What your ports are actually doing
Plug in a drive and macOS tells you almost nothing: not the speed the link
settled on, not what the drive was capable of, not whether the cable is the thing holding
it back. CableScope reads the answers out of your Mac and says them in plain language.
The cable in the drawer
Most “slow drive” problems are a cable problem. A charging cable and a 40 Gbps cable
look identical from the outside, and once one is behind your desk you will never know
which is which. CableScope asks the cable what it is, asks the device what it wanted,
and tells you which one is the limit.
What it does
- Names what's plugged in. “Envoy Ultra”, not “vendor 0x1E91”.
- Compares device against cable. The speed the connection settled on,
beside what each end can do — and a mark on the cable when the cable is the limit.
- Explains itself. Every field carries a plain-language description,
on by default, for anyone who does not spend their day reading USB specifications.
- Suggests what to try, specifically enough to act on — “look for a
cable sold as Thunderbolt, USB4 or 40Gbps”, not “get a better cable”.
- Lives in the menu bar, and can tell you when something needs
attention while you are working in another app.
What it deliberately does not do
The hard part of this app is not reading your hardware. It is refusing to overstate
what the hardware says.
- No invented numbers. Thunderbolt does not report its link speed to
macOS, so CableScope says so rather than showing a figure it inferred.
- No false alarms. A device slower than its cable is normal and is
not flagged. A cable that cannot be read is not a slow cable.
- No false reassurance. Liquid detection reports “not readable”
rather than “dry”, because no Mac examined so far publishes a sensor it can read.
- Claims are labelled as claims. Everything a cable reports about
itself is self-asserted, and the app says so.
Enforced by macOS
It cannot connect to the internet
CableScope requests no network entitlement, so macOS refuses any outgoing connection
at the system level. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking — not as a promise, but as
something your Mac enforces and Apple checks.
Read the privacy policy.
Requirements
| macOS | 14 (Sonoma) or later |
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| Mac | Apple silicon |
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