Indeed, if you have a short Thunderbolt cable supplied with hardware, that may be a passive cable rather than an active one. Active cables can run a lot longer, but due to their construction, they ...

If you try to connect an active Thunderbolt 3 cable to a USB 3.x peripheral, you’ll notice its connection falls back to USB 2.0 speeds, which is a super slow 480 Mb/s.

Thunderbolt 3 runs longer than 18-inches can be passive or active. The passive ones have lower speed, with the max data rate hitting about 20Gbit/second at two meters of cable length.

The Thunderbolt 3 cable is active, rather than passive. Instead of carrying up to 5 Gbps of USB 3.1 Gen 1 data, these active Thunderbolt cables throttle down to USB 2.0 speeds, offering about ...

(The passive/active difference could also cause significant confusion if you connected two USB 3.x devices with a Thunderbolt 3 cable. A passive Thunderbolt 3 cable supported USB 3.1 at up to 10 Gbps, ...

Active Thunderbolt 3 cables feature integrated circuitry, which results in a slightly larger area where the cable terminates at the USB-C connector when compared to the passive cables in my ...

The first Thunderbolt compatible peripherals—Promise's Pegasus RAIDs—started shipping on Tuesday. Using the RAIDs with a Thunderbolt equipped Mac, though, requires a rather expensive $50 cable ...

Apple has started selling a high-end certified 40 Gbps Thunderbolt cable that’s either a real bargain or ridiculously expensive, depending on your point of view. The braided $129 Thunderbolt 3 ...

Apple has quietly started selling its 2-meter Thunderbolt 3 cable priced at $129, offering a braided design and active cable technology that supports full Thunderbolt 3 data transfer speeds of up ...

iFixit takes apart Apple's new Thunderbolt cable and confirms it does include active circuits to work with the high-bandwidth Thunderbolt technology.

While not technically Thunderbolt 4, OWC’s new 15-foot cable offers Thunderbolt 4-level throughput of 40Gbps for less than Apple’s 3-meter alternative.