Slashdot Mirror
Most 'Genuine' Apple Chargers and Cables Sold on Amazon Are Fake, Apple Says (engadget.com)
Apple says it bought Apple chargers and cables labeled as genuine on Amazon.com and found that nearly 90 percent of them to be counterfeit. The revelation comes in a federal lawsuit the company filed against a New Jersey company over what Apple says are fake products that were sold on Amazon. Engadget reports: When Apple got in touch with Amazon about the issue, the website told the former that it got most of its chargers from Mobile Star LLC. The iPhone-maker stressed that since counterfeit cables and chargers don't go through consumer safety testing and could be poorly designed, they're prone to overheating and catching fire. They might even electrocute users. Tim Cook and co. are now asking the court to issue an injunction against the defendant. They also want the court to order the seizure and destruction of all the fake chargers in addition to asking for damage
Try to buy a legit Sony Playstation 3 controller from Amazon. Go ahead, I'll wait.
A story where Apple isn't [necessarily] the bad guy... is definitely news to me.
Maybe this will finally prod amazon into cleaning up all the other fake chinese shit they sell.
Or not.
It would be nice to be able to buy real reputable chargers and batteries for laptops/phones on Amazon but, as Apple is now proving, thats essentially impossible. Its a better bet to go with something amazon basics branded than the actual OEM equipment, because at least Amazon will stand behind their own branded stuff. I bought a "Real, made by lenovo" charger laptop off Amazon for my T450s and it didn't have a serial number on it and it had odd markings that the real one didn't have. Counterfeit, for sure - theres no reason Lenovo would sell you a charger without a distinct serial number on it.
Doesn't Amazon have any power to stop sellers from selling counterfeit equipment? They don't have to vet the quality of every product they sell, but selling a new OEM product should require additional vetting. I don't care if they don't test a product thats clearly not OEM, then at least its a buyer beware scenario.
I recently bought a couple of "genuine Apple" headphones from Woot (owned by Amazon) thinking that with all the fakes around I should get them from someone legit. The first pair failed within a couple of weeks. I'm going to guess they were not, in fact, genuine. It does make it a pain when it seems that the apple store is about the only place you can be sure you're not getting a knockoff. I'm happy to buy knockoffs for certain things, but I like to know what I'm getting.
Maybe if Apple didn't sell their cables for such obscene prices, there would be less market demand for Chinese knockoffs. If I can buy 10 cables on eBay at $0.50 each, I don't care if 5 go out in less than a month. Also, I've NEVER seen or heard first hand if one of the knock offs catching fire.
Serves them right for overpricing their cables so much.
And they use dirty electricity that's sub par for your precious apple. Genuine Apple approved electricity has the official Apple logo and their seal of approval, few just a few extra pennies a mW.
Maybe if Apple actually took the time to make a decent power supply cable then this wouldn't be a problem. Honestly I love apple products but why do the power cords only last for about a year before coming apart? I hate shelling out $79 for a new power supply ever year or so. I don't know any other computer where the power chord comes apart. Apple has claimed
"You aren't supposed to move the chords."
"Don't wrap them up like the pictures or when they new"
"You must be transporting it improperly."
Why is it that every other computer company can make a chord that doesn't fray and come apart after a year? Why have they made a product that can't be used as it is designed. Honestly somebody should ask them at a conference why they are incapable of designing power cable that works for the life of their product.
Everything on Amazon is fake!
Can't we have a micro-USB to lightning connector adaptor, so that anybody w/ a common microUSB cable can just plug it into that, and the combination can be used to charge iPhones, iPads and the like? Apple can make that as well, just like they made the microUSB to 32-pin adaptor
... and more often than not want to have their cake and eat it too.
the singular reason that cheap chinese counterfeit products are flooding the US today.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Are they angry because after forcing manufacturers to pay for the right to produce cables?
Are other business producing said cables for less because they are not paying apple for the privilege?
