Apple By Ryan Whitwam May. 13, 2014 5:26 pm
The USB cable used to charge your device is supposed to be plugged into the wall adapter it came with, but there are plenty of cheap replacements floating around. Is it worth paying Apple’s exorbitant prices for replacement wall chargers? What about all those other device makers who swear up and down that using a sketchy third-party unit could cause you headaches (or much worse)? Are they blowing smoke, or is it the $3 Amazon knockoff charger that’s smoking? One clever engineer disassembled a knockoff iPad charger to find out.
Perhaps we’ve all gotten too used to carrying around these powerful electronic device without much concern, but batteries and charging cables handle a lot of power. Inside the wall adapter for your device is a 170 volt charge that can cause damage to your device (or you) if it’s not properly contained. Looking inside a cheap $3 counterfeit iPad charger can show you why.
The first thing we find is the almost complete lack of insulation in the knockoff. That’s certainly not what you want to see, but perhaps more troubling is the fake charger’s more primitive circuit board, lack of voltage filtering, and awkwardly placed components. The internals of a wall charger should have good separation of high and low-voltage components, but the lazy design of the cheap charger shows no such attention to detail. It’s the same story with the flyback transformers, which turns the input power into DC. So what does that mean? Voltage bleed, shorts, and lots of heat.
When the performance of the voltage vs. current is monitored, the difference is clear. The real deal charger has very clean power with few spikes. The counterfeit one is seriously unstable with unsafe jumps in output that can cause damage to batteries. The noise on the cheap wall adapter is actually so bad it could cause screen distortion.
It’s not that you can’t buy a less expensive charger that’s safe — there are reputable brands that know how to deliver a wall adapter for less than Apple’s $19 asking price. However, that $3 knockoff plug is something you should avoid like the plague.
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Perhaps we’ve all gotten too used to carrying around these powerful electronic device without much concern, but batteries and charging cables handle a lot of power. Inside the wall adapter for your device is a 170 volt charge that can cause damage to your device (or you) if it’s not properly contained. Looking inside a cheap $3 counterfeit iPad charger can show you why.
The first thing we find is the almost complete lack of insulation in the knockoff. That’s certainly not what you want to see, but perhaps more troubling is the fake charger’s more primitive circuit board, lack of voltage filtering, and awkwardly placed components. The internals of a wall charger should have good separation of high and low-voltage components, but the lazy design of the cheap charger shows no such attention to detail. It’s the same story with the flyback transformers, which turns the input power into DC. So what does that mean? Voltage bleed, shorts, and lots of heat.
When the performance of the voltage vs. current is monitored, the difference is clear. The real deal charger has very clean power with few spikes. The counterfeit one is seriously unstable with unsafe jumps in output that can cause damage to batteries. The noise on the cheap wall adapter is actually so bad it could cause screen distortion.
It’s not that you can’t buy a less expensive charger that’s safe — there are reputable brands that know how to deliver a wall adapter for less than Apple’s $19 asking price. However, that $3 knockoff plug is something you should avoid like the plague.
More...
