I've had more problems with Apple cables than any other brand - and Apple tends to make their cables sleeker looking. Coincidence? I doubt it.
At least they've improved from the Wallstreet-era Powerbook G3 chargers, though. I think I went through 3 of those circa 1998. Of course, those machines, and the early G4 Powerbooks, had bigger issues than just that. Dark times in Macland.
(As an aside, how people talk about their device history is a good litmus test of the length of their experience with Apple hardware, thanks to the Intel switch laptop name change.)
If you leave out the tape, and you put a bunch of them in a box, this is the ritual for summoning an elder god. (the elder god is always gone by the time you re-open the box, but the non-euclidean tangle they've left the cables in is quite apparent.) Unless you're the kind of person who will happily and patiently sit uncluttering the cables without yanking them for a few hours, you'll damage your stuff extracting them from this class of mess.
For reference: I am actually still using the charging cable that came with my 2009 MBP (via a magsafe2 adapter) with my latest work-issued MBP as the spare adapter in the home office. The cable is a bit grubby, but undamaged and entirely functional.
Perhaps you had more Apple cables (an obvious branding) compared to any other brand? And your apple cables get more use than others (e.g. on your main laptop, compared to some cable left for years connected to a printer at the office, etc).
Except if you had e.g. an equal number of Dell and Apple machines, etc, or buy branded cables from a single brand.
I have never had an entire Apple charger stop working, though.
tl;dr they're pretty trash, but maybe so are other chargers.
There really is something wrong with the stupid cable. It's unthinkable that any of my other non-apple cables would do this.
I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky* things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit)*
People forget that thin, quiet, light, etc are also "function", and more important to some people than function they'll never exhaust in their use cases, like a bleeding fast GPU.
This takes about 1 year, 1 year and an half. I never jam it in doors or desks. I do not have pets. I sometimes put it in my bag but I do not wind up the cable to avoid having additional tear on it. I do live part of the year in hot and humid climate (like Japan in summer or South East Asia) which might accelerate the issue.
But honestly, this is a problem, no matter how careful I am, I have to buy new chargers.
Now it doesn't really matter as they just use a standard USB-C cable so you can use whatever brand cable you want.
There's a reason why everyone else uses thicker cables and strain relief.
And it's not because of end-user negligence: it's because of engineering pragmatism.
Although all this is irrelevant since Apple phased out mag safe, the "ears" that hold the cable, and added a removable cable.
Still, Apple's Lightning cables are also extremely vulnerable to bending and abrasion. What makes you think their USB-C cables will be much better?
Non-technical customers who can't afford to buy new cables, or don't know to use better aftermarket cables, are already known to resort to using springs from pens as ad-hoc strain relief: https://www.google.ca/search?q=iphone+charger+spring
Nothing, but at least those can be replaced without having to upgrade the whole power brick.
I'd say half of the Macbook users around me have suffered problems with power brick cables. Specially where the mag safe cable connects to the power brick.
I wouldn't blame it on users though. I've never seen other power bricks so plagued with these problems.
Just stop already.
It's fine to say you don't have issues, but if six other people are saying they have issues, and know people with issues, it's rude to write them all off like that.
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EDIT: replacing the paraphrased quote to try to avoid unfairly representing the original statement and remove my read of its intent. I had paraphrased it down to ""I assume the people having issues are responsible for those issues" which dropped the bit about perhaps having pets or similar and so put everything on the disrespecting the hardware part.