About a month ago, I wrote about my favourite iPhone charging dock, and since then I’ve also been testing a USB-C cable from the same company.
The cable itself is a fairly standard USB 2.0 cable with support for 60-watt fast charging, but the real magic is on the outside. The team at Kuxiu has coated the outer sheath of the cable with a magnetic powder that allows the cord to stick to itself. It’s a small feature, but over the last month, it’s worked well enough that this is now my go-to travel charging cable.
I typically use the older red OnePlus USB-C to C cables since they’re solid quality and I love red, or Apple’s braided cables since they’re small and wrap up quite tight. However, I need to use velcro cable ties with those and I lose them all the time. Plus, let’s face it, it’s pretty annoying having to wrap and unwrap a little piece of velcro every time you want to use a cable.
That’s where this cable comes in. It holds itself in place when you wrap it up with no extra hardware needed. I was really skeptical at first since it didn’t feel like it had that strong of a magnetic pull, but after all my testing, it just works and hasn’t let me down. Also, how could it, if it unwraps it’s still pretty hard to get tangled because of how robust it is. That said, most of the time I pulled it out of my bag, it was still wound up nicely.
There are a few upgrades I’d love to see the company make, but compared to a regular cable, this one is so much easier to pack up and it just feels premium to use. Compared to how thin Apple’s braided cables feel, this option feels like it will last much longer.
It works by having half of the cable coated in positively polarized magnets and the other half in negative magnets. This means when you coil it in a specific way, it will stick together in a neat little bundle. There is a bit of trial and error to getting used to this though, since there are no visual markings to signify which side sticks to which. After a while, I got used to it, but finding a way to have half the cable blue and the other half red would have been visually striking and easier to use.
That said, after a week or so of use, I adapted to it and could coil the cable without error most of the time. The magnets aren’t incredibly strong, but they’re enough to hold the regular three-foot cable wound up. If you get annoyed at cables being loose in your bag or lose cable ties often, this could be a good option.
The magnetic cable has PD3.0, allowing for fast charging speeds of up to 60 watts if you have a device that supports it like a MacBook and a beefy charger. It is only rated for data transfer speeds of 48oMbps, which isn’t overly fast compared to the 10GBps cables you can get with most external hard drives, but it is enough to transfer a few files in a pinch. If you don’t have to move a lot of media, this can be a perfect all-in-one cable.
Kuxiu sells two versions of this cable. One has USB-C on both ends and the other is USB-C to Lightning for older iPhones. Both are 3.3 feet. I’d love to see a six-foot option in the future, but for now, I’m at least satisfied to have one cable that I know won’t get tangled up in my bag.
You can buy the cable from the Kuxiu website as of the time of writing for $21.
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