Are we really sad for poor apple that it cannot 100% monetize this as well?
Fuck apple. Fuck them in their overpriced iThing.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
then there would not be problems like this.
A German computer magazine called C't was checking on Amazon products a year or two ago, I'm pretty sure it was Samsung batteries they were testing. They bought a selection of batteries from a selection of third-party sellers and were expecting some of them to be fakes. What they were not expecting was that every single battery was a fake, it was just that some of the fakes were better (in terms of product quality) than others.
They reported this to Amazon.
Nothing changed - the same vendors were selling the same products weeks later.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
A story where Apple isn't [necessarily] the bad guy... is definitely news to me.
No, you're reading it wrong.
Apple just seems like it's not the bad guy because it's dealing with some of the counterfeiting on Amazon, something Amazon has been terrible at and doesn't seem to care much about. But they're doing it to lock people into buying from apple and paying a premium... in order to buy a cable that was created as a tie-in to your primary product (your laptop or desktop) that should be illegal as in restraint of trade.
If you had any doubt as to why they had removed the headphone jack, and why they are rumored to be removing a USB port, this should clear that up. It is the third thing they've done lately that suggests they are adopting a business strategy of locking customers into their nickel-and-diming, like in the bad old days before cable standards started to really kick in between devices.
Fundamentally, anyone should be able to make a copy of an apple cable unless there is something so revolutionary about the cable that it really does justify a monopoly (This basically never happens.) They just shouldn't be able to put the brand name on it. But even so, apple's action here is definitely anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
I would love it if Amazon would do more to vet suppliers and eliminate the counterfeit crap.
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
Apple is so expensive that I really don't care, I just want something that works for a price that isn't marked up by 10000%.
This is why I've resorted to buying licensed third party, such as Anker brand. That way you know it isn't Apple, but you know it is certified by Apple, and often half the price and better designed. I love the braided lightning cable I use now. And I know it isn't a knock-off.
> The iPhone-maker stressed that since counterfeit cables and chargers don't go through consumer safety testing and could be poorly designed, they're prone to overheating and catching fire.
Seriously, dude, it was in the fucking summary. I guess you were blinded by hate.
It's Apple's proprietary practices that keep you from using anything other than what's sold by them and at their premium prices. For crying out loud, just look at iTunes.
so that high quality cable that those apple folks tout over the cheep android cables are most likely both cheap low quality...
The fake Apple charger and cable is probably just as terrible as the genuine one.
Oh wait, you CANT, because Apple changes their chargers every hardware release, and you continue to suck it up.
It seems like a lot of these knock-offs are directly cutting into the sale of Amazon's Basics brand as well. I've bought several of their cables and adapters over the years and had very good experiences with them. They aren't the cheapest cables, but frequently they are the cheapest cables that seem trustworthy.
If I want cheap knock-offs, I'll go to eBay. I expect a little more from Amazon.
ProTip: Even the real genuine ones are fake in the sense that they're cheap-as-dirt sold for gold-plated prices.
Apple; pushing the bounds of clipboard functionality since 2009.
Requiem for the American Dream
AI will be used enslave the human race. We're already on the path towards Borg, not Federation.
I purchased a genuine 12w apple charger from an Australian eBay seller. It failed within a week. I pulled it apart and it was clearly a Chinese knockoff. The creepage between primary and secondary was almost non existent. I told the seller and they were 'shocked'. I pulled apart the replacement they sent, and it too was a knockoff, albeit with better creepage. I told the supplier they needed to take down their Ad as they had sold over 300 of these things. Well after many back and forth emails, they start getting abusive. They just couldn't comprehend that that had broken Australian electrical safety laws, consumer seller laws and violated apples copyright.
The sad thing is, as I did more research, I find out: eBay doesn't give a toss; unless someone has died, the government regulators don't give a toss. So I reported them to Apple,but to be honest, I don't think Apple care that much either.
So this means, if you really want a genuine charger that won't kill anyone, you need pay the Apple tax.
