IONIQ 5 uses Tesla’s NACS connector, we can—in theory—charge easily at Tesla Supercharger sites. However, we ran into a minor problem worth sharing: short charging cables.
Tesla has installed four generations of Supercharger sites with ever-evolving designs and specifications. I believe our previous trip’s Supercharger site was a newer V3+ or V4 design with longer cables, whereas the one we encountered at Chestertown, NY, on the way home was a V3 design whose shorter cables are only about 6 feet (2 m) long, attaching to the inside of the charger cabinet.
When we arrived, only one slot was open, so we backed in, only to discover that the cable wouldn’t reach the IONIQ 5’s charging port on the back of the passenger side. (In contrast, Teslas all have the charging port on the back of the driver’s side.) Luckily, in the two minutes it took us to figure this out, someone else left, freeing up a charger cabinet perpendicular to the others at the end. With that one, we could pull forward onto the grass to get close enough to connect. Slightly awkward, but it worked.
In reality, the turnover was high enough that if we had had to wait for someone to leave, it would have taken only a few more minutes. However, we would have had to occupy a spot designed for the next cabinet over, which would have prevented a Tesla from connecting (though not necessarily another model, like the black Kia Niro with its charging port in the nose). Electrify America and EVgo sites we’ve used have had much longer cables.
Nothing in the Tesla, ABRP, or PlugShare apps identifies the generation of a Supercharger site, but there are a few ways to tell. The easiest is a photo—if the cabinets are white with red interiors and the cables are inside, that’s V3. The V3+ or V4 cabinets are taller, white and black, and have longer (nearly 10 feet, or about 3m) cables mounted on the side, as you can see in this PlugShare photo from Keith Bohling. The other giveaway is that V3 chargers will be listed as supporting only 250 kW, whereas V3+ and V4 chargers will be listed at 325 kW or higher.
Anyway, if you can charge at Supercharger sites, keep in mind that you may encounter a short cable. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it could require an additional wait and some spot-jockeying.
Finally, we had a notable success with using ChatGPT to find somewhere to eat dinner on the way home. We had passed through the town of Speculator and were slated to go through Rome en route toward Syracuse. It was 5:40 PM, and we wanted to eat sometime in the next 90 minutes or so, without being pushed toward fast food or a diner focusing on fresh-from-the-freezer fried food. After a tap on the ChatGPT CarPlay icon and another to start a chat, I said:
We’re driving from Speculator to Rome and then on to Syracuse before heading home to Ithaca. We’re looking for somewhere to eat dinner, probably in between Speculator and Rome, so that we can be done with dinner around 8pm. It is currently 5:40pm. What would you recommend as a restaurant that has interesting food, not just a diner, and certainly no fast food?
After a moment, ChatGPT came back with:
So, yeah, given the timing and Sunday hours, I’d nudge you a bit farther west and aim for Tailor & the Cook in Utica. It’s a farm to table spot with a serious reputation, craft cocktails, and it’s open till late, so you’ll actually relax.
It also suggested a Greek place that closed at 8:00 PM, but Tailor & the Cook looked entirely reasonable and had a reservation available when Tonya checked, so we went there. The food, decor, and atmosphere were far nicer than what we normally experience when stopping at random restaurants on the road.
There’s no telling if we could have found something equally good on our own, but the search space was large—quite literally, given that we didn’t care when we stopped as long as it was on the way. Fold in questions about cuisine type, food quality, price, and hours, and Tonya could have spent 30 minutes on her iPhone researching with no guarantee of equivalent success.
Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar situation of needing to find a restaurant that fits a few time, space, and food constraints, it might be more productive to work with a chatbot rather than risk getting carsick poring through Yelp.
Mike Wuerthele
9
Fri Aug 28 2026, 10:25 AM EDT · 4 minute read
Jony Ive & Sam Altman | Image Credit: OpenAI
In what is likely the most tone-deaf response by companies that have created a massive problem, Sam Altman and other AI companies are crying out for a public effort to solve AI hacking that they all enabled.
What an absolute crock of self-serving nonsense from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, again.
What Altman is likely referring to in a post on X, and ignoring the fire in his own house, is that a Chinese company is about to release a new "frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities model."
So, Altman is now afraid, I guess, of the tool he let loose on the world. He is now clutching his pearls that, shockingly, a tool made to generate code might be used maliciously.
Kind of like OpenAI's tools are, and have been. As a reminder, Altman's models were attacking Hugging Face on their own. And those same models self-hacked OpenAI's Kubernetes clusters and deleted records on its own to hide it.
He now wants the world to chip in, in a massive effort, to close what he says is a narrow window to prevent widespread AI agent attacks.
To be fair, that window probably is narrow. He just broke it in the first place and is shocked that it is broken.
There's more to read about it here. I'll use my brain to write a brief summary of this probably AI-generated document.
In short, Altman wants the world to get together to solve the AI attack surface problem, no matter how big or small. He wants the world's governments to harden surfaces, and every organization, no matter how big or small, to use counter-AI tools using AI to make the patches.
