MacBook Pro models introduced in late 2016 come with an Apple 61W or 87W USB-C Power Adapter with duckhead and a USB-C Charge Cable.
MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015) and later comes with an Apple 29W USB-C Power Adapter with duckhead and a USB-C Charge Cable. MagSafe power adapters have three pieces: Connector and adapter, AC cord, and the AC plug, or “duckhead.”
Lower wattage adapters don’t provide enough power. You can use a compatible higher wattage adapter without issue, but it won’t make your computer charge faster or operate differently.
You should use the appropriate wattage power adapter for your Mac notebook.
Power adapters for Mac notebooks are available in 29W, 45W, 60W, 61W, 85W, and 87W varieties. This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Moisés.Learn which power adapter, cord, and plug comes with your Mac notebook computer. If it’s a more-expensive active Thunderbolt 3 cable, which allows for 40 Gbps of throughput among Thunderbolt 3 devices up to about six feet, it also can’t handle more than USB 2.0 rates. It won’t hurt anything, but it’s overkill given the higher cost of Thunderbolt 3 cables compared to USB-C cables. You can use a Thunderbolt 3 cable with a non-Thunderbolt 3 USB-C device, and it should correctly carry power and no more than the maximum either side can handle. These cables will always have the Thunderbolt lightning-bolt logo on each USB-C tipped cable end. Thunderbolt 3 cables: From the specification, all Thunderbolt 3 cables carry either 20 Gbps or 40 Gbps of Thunderbolt 3 data rates and pass along power as high as either 60W or 100W, depending on the cable design. Belkinīelkin marks its Thunderbolt 3 cables with the lightning bolt and a numeral 3. See Apple’s power-cable identification guide for details about figuring out which cable is which.Īnd some of these cables will only carry USB 2.0 data rates-but a few are designed to handle USB 3.0 and 3.1 speeds, like the Anker PowerLine II. Apple doesn’t put icons on these cables connectors, but there is information printed in very very tiny characters on the cable itself. But if you use a 61W laptop with a 30W cable, it won’t charge quickly or may slowly lose charge while you use it. Even Apple has three: 29W (for the original 12-inch MacBook), 30W (2018 MacBook Air), and 100W (all other USB-C models) the 29W and 30W cables are effectively interchangeable. High-wattage USB-C: Higher-wattage USB-C cables come in many varieties. These cables may have USB 3.0 SuperSpeed (SS + a USB logo) or similar branding or logos on one tip.
They mostly manage USB 2.0 data (480 Mbps) plus no more than 15W (5 volts at 3 amps), which is enough to charge smartphones and tablets.
Low-wattage USB-C: Some cables with USB-C connectors at one end and a different kind of USB connector (like Type A or Micro Type B) can’t pass a lot of power. You won’t harm a device by plugging in a cable that’s rated for lower wattage-unlike an AC cord, which can overheat-because USB-C negotiates power usage and prevents passing voltages above the level the cable “says” it can carry.īut you will find many different cables with seemingly identical USB-C connectors. The trick is that you have to have the right cable for the right voltage. (The spec has been updated to 3.0 with additional smarts about multiple connected devices, but it’s fundamentally the same.) USB-C allows up to 100W of power by incorporating the Power Delivery 2.0 specification from the USB trade group. AnkerĪnker’s USB-C cables are sleek and featureless. Before USB-C, even though it was possible to carry laptop levels of power over a USB cable designed for that purpose, manufacturers generally avoided this-probably to avoid cable confusion. The trouble intrudes when we talk about power delivery, a separate part of the USB specification and incorporated into USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. It can also carry all the kinds of traffic noted above for “plain” USB-C devices. It was built to work only with the USB-C connector style and specification. Thunderbolt 3 is a data-transfer standard that can carry up to 40Gbps of information. Hardware devices-like the 2015 to 2018 12-inch MacBook and some non-Apple smartphones, tablets, and laptops-use USB-C to carry USB 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1, as well as ethernet networking and DisplayPort/HDMI video signals (and even DVI and VGA!) via adapters. USB-C is a broadly defined connection and cabling format, rather than a protocol for defining specific kinds of data that passes over it.