46137
Fake? They exist in an imaginary space? Hamiltonian hookers?
They oscillate 90 degrees out of phase? That could be a problem.
I have very little insight into the world of fashion, but I do know that since there are no laws against creating the exact same dress, shirt, purse, or whatever, luxury brands tend to plaster their name or logo all over their products. You can't copy the name because that's trademarked.
As a result, you have folks seeing the popularity of an item making knockoffs. These vary in quality, of course, but in some cases, they're made from the exact same materials, in the exact same plant that the originals are made. The only difference is they have to print a different brand name on them or risk criminal activities, so a Coach bag becomes a "Loach" bag, with the mark spelled out in the same font with an extra curvy 'L'. Sure, technological devices are usually protected by more than trademark - patents and such which are often ignored by certain eastern markets - but since a piece of paper half a world a way isn't an actual barrier to producing a physical product, so it often comes down to the same thing.
The funny thing here is that even with off brands that may exceed the quality of the item, the original brand is still much more highly prized. Why? Because of marketing generating a social expectation that a 'genuine' object affords prestige. It could just be that it's expensive, or that it's advertisements paradoxically indicate that you must both be beautiful enough to wear it and simultaneously that you must wear it to be beautiful (like Abercrombie & Fitch, for example). It says, "Even if it's not as high quality, I both went through the trouble to find it AND paid more, and I passed through the filter that says I'm worth owning this, and that says something positive about me as a person!"
Sound like any company you know? Starts with an A, ends with A -pple, nothing in the middle?
This is just Apple selling it's product not as a piece of technology, but as a lifestyle accessory, as they've done ever since they realized that was the way to success. The claims of technological merit are just fluff, but necessary fluff to keep up their brand pretension and justify their walled garden environments.
Made in exactly the same factories as their own overpriced versions.
Most 'Genuine' heterosexuals placing ads on PlentyOfFish are as gay as Gaylord McGayface, says Apple.
I purchased a Mophie for my iPhone 5s a while back and was 35% off. Seemed great as deal. What thing that was odd is that only seems to improved battery life time by 2 hrs. Called mophie and send them a pic. The damn thing was fake even mophie was shocked. The sticker per Mophie said the font was wrong!
Anytime you buy a cable somewhere besides monoprice, you are probably messing up.
Amazon doesn't give a shit.
I wish people would quit repeating that nonsense about the counterfeits being just as good as (or sometimes better than!) the item they are counterfeiting. Just think for a minute: what incentive is there for the counterfeiter to do a great job on the product? If it falls apart after a week, it's not the counterfeiter whose reputation will suffer. It's not his brand on the product! Once he has taken your money, he doesn't give a toss. He is, after all, a crook.
Knockoff items are poorly made, badly insulated, and are a fire hazard. They often don't meet spec, so they don't perform as well.
If you want to make a knockoff item, Apple can't stop you, but they DO want to stop people from thinking they're buying Apple cables, which ARE tested and manufactured to a higher standard. Apple is presumably willing to stand behind their products and take the flak if they're bad (I had a laptop charger replaced under a recall), but they can't be expected to stand behind the product of someone else using their branding.
So the problem really is on Amazon's end, because they're the ones giving worldwide distribution and implicit authenticity to these fake products.
I've bought cables from Anker that were MFi certified, and they were cheaper than Apple's and just as good (maybe better? Time will tell). It's not that Apple doesn't let other people make cables, but they're expected to meet spec.
Anyway, your post is basically garbage. Yes, we all know that Apple is in some respects a Veblen good, but their products *do* actually have sufficient merit that ordinary people are willing to buy them.
"They also want the court to order the seizure and destruction" - shock therapy has never been more fitting, eh?
What are they gonna do, fit such cables in someone's brain and turn the power on?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Having worked with a chinese company that did this sort of thing before, the 'easiest' way to do it is just use the same assembly line, machinery, and workers to roll off a duplicate version with the exact same materials from the exact same material providers.
