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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
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.
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.
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
This isn't an issue of DRM. This is an issue of crooks in China making very low-quality fakes that are dangerous to use because they cut corners on safety features.
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.
Right. Because this is such a uniquely Apple issue. That whole brouhaha about crappy USB C cables and the damage they cause, or all those fly-by-night USB multi-port chargers that overheat and catch fire, those must have been some sort of fever dream I had.
But this did give you an opportunity to be smug, so at least some good came out of it.
You should. Apple chargers are incredibly over-engineered to protect against many problems. If you want to trust your expensive iphone & ipad to cheap chargers, you feel free. I won't and I buy extras to use for other devices as well. Here's a teardown & explanation. http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html
So, because Apple is involved, it's ok to pass off shoddy untested and unverified products at the same time as ripping off a company's trade dress and defrauding customers.
These aren't just generic USB chargers you plug into the wall - these are made and advertised to look like genuine Apple products, using Apple logos and everything. Except that they aren't.
Good to know that irrationality still wins the day with both Apple's fans, and detractors.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's not FUD. From all accounts, these things fail with alarming regularity. When you have insufficient distance between high-voltage and low-voltage traces, when you get some extra moisture in the air that condenses in the wrong place, it can easily trigger an electrical arc that delivers 110VAC to your 5V line. In addition to roasting any device that's attached to it, such an extreme over-voltage event will give you a nasty shock if you're holding the device at the time even under the best of circumstances, and that is enough voltage to kill you under the worst of circumstances.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why bother? This isn't exactly rocket science, pretty much anyone can design a safe charger, etc. They just cost more to build, and why would you bother when you're fraudulently selling it under false trademark anyway, and could put that extra $0.25/unit into your bank account instead?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's Apple's own fault for making their stuff in China. Part of the general industry practice in China is for factories to produce a larger batch than the customer orders and then sell them themselves as the genuine product at a lower price.
That alone wouldn't be a big deal for the end customer because the product is made by the same factory. However, their extra unofficial batch generally doesn't go through any QA or testing. For products that have a large number of DOAs or manufacturing defects that would normally be caught by QA, that can cause major issues for customers who buy the knock offs and hurt the reputation of the brand.
That said China makes lots of plain knock offs too that have obvious physical differences.
Amazon does need to address this issue on their end, because the whole knock off issue on Amazon started when they allowed Chinese distributors to sell directly through Amazon to lower prices.
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.