Charging devices is one of life’s continual struggles. We’ve all been in fights over the charging cable where we proudly state that we need it most because we’re down to 3% and they’re still on 5%. To make matters worse, different devices require different charging cables. By chance, I discovered something that has made charging my devices a little less stressful.
My Devices Still Require Different Charging Cables
Despite the best efforts of the European Union, whichforced Apple to finally give up the Lightning cableand join the rest of the world in using USB-C, we still live in a world where you need multiple different charging cables for your various devices.
I can use a USB-C cable for a lot of things, such as charging an iPhone, my Switch and PS5 controllers, and even the battery of my smart door lock. However, there are still plenty of devices that require other types of cables instead.
If I want to charge my iPad, AirPods, or Magic Mouse, all of which were made before Apple finally switched to USB-C, I need one of Apple’s proprietary Lightning cables. Devices such as my mini Bluetooth speaker and Wi-Fi remote require yet another cable, as they only include micro-USB ports. Far from only needing one cable to charge them all, I’m still stuck with a mess of different cables.
By Luck, the Cables in My Living Room Are Different Colors
Like all self-respecting geeks, I have charging cables stashed all over the house, including the obligatorydrawer that’s full of obsolete charging cablesfrom phones I’m never going to use again. However, my main charging hub is in the living room, so that my family and I can charge our devices as we’re watching TV. I have a tower power strip behind the sofa with various devices and charging cables plugged into it.
Since a lot of charging cables don’t reach very far, I invested in some that are long enough to use even if you’re sitting a fair distance from the power strip. It means I can still doomscroll and miss the key plot points of the show I’m pretending to watch while charging my phone. Purely by accident, the longer cables that I bought turned out to be different colors. My USB-C cables are gray, my micro-USB cable is purple, and my Lightning cable is white.
Anker USB-C to USB-C Charging Cable
Cables with unique colors, like these from Anker, can help a lot with color-coding. Pastel wires will stand out among the typical white and black wires.
Color-Coding Makes Finding the Right Cable So Much Easier
It’s only after the fact that I realized how useful this is. Usually, the only way to distinguish between a micro-USB cable, a USB-C cable, and a Lightning cable is to take a close look at the connector. In the mess of cables, that meant grabbing a cable, finding its end, realizing it’s the wrong one, grabbing another, and repeating the process. Murphy’s Law states that you will always grab all of the cables you don’t need before you grab the one you do.
By accidentally color coding my charging cables, however, that problem has gone. I don’t need to carefully examine the connector of a cable to know which one is which. If I want to charge my iPhone, even if I can only see a tiny portion of a gray cable, I know that’s the one to grab. If I want to charge my AirPods, I grab the white cable safe in the knowledge that it’s the right one.
It Wasn’t By Design, but I’ll Be Color-Coding From Now On
I’d like to claim that this was all part of a cleverly thought-out solution to an everyday problem, but the truth is it was just dumb luck. However, now that I’ve discovered how much easier it is to use color-coded charging cables, there’s no going back. Being able to quickly grab the right cable without having to mess around peering at connectors or continually pulling out the wrong cables removes a source of stress that doesn’t need to exist, and there’s already more than enough stress in my life as it is.
Buying cables in different colors isn’t the only way to make this work. You could use methods such as adding colored tape to each cable to differentiate them, for example, although using the satisfying phrase “cable label” is completely optional.
However, the benefit of using colored cables is that you can always find the right cable no matter which part of it is visible; if you use colored tape, it only works when the section of cable that has the tape on it is easy to spot. If it’s buried under something else, you’re back to the same old problem.
When my cables fail, or a new USB connector is introduced with the sole purpose of making all of my current cables obsolete (because that’s why they do it, right?) I fully intend to purchase colored cables to replace them. Finding the right charging cable a little quicker isn’t exactly high on my list of life problems, but all these little inconveniences add up. The colored cables I bought weren’t any more expensive than other cables, so it’s a zero-cost way to remove one small source of unnecessary stress.
