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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I would just never buy their cables or chargers, as virtually every cable I have from them is wrapped up in electrical tape.

I ask this a lot of times that I see someone complain about the quality of Apple cables: what the hell are you doing to your cables? I've still got 30 pin cables with cracked plastic on the 30 pin end, but they still work. After over 10 years of buying Apple devices that have cables, I count one cable that has gone bad.

More of a rhetorical question I guess, as we're just trading anecdotes. But I find it interesting that some complain about the quality of Apple cables, whereas I have piles of them that just refuse to die.

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I see a lot of people unplug their MBPs at the end of the day, and wrap the cable so tightly around the power brick it's like they're trying to protect its chastity

And twisting the cable as they wrap it instead of rolling it up.

Same question. I abuse the hell out of the half-dozen Apple cables in my house (2x macbook, a few ipad/phone)—roughly bunch them up and toss them in a bag or drawer all the time, yank them out of walls with little care, et c. My usual position for my Macbook at home puts the cable at an awkward, crimped angle and I really ought to stop that.

Plus I've had my kids tripping over them, folding them, playing tug of war with them. At least once a week something happens to one of my cables that probably ought to break it. Not one has broken.

WTF are people doing with their cables that's worse than what I do?

I've only ever had three chargers start pouring out smoke. Two of them were Apple chargers for a Macbook where the wire near the magsafe shorted so badly that the plastic had melted before I'd gotten it pulled. The second of those chargers were the one I received as a replacement for the first one. It was a clear design defect - the sleeves were too short. Despite insisting it was not their fault, I noticed the second replacement I received had a sleeve twice as long.

Since then, we've not had chargers that turned out that bad, but multiple iphone charging cables have broken quickly with normal use.

That said, I have plenty of failed micro USB cables for my Android devices too; there it is usually the plug that gets too loose to connect properly.

2 of my Apple laptop chargers have died in the same way: There's a little rubber clip on the cable for if you want to wrap the cable up. I never use it because my cables live on a desk or next to a sofa. But after a year or so, that rubber in that clip has reacted with the plastic sheathing of the cable so if you touch it, the whole cable just splits at that point. They use some tensioning in the cable to keep it from tangling, and once there's a tiny split in the sheathing, the cable is doomed.

It's definitely erratic. I've had (genuine) MBP chargers that I toss in my backpack with relatively little care be entirely happy, while others that sit 24/7 in a cable shelf under my desk, comes up through it and lives their life in a channel/cable holders so there's zero tension on the connector fray into a lantern pattern of rubber.

Absolutely nothing, after about a year every one of them starts to break into pieces (and they also tend to stick like a gum). I've been using iPhones since the 3G. Now, I'm buying only cables not made by Apple. I think they're biodegradable and something triggers that faster, but I don't know what.

The 30-pin cables have a fixed orientation for the connector, but the Lightning cables can be inserted either way.

This leads to a lot of bending near the connector end because you can plug them in any which way. And then you get splits of the cable near the connector.

My 30-pin cables never went bad. My most used Lightning cable (of five) has.

I feel silly contributing to this tale of anecdotes, but ~50% of my Apple cables have gone bad.

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