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Comment by SippinLean | Hacker News Reader

But if you want to quick charge your iPhone X (or 8) you need USB-C. The included USB-A to Lightning cable won't do it (neither will the 5W power brick included with the iPhone X).

You'd need a lightning to USB-C cables and a USB-C PD power brick, neither are very cheap. Apple's USB-C cables start at $19 and the charger at $49!

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The good thing is that the USB-C ecosystem is open and a wide variety of known, vetted OEMs have stepped up to serve it.

USB-C to Lightning cables are still expensive because Apple hasn't opened the connector up for MFi certification yet, but Monoprice will happily sell you a USB-C brick with upto 40W output for $15:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=116&cp_id=10851&cs_id...

I expect high powered chargers and battery packs to become more common as recently full system chips for handling USB-C PD have been released which support up to the 100W via various means. That makes it much easier to build them rather than having to rely on your own fab or reusing USB2.0 chips with some hacks.

A critical morsel of information missing here is that iPhones charge pretty quick using 12W/2.1A USB-A chargers, to the point where I’m not inclined to move to USB-C for only a few % gain in speed. Yes, it’s super slow using the included 5W charger, so I haven’t used one of those since 2013 or thereabouts, it stays in the box until resale time.

Totally agree, iPad charger ftw. My favorite (if such a thing can be said about usb charging bricks) is that it uses the same detachable power prongs as a Mac charger. So I’ve got a Mac extension cable plugged into an iPad charger and voila, extended charging cable without a usb extension killing charging speeds due to voltage drops.

I've purchased a large number of USB-C cables, and the Apple one is the only one that seems to charge a macbook pro at full-speed (87watts). All the others (Anker, Amazon Basics, a few others) only charge at 30w or 60w which can leave your computer out of battery after a full day of use even when plugged in if you're doing compute-heavy things. Not saying the $19 price-tag is "fair," but at least it's a high-quality cable.

"High quality" in this case probably means that the microcontroller embedded it spits out the right sequence of bytes to make the laptop enable full-speed charging.

Surprisingly, no.

Google around for tear-downs of Apple charging gear. They usually have comparisons with tear-downs of the generic "equivalents."

It's fascinating how different the engineering is from one brand to another, and the (sometimes terrifying) shortcuts the non-Apple chargers take.

Aren’t we talking about the cables here ? I’d be curious to know what in the Apple cable is so high quality that it allows it faster speed than the other decent brands.

Otherwise my Google-fu is failing me on the USB-C charger teardown, do you remember where you saw one ?

Aren’t these actually Thunderbolt 3 cables?

No, the charging cables aren’t. They’re even only USB2 speeds for data IIRC.

Sufficiently low resistance wire; in particular, USB power over 60W needs >3A current, so a high-gauge high-resistance wire can cause voltage to drop below the minimum specs.

Since everything 60W and below uses a max of 3A, that’s the common maximum design target.

This basic anker cable seems to fit the bill:

https://www.anker.com/products/variant/powerline-3ft-usb-c-t...

it might have been rarer when the macbook pro got out, at this point I think it’s decently common.

"This cable will not charge Nexus 5X, Moto Z, OnePlus 3/3T, Huawei Mate 9, Helio X20/X25, or MacBook Pro 87W at full speed."

Guess I'm still going to Apple.

good point, I read too fast

The USB-PD spec requires active cables in order to support over 3A, which is 60W @ 20V. Any cable supporting over 60W will most likely specifically advertise itself as either a 5A or 100W cable.

It's nearly as fast to just use a higher wattage charger like they ship with iPads or any number of third parties. I haven't used an iPhone charger in years.

This doesn't require a change of port on the phone, just a purchase of a different cable.

Apple has a history of expensive accessories and cables, so it's nothing new

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