ProductIntelHub
Sign In

WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

  • Hacker News

USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to. Plug in a cable and it tells you in plain English what it c...

  • Published: May 1, 2026
  • First seen: May 1, 2026
Visit website

AI Summary

USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to. Plug in a cable and it tells you in plain English what it c...

Best for

Teams evaluating AI product workflows / Builders comparing emerging tools / Operators tracking early category shifts

Why it matters

Primary discovery source is Hacker News.

Key Features

  • Primary public product URL is https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable.
  • Description: USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to.....
  • GitHub repository is linked as darrylmorley/whatcable.
  • Listed on Hacker News as "WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables".
  • Source description: USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to.....

Use Cases

  • Primary discovery source is Hacker News.
  • A public GitHub repo is available for direct technical review.
  • Hacker News mention is recent (2026-05-01).
  • Primary public product URL is https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable.
  • Description: USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to.....

Why Now

WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables is appearing on fresh discovery surfaces, so it is worth reviewing while momentum is still forming. Confidence is currently medium (49/100), so treat this as an early signal rather than a settled trend.

Community Signals

Trend score

44.9

24h momentum

Rising

Hacker News points

146

Rising

Facts / Signals / Inference / Unknowns

Facts

  • Listed on Hacker News as "WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables".
  • Source description: USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to.....
  • Source publish date is 2026-05-01.
  • Description: USB-C cables can be a mess. One cable charges at 5W, another does 100W and Thunderbolt 4, and they look identical in the drawer. WhatCable sits in your menu bar and reads the cable data your Mac already has access to.....
  • GitHub repository is linked as darrylmorley/whatcable.
  • Primary public product URL is https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable.

Signals

  • Hacker News mention is recent (2026-05-01).
  • A public GitHub repo is available for direct technical review.
  • Primary discovery source is Hacker News.

Inference

  • Public code access can lower evaluation friction for developer audiences.

Unknowns

  • Documentation is not explicitly linked in the current allowed evidence set.
  • No tagline is stored on the current product record.
  • Pricing details are not explicitly linked in the current allowed evidence set.
  • Recent changelog or release history is not explicitly linked in the current allowed evidence set.
  • Release cadence cannot be confirmed unless a changelog or release link is explicitly provided.

Evidence Snapshots

WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

Listed on Hacker News as "WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables".

WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables GitHub repository

GitHub repository is linked as darrylmorley/whatcable.

WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables official profile

Primary public product URL is https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable.

Alternatives / Related

LangAlpha – what if Claude Code was built for Wall Street?

Hacker News

Some technical context on what we ran into building this. MCP tools don't really work for financial data at scale. One tool call for five years of daily prices dumps tens of thousands of tokens into the context window. And data vendors pack dozens of tools into a single MCP se...

Open detail

Self hosted video feed for children

Hacker News

As a patent I don’t want my child to be on social media. In the same time I don’t want to miss some of the experience. So I came with an idea - why not create a “social network” for my child, that is easy to setup, has the similar experience like popular social networks with s...

Open detail

Task Manager for AI Agents (MCP, Opensource)

Hacker News

AgentRQ is a (optionally) human-in-the-loop, self learning closed loop task manager for agents. Agents can create and schedule tasks for themself and work on them on their own schedule. In high level it comes with one supervisor MCP that controls workspaces(worker agents) and...

Open detail

A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)

Hacker News

I shipped a wiki layer for AI agents that uses markdown + git as the source of truth, with a bleve (BM25) + SQLite index on top. No vector or graph db yet. It runs locally in ~/.wuphf/wiki/ and you can git clone it out if you want to take your knowledge with you. The shape is...

Open detail

Original Sources

Hacker News