sinceApple Spring Conferencelater, along with Mac Studio Launched a new accessory Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable, the price of 1.8 meters is NT$3,990. If you choose 3 meters, the price will be as high as NT$4,890. Many people laugh at Apple’s blessing. Accessories will always be expensive enough to hit a new high. Why is it so expensive? Instead of spending time guessing, it is better to see what secrets are inside the cable. ChargerLAB, a foreign dismantling company, took the lead in dismantling the Thunderbolt 4 Pro and found that the material used for this transmission cable is really expensive.
Thunderbolt 4 Pro Teardown Reveals Apple’s Real Materials
I believe everyone will find that there are many choices for Thunderbolt 4 transmission cables in the market at the price of more than 1,000 yuan, but why should Apple set the price of “Thunderbolt 4 Pro” cables so expensive? You can probably see the clues.
ChargerLAB is the first to dismantle Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 Pro. The exterior material is made of black woven design, which is waterproof and dustproof. It is very thick and not easy to knot when rolled. The thickness of the wire is about 5.24 mm.
Thunderbolt 4 Pro is the same as the previous generation Thunderbolt transmission cable. Apple still doesn’t like to put extra protective sleeves between the cable and the charging cable. In particular, the connecting cable is about 3 cm long. It is also simply printed with the Thunderbolt logo. Users can’t identify whether it supports Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 3, unless the USB-C plug is used to observe whether it adopts a full-pin design (12 pins on the upper and lower sides, a total of 24 pins).
The ChargerLAB POWRE-Z tester shows that the Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro transmission line can support 20V5A up to 100W charging, and the data transmission speed can reach 40Gbps, which perfectly complies with the Thunderbolt 4 standard.
After cutting the Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable, it can be found that in addition to the braided outer layer, the inner layer is protected by TPE and a tin foil layer with a three-layer mask function, which can also be used to isolate the signal.
A transmission line contains a total of 19 wires that can be used to transmit data and charge. The most important thing is that Thunderbolt 4 needs to use coaxial cables for materials. From material to finished product, it needs to go through 88 processing and production lines. More than 100 people can complete it. Assembly, which also needs to pass Intel certification and testing, is very complicated and time-consuming, and the cables in Thunderbolt 4 Pro include:
- 5 red wires and 1 purple wire are used for power supply, the material is made of tinned copper wire
- Orange, red, green and blue wires in coaxial design (first layer is plastic insulator, lower layer is pure copper foil, inner wire is silver plated material)
- Blue is the CC line
- Yellow is the Vconn line
- Black is the SBU line
- The two white-green plastics are the USB 2.0 cables
- two bare wires
The part of the Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable is made of brass sleeve, using two circles of dense solder joints to fix the connector and the transmission line. The connector number is marked BC1762, and the other side is C198020.
After removing the brass sleeve, it can be seen that the wire ends at both ends are designed with a very dense chip. The front and back sides are different. The power line and the step-down circuit are soldered on the back. The Intel Thunderbolt ReTimer chip (model number) occupies the largest area. For JHL7040), the bottom connection is protected with a lot of glue.
There are a total of 24 USB-C pins, all of which are gold-plated and durable.
ChargerLAB gave a dismantling summary for Thunderbolt 4 Pro: “It’s expensive!” This is not only a blessing from the Apple brand, this time the materials are very realistic, and it requires a lot of manufacturing costs. Each wire has a multi-layer mask design, It can reduce signal interference, and at the same time, it is equipped with Intel Thunderbolt chip to ensure stable and reliable signal transmission.
Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable is indeed exaggeratedly expensive for ordinary users. Currently, Thunderbolt 4 on the market is truly certified by Intel, such as Cable Matters, Plugable, Belkin and Apple. The lowest asking price starts from NT$1750, but the production process And the cost of materials must be high in specifications, and the relative price will have a significant gap.
This Thunderbolt 4 Pro charging cable is mainly aimed at professional users. It was launched in order to achieve the mass transmission level of Mac Studio. Whether it is 100W charging, 40Gbps data transmission per second or 8K high-definition video, it can be easily competent, and can even be used. On subsequent high-end models, in a word, if you do not pursue high-efficiency transmission and charging efficiency, you can basically ignore Thunderbolt 4 Pro products.