Fake Apple Chargers Fail Safety Tests (bbc.com)

Investigators have warned consumers they face potentially fatal risks after 99% of fake Apple chargers failed a basic safety test. From a report on BBC: Trading Standards, which commissioned the checks, said counterfeit electrical goods bought online were an "unknown entity." Of 400 counterfeit chargers, only three were found to have enough insulation to protect against electric shocks. It comes as Apple has complained of a "flood" of fakes being sold on Amazon. Apple revealed in October that it was suing a third-party vendor, which it said was putting customers "at risk" by selling power adapters masquerading as those sold by the Californian tech firm.

Comments

Amazon's responsibility

[DogDude]

This is Amazon's responsibility. They're selling counterfeit, dangerous merchandise.

What's inside a fake

[spaceyhackerlady]

Here's a video taking one apart and reverse-engineering it to see why it's so crappy.

You get what you pay for.

...laura

Re:What's inside a fake

[Solandri]

Not that video. The "genuine" Apple charger turns out to be counterfeit, and not much better than the cheap generic charger. You're only going to be able to tell it's crappy if you're an electrical engineer who's dissected these before. (I took 2 EE courses in undergrad so understood most of the terminology he was using, but his rant about it being terrible was Greek to me.)

This related video shows the insides of a genuine charger. Jump ahead to 9m 40s if you've already seen that first video showing the innards of a crappy charger.

Re:Apple problem mostl or platform-independent iss

[tepples]

The closest thing to "something inherent about the Apple design" is Apple's tighter control over production of devices with Lightning and MagSafe connectors through refusal to license relevant patents. Android devices, on the other hand, use standardized USB micro-B and USB C connectors. Licenses for patents that cover standard USB connectors are offered under "FRAND" (uniform royalty) conditions. So any safe USB charger is a safe Android charger.

Re:InOtherNews: Real Apple chargers fail budget te

[SuricouRaven]

It's worse than that. At work, we use trolleys for charging macbooks. Each trolley has fifteen slots, and fifteen magsafe cables coming from a common power supply.

Except that there is no way to get those cables.

Apple holds the patent. They make exactly as many connectors as they do chargers. They don't sell the connectors or cables separately. They will not allow anyone else to manufacture them. So on every one of those trolleys, for every one of those fifteen bays, we had to sacrifice an Apple charger. We chopped off the connector and had it incorporated into the trolley, and threw the charger body itsself away.

And every time a connector needs replacing - which happens a lot, see above post on how awful magsafe connectors are from a durabiity standpoint - we have to buy another expensive charger, chop off the connector, and throw the rest away.

You can get magsafe connectors on eBay, which I assume come from some knock-off-shop in China who are happily ignoring the patent. Supply is erratic, and we can't use them because they don't come from a known trustworthy supplier.

Re:Apple bears some responsibility here.

[dgatwood]

Case in point: Mac laptop chargers have been known to suffer from frayed cables due to Apple's insistence on a design that lacks adequate strain relief. This has been a known engineering defect in their chargers since the PowerBook G3 series design almost two decades ago ...

FTFY.

As far as I'm aware, Apple has never in its entire history built a good laptop power supply:

• The original PowerBook 1xx series had connectors that kept breaking. IIRC, the 5xx series was similar.
• The G3 series had a ferrite choke a quarter inch from the plug, and that quarter inch of wire constantly broke, causing fires, so they recalled the entire lot of them and replaced them with the yo-yo power supply.
• The yo-yo design had no real strain relief, and even better, had thinly insulated wires inside a steel-braided shield that over time wore through the insulation, resulting in cables that sparked internally. In a dark room, you could see little blue electrical arcs in the middle of the wires.
• The iBook power supplies had inadequate strain relief and broke right at the plug end.
• The T-shaped MagSafe connectors had the same problem.
• The L-shaped MagSafe connectors were usually more reliable, though they still eventually fail at one end of the wire or the other, but the MacBook Air version was notoriously bad.
• And MagSafe 2 is a disaster of failed strain relief.

So saying that third-party Mac laptop supplies are worse than the real thing might be true, but it is like saying that a Pinto is worse than a Corvair. They do, however, build reliable USB power supplies... but their cell phone power cords are even worse than their laptop power cords. Fortunately, there are many third-party manufacturers building Lightning cables that are actually built to last.