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
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.
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.
I don't care if five of them go out in a month, but I do care when one of them destroys my hardware.
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.
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.
According to what I have read, if they failed within a couple weeks, that's a pretty good indicator that they ARE a real Apple lightning cable.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
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.
That is the one thing Apple does very poorly. It's 35 dollars for a lightning cable from the Apple store, and they last at most 6-9 months. Then the ends near the connectors start to fray until wires are exposed. Shortly thereafter, they no longer charge your phone. There are 6 people in my family, 3 have iPhones, 3 have Android. I have never once had to replace a microUSB cable, but I have gone through at least 10 lightning cables in the last 5 years. 5 of them came with the device (either iphone or ipod), 5 others were purchased from the Apple Store. All eventually failed. It's the one thing from Apple which drives me crazy.
I dunno. This story just makes me feel better about not buying Apple products. I can buy any cable I like and not have to worry about this bullshit.
"OMG. You didn't buy a genuine monster cable! Quick, toss it out before it EXPLODES!"
Which bullshit? The bulishit of shoddy cables destroying your laptop?
I recently had 2 iPads repaired and returned to my sister abroad. One of them has the old 32 pin connector. At her place, they have plenty of micro-USB cables, both good and bad, but just about 1 or 2 32-pin cables. So I bought a micro-USB to 32 pin connector and sent it w/ the box of other things.
The last few times I've gotten lightning connector cables, I've done one thing - just not bothered unwrapping them. It comes in a circular bundle, and I connect it to the other end in that way. I also have a couple of knock off lightning connectors that I use to charge the iPhone and iPad, and I also have the 2 lightning connectors that came w/ the iPhone and iPad that I only use to connect to the laptop when I need to move files around
I did in the past have the experience you describe - the wires fraying near the ends, and getting exposed, and so I started the practice of not unwrapping the newer ones. But going forward, once my Apple connectors die, I plan to use micro-USB connectors in conjunction w/ the USB to lightning adaptors that I mentioned. That way, I can use some top quality micro-USB cables that I have in conjunction w/ the iPad
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.
There's a huge problem on Amazon - most listings for Apple chargers, headphones, etc claim to be genuine and very few of them actually are. Amazon doesn't seem to be doing anything to police it.
There's a wonderful solution though - buy the AmazonBasics version. You get something that you know works and it's a lot cheaper to boot.
(Funny how that all works out...)
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.
Except, I got an iPad one, direct from Apple, sealed in the box. Used it for a few years and the (genuine, came in the box from Apple) charger cable had a strain relief failure. Took it to the Apple store to buy a replacement and had the "Genius" on duty harrangue me incessantly about how my cable was a shoddy knockoff and can you see the difference in how the genuine ones are made? Yeah, I see that Apple had really crappy strain relief on their charging cables, whether iPhone, iPad, or MacBookPro mag-lock, they were all crap from 2006 to (at least) 2010. "Genius" can go F himself and his attitude - as can the company that sold a $700 bullet-proof tablet and then proceeded to disable it through OS updates so that within 4 years it was completely worthless, and then they were selling $700 tablets that cracked and broke easier and easier with each passing generation.
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.