That's not always the way, but it is the easiest.
But when I have.. which is maybe 2 or 3 times, it was the 12w iPad charger. I made double sure I selected the "sold by and ships from Amazon" option, no matter how hard it was buried.
The rest of the times I've needed anything Apple related i got it at Worst Buy.
Why do people not make sure that the seller is Amazon and not some shady 3rd party? Yes yes yes, I @#!$% know Amazon many times sets the default to "some random chinese faker".. but really? People don't check it? I do. Every single time. For everything I buy. The rare exceptions are when it says "sold by blah and Fulfilled by Amazon"
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Most accessory parts for anything on Amazon are fake. Go there and look for a charger for a Canon T2i/T3i battery. All of the "real" listings are full of reviews saying the products are fake, don't fit batteries correctly, and don't charge. And the only non-fake offbrand product is really badly designed and also apparently doesn't work well. Had to order on from Canon themselves, and interestingly, they wanted $60 for it while Amazon claims the MSRP (even for the real ones) is $40.
I agree, it's a genuine possibility. I've ordered enough things off Amazon to be genuinely concerned about the state of cheap Chinese chargers being sold through there. There's no good reason to allow a vendor to sell a product that is unsafe, uses counterfeit labeling to bypass US electrical safety inspections and regulations, and easily threatens the safety and welfare of consumers. We can hang Samsung out to dry when its batteries catch fire, but we can't do the same to Amazon for selling us this junk?
My own anecdote: Our school district ordered 10 HDMI-to-VGA adapters recently from Amazon. They were Chinese-direct w/ Engrish instructions and the like, but I knew I was going to get that. What I didn't know I was going to get were incredibly, incredibly cheap 5V 1A chargers, only one of which was spot-on 5V, three more were within +/- 5% of 5V, five were about 5.5V (which still worked, but is not as safe and out-of-spec), and one that would start at 5V for about a minute, then float up to about 20V, before floating back down to 5V. Needless to say, the video adapter paired with the one that floated up to 20V had its display glitch out every-so-often, and even after I tried using a good 5V power adapter, the video adapter was permanently glitchy at that point.
About a month prior, I bought some other video adapters that also were powered by 5V 1A power adapters, but the stickers on the power adapters said they were 9V 1A adapters, even though my multimeter said they were running at 5V. (Sticker also said they were UL listed. Probably just as truthful as the 9V spec was.) I didn't trust those adapters worth a dime, but I wanted to see what was inside them. Unlike the wall-warts of yore, most cheap adapters now (including these) can be opened with a single screw. Inside was a little PCB stuck to the inside plastic cavity with simple double-sided tape. Most shocking to me: The PCB boards were hand-soldered, as evidenced by two of them having etches scraped into the board where solder appears to have overflowed onto other joints, plus that some joints were cold, some were gigantic blobs, and it was generally very sloppy solder work. Also concerning: the wires connecting the plug to the PCB were also hand-soldered on both ends, and more-than-half the joints were cold. One of those wires was also rusted out, and broke off the plug as the device was opened. (There was no tugging on the wire; just twisting it snapped the wire off.) Finally, one of the transistors had leads about 1/2" long off the PCB, and the transistor was bent so hard that one of its leads was dangerously close to a capacitor lead, all on the high-voltage side of the PCB.
This explains why Amazon can make a profit selling 5V USB adapters for $1.50 each, or 5V power adapters for $2.50.
While there is no doubt that amazon has a problem, so does Apple. Look at the reviews on their own website for power adapters. The average rating for a laptop power adapter is 1.5 start out of 5 stars on their own store website.
