github darrylmorley/whatcable v1.4.0
v1.4.0: Devices behind docks land in the right place, and speed blame gets honest

4 hours ago

Devices behind docks land in the right place, and speed blame gets honest

Connected devices

  • Devices behind docks are placed by the chain's actual topology, not by name matching. A drive on a dock used to be filed under whichever device happened to share a name with something in the chain, so an SSD could show up inside the wrong enclosure. The tree now follows the PCIe path the device actually hangs off. Thanks @cannotcollide (#493), whose CalDigit chain with two same-vendor enclosures caught it and whose diagnostic submissions proved the fix.
  • Thunderbolt tunnels set up by the firmware at boot are no longer dropped from the tree, and a display reporting an empty name no longer counts as having one.

Speed verdicts

  • "Cable is limiting data speed" stopped blaming the cable for a slow device. On a multi-hop chain the verdict compared against the first thing in the chain (often an adapter), not the device at the end. It now walks to the end of the chain before deciding who is the limit. Thanks @cannotcollide (#507).
  • Thunderbolt 1 and 2 devices no longer read as 40 Gbps. Old TB silicon reports the same link-speed code as Thunderbolt 3, and WhatCable took it at face value: a TB1 drive showed "Device 40 Gbps" and its adapter got flagged as the bottleneck. The device's own generation now caps the figure, the port badge matches the diagnostic, and the verdict correctly points at the device. Thanks @cannotcollide again (#515), who caught this in the beta the day it shipped.

Charging

  • "Charging at 30W" no longer shows when the Mac isn't charging. With a full battery, or charging paused by a charge limit or Optimized Battery Charging, the banner now says so instead of implying an active charge. Contributed by @YuriNachos (#514).

Cables

  • A cable fingerprint is no longer treated as one retail product. Many brands ship the same electronics inside different jackets, so a fingerprint shared across brands now lists all of them instead of naming whichever was reported first.
  • The cable database has been rebuilt and now holds 116 entries.

Fixed

  • The app was rewriting its widget data every second or two whenever power readings wobbled. It now writes only when something meaningful changes, at most once a minute, and not at all if you have no widgets installed. Reported by email, thank you.
  • The CLI's test-kit consent text no longer contradicts itself about how many probes run.

Also

  • The diagnostic test kit now reads each hub's own hardware descriptor (which ports are soldered to internal devices versus real plug-in ports), runs three cheap probes a second time at the end of a run to catch state changes, and fixes capture blind spots on M1, M2 and Intel machines.
  • Traditional Chinese wording refined across the link-speed and e-marker sharing strings, by @jimmyorz.
  • The in-app Pro page now leads with what Pro is actually for: finding the weak link in a chain and keeping the evidence.

Thanks

To the beta group, especially @cannotcollide, who reported two of this release's three headline bugs, verified both fixes on the hardware that caught them, and contributed diagnostic captures that now guard the fixes in the test suite. @aguilaair confirmed the build healthy on M1 Pro and contributed hub data. And @YuriNachos for the charging fix, a first-time contributor.

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