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Comment by pilsetnieks | Hacker News Reader

> I ended up going to an Apple store as they had just made everything in their laptops Type-C, but in typical Apple fashion they were $90 and that just seemed outrageous. Not too far away a Microsoft store had a charger for only $30, so I bought that instead.

Was this nugget really necessary? And, by the way, a laptop charger for $90 is a reasonable price; if anything, I'd be more outraged about a $30 phone charger.

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no 90$ for an item that doesn't even 15$ to make is not a reasonable price !

Only if you care about the quality of the charger that can easily smoke your $2000 laptop.

Do you think the Microsoft store is selling chargers that will set your laptop on fire?

I can believe they aren't up to Apple's standards for their laptops.

You're a fool if you think that a Microsoft charger is going to "smoke your $2000 laptop". Everything Microsoft sells is guaranteed to be agency certified, which is going to make sure it doesn't short out and destroy things. The chargers you have to watch out for are the shady counterfeit ones on Amazon that are pretty much guaranteed to not have agency certifications and range anywhere from "probably ok" to "fire hazard waiting to happen".

I don't have a USB-C Mac, but but Apple's $80 MagSafe chargers aren't actually very good. They don't have basic strain relief sleeves on the cables, so they get kinked at the ends and fray/melt/stop working after a year or two of regular use.

This has been a problem for more than 10 years and Apple's never done anything about it. I can only imagine it's because they think the strain relief is ugly, which is one of those random bits of belligerent incompetence that's really frustrating as a Mac fan.

I've only had a half dozen MagSafe chargers, and never had one fail.

I've had at least four, and never had one not fail.

It may depend on the conditions you use them in; keeping it on your desk most of the time is probably better than carrying it around and using it in coffee shops and so forth. But that's a standard use case for laptops; there's no excuse for not being able to survive that.

That Kool-Aid must be delicious

No it's not. The BoM is at most $10.

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