<URL:http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC461LL/A/apple-60w-magsafe-power-adapter-for-macbook-and-13-inch-macbook-pro/>
The problem is that the cords that apple uses always come apart. They are able to make a good charger but the problem is that they refuse to make the cord in between the charger and laptop durable enough to last. I would buy a third part charger in a heart beat if it was more durable then the apple charger. This is probably why people are willing to buy cheaper chargers that might be counterfeits, because even the new expensive ones are terrible. There are ways to extend the life of the chargers such as electrical tape around where it is fraying or dipping it in silicone, but has anybody ever had to do that with a dell laptop cord?
So while Amazon may have a quality control issue for genuine products, in this case the genuine product is still terrible. What is more surprising is that there is not a genuine knock off product that works better then apples power adapter.
It's a great idea, but one, you can typically avoid someone tripping over a cord with a little common sense, and two, the adapters the MagSafe connector is attached to suck. The brick is too damn heavy. The cord frays too easily. Apple charges a ridiculous 79.00 for what clearly is shit.
I could understand even that 79.00 if it was half as decent in build as the laptop it was attached to, but it's really shit compared to my Dell adapters.
If that was true why do we keep finding so many 'genuine' products that are clearly manufactured using lower standards and don't remotely resemble the genuine article when taken apart?
I like a lot of what Amazon offers. I like the ability to go to one place, find what I want, order it and receive it reasonably quickly (Prime). Over the past 18 months or so I've had an increasingly difficult time finding products I want/need for exactly this reason; it's becoming very hard to tell which products are legitimate and which are not (plus, all the obviously fake reviews, but that's been an issue for a longer time). I avoid cheap chargers (such as these "Apple" chargers) like the plague. They truly are dangerous. The last one I tried (not mine, a client's) made a terrific frying-sound and ultra-heated the cable-end near the magsafe end to the point of starting to melt the cable sheath the very first time we plugged it in. Not a good smell either.
I think Amazon needs to very, very clearly state which company actually manufactures a product, who the make it for, and if this is the manufacturer's recommended item. (i.e. This product built by ChineseCompanyX for Apple. It is the genuine Apple part manufactured by the part-supplier for Apple.)
For now, I've been returning products which appear suspiciously low-quality across the board. So far only had a single refusal.
OK, I've worked for years in retail-support and education tech sectors. So I deal with damaged and dead chargers for a lot of brands (and different types of products, for that matter, but we are discussing Laptop chargers here). All I can say is; "What the hell are you doing to your Apple chargers?" Seriously, these things are pretty damn bullet-proof. You can't even really torque the cord too much at the magsafe end because once you put too much leverage on that end it just unplugs. I see a lot, lot, lot more failures across the board for Toshiba and Dell branded stuff than I do Apple, especially in highly-risky environments like K-12 education, where the Apple chargers are generally used and abused for years. I do, however, have a couple of "whiner" teachers who more-frequently have Apple charger failures. But guess what? They are the teachers who don't control their students well, don't respect any other equipment, and who tend to have little regard (or understanding) that "stuff breaks".
Here's a 9.7 inch tablet.... It sounds legit sold by Amazon.... All the bells and whistles for under $200...how isn't this taken down? https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B01G5U9PSQ/ref=mp_s_a_1_11/158-8346669-2297150?ie=UTF8&qid=1477097054&sr=1-11&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=android+tablet+10
Apple Inc.'s products, hardware, are designed by a company in London, England, UK, that are farmed out to product producers in China, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore and Taiwan, which are then assembled in China, and sold by Apple International Inc. in Ireland.
Yep, Timmy knows a fake when he see's one, even with his eye-glasses from Brazil.
I'm waiting for Timmy to declare that Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City is a Fake human being!
PS Timmy is "stretching his legs before Hillary is declared Dictator of the U.S.A.!" And she will be!
EEVblog did a component level comparison of a fake and genuine charger. youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE
So... these are Genuine Imitation Apple chargers then?
Good to know we are getting the real fake stuff, and not the fake fake stuff for our hard-earned money!
Sure, these devices might also explode in a thermo-nukular-fireball, but it is pretty damn unlikely. Mainly, Apple is miffed at losing revenue.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!