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.

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