SEE: How I upgraded my USB-C power banks and chargers to make them easier and more convenient to use Apple doesn't claim that it's a PD charger, just USB-C, but we were surprised that it didn't work when the older, 29W charger did. But the newer 30W Air charger couldn't power the Surface Go, the Pro X or the Surface Book 2 even with the official Apple cable, or with the Infinity cable. The older, 29W Air charger charged all our PD-capable devices whether we used the Apple cable or the Infinity cable. The Infinity cable could charge the Surface Go, the Surface Pro X, the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro quite happily, when it was plugged into the Anker Power Port Atom III charger, the charger that came with the MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro charger or one of the two MacBook Air chargers we used. To try that out, we sat down with the Infinity cable, an official Apple cable, several USB-C chargers from Apple and Anker and a pile of devices - a Surface Go, a Surface Pro X, a Surface Book 2 (Core i7 and NVidia GPU), a 15-inch MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro. Infinity Cable: different tips attach via strong magnets, allowing one cable to support USB-A, USB-C (including Power Delivery), Lightning and Micro-USB. But the big change is that it supports PD up to 100W. The £46/$55 Infinity Cable (also from Chargeasap) has some nice tweaks: a cord wrap a smaller, less bright LED on the cable so you know when power is flowing but you don't get dazzled by your phone cable at night and the 15-year warranty that presumably inspired the name. That's why the UNO interchangeable cable we looked at recently didn't support PD, making it an almost, but not quite, universal cable. SEE: IT pro's guide to the evolution and impact of 5G technology (free PDF) And you need specific controller chips in the cable to support PD.

Different protocols have different licencing requirements, so not every cable supports Thunderbolt. Some laptops have one USB-C port that supports the PD (Power Delivery) standard and one that doesn't, because that way you can use a cheaper controller chip and only have to route the power down one path on the motherboard. The best cheap vacuum cleaners: Affordable and reliable vacs

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Charging with ac over usb 2 vs usb 3