Oh, don't worry. There are more companies in on this, wanting external help to solve problems. Microsoft is wringing its hands, so is Google, and Anthropic.
They just aren't doing it with the same vehemence as Altman.
Certainly, this monumental effort won't be free from an engineering or hardware perspective. Nor will the labor. There has already been a massive cost to actual people, even if businesses using AI haven't suffered that much.
Yet. These AI companies are going to want to turn a profit eventually, and that means that users will get charged more and more, in much the same way that Google has squeezed publishers over the last 15 years.
Nowhere here is there a call for the AI companies to chip in financially to the places and people that their tools have attacked, sometimes autonomously. There's no call to help the fired workers, displaced by AI. There's no call to pay artists whose art they have stolen.
And OpenAI models are already attacking US infrastructure, and he knows it.
ADAM ENGST 10 August 2026
My son Tristan was visiting recently while on vacation and took the opportunity to replace his base-level M1 MacBook Air (8 GB / 256 GB) with a new M5 MacBook Air with 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. The replacement wasn’t urgent, but he was running low on memory because the 256 GB SSD left little room for swap, and the M1 model could never connect natively to two external displays. He paid $200 more than he would have if he had purchased before the end of June (see “Apple Raises Prices for Many Products,” 26 June 2026), but at least he was able to walk out of the Cornell Store with the new Mac.
At the time, we didn’t quite realize that the global memory shortage, driven by demand from the AI industry, would also lead to significantly longer delivery times as Apple competes for a limited supply of chips. But the word from Apple consultants in our TidBITS Content Network program is that the situation has gotten bad. When ordering from Apple, the estimated delivery times have increased dramatically—a few maxed-out configurations could take several months to ship. Worse, some consultants say they’re seeing even longer delivery times after an order has been accepted, so Apple’s estimates may not be accurate.
Although higher-memory configurations are particularly impacted, there’s no way to predict which Macs will be affected or the estimated length of delivery delays. As of 10 August 2026, the Apple Store is reporting the following example delivery estimates for my ZIP code, 14850:
Other locations and configurations may vary, and the situation changes daily. In the last week, the MacBook Neo delivery estimate dropped from 10–14 days to 2 days, so the news isn’t all bad.
So if you’re in the market for a new Mac, what should you do?
If, like Tristan, you’re upgrading from an older Mac that’s working acceptably, waiting might not bother you. He had been considering upgrading for a while, but he was too busy to make the purchase, and no one expected Apple to raise prices. It wouldn’t have been a problem if he had had to wait several weeks to get a new MacBook Air.
But what if your Mac has been lost, stolen, or damaged, and you need a replacement sooner rather than later? You have a few options:
Are you in need of a new Mac now? And if so, what strategy are you taking?
Amber Neely
10
Wed Jan 14 2026, 05:14 PM EST · 2 minute read
The method and the madness | Image credit: Reddit user peninkling
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The nail polish girlies have found a new favorite tool to use with magnetic cat eye nail polish — the Apple Watch charger.
If you keep up with nail polish trends — and I'm assuming many of you don't — magnetic nail polishis having a big moment right now. It's interesting, because magnetic polish is hardly new. I remember seeing it hit the shelves of bougier shops in my early 20s, only to trickle down to drugstore brands a year or two later.
What is new, however, are the inventive ways people are using it. Just about anything that has its own localized magnetic field has been used to alter magnetic polish, and now that growing list includes the Apple Watch charger.
Reddit Laquerista peninkling shared some pictures of their newest manicure, which they proudly claimed — and explained — was achieved using the Apple Watch charger. You simply press your finger to the charger, apply your coat of magnetic polish, and wait about one minute for the effect to lock in place.
While peninkling didn't invent the Apple Watch charger method, they certainly did a great job with their take. The result is an absolutely stunning shimmery blue to black gradient.
Instagram user Sarah Kendall also has taken a crack at the trend. Her video shows the method from start to finish.
For those of you who are looking to recreate peniklings look, you'll want to snag two Mooncat nail polishes. The bottom coat is Mooncat's Getting Even, followed by two coats of Mooncat's Bloodbender.
And for the majority of you who are wondering what on earth magnetic nail polish is, I've got you covered, too.
Magnetic polish, often called cat eye polish, is a nail polish that contains ferromagnetic metallic particles. When you hold a magnet over — or under — the wet nail polish, you can create some stunning effects.
Once dried, the effect stays locked in place.
Popular effects include a cat eye, done with a bar magnet, velveteen effects done with U-shaped magnets, or simple shapes like hearts and clovers using magnetized wires. Now we can add the Apple Watch charger to the list, too.
And, I'd like to point out that Redditor Glittering-Time-2274 notes a similar effect could be achieved with MagSafe-compatible accessories. They specifically mention a magnetic PopSocket, but I'd be willing to bet you could use your favorite magnetic mount, the MagSafe Wallet, or anything else that sticks to the back of your iPhone.
As someone who does her nails pretty routinely, I can see the appeal. I'll admit that I haven't snagged myself any magnetic cat eye nail polish — yet.
