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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

Not joking but this is entirely user related. In the 15 years I’ve been using the things I haven’t killed a single cable. Not one. The strain relief is not great but if you’re careful it’s absolutely fine and it’s no worse than the other cables out there.

The killers are people who sit there with the cable rammed into their stomach bending it at 90 degree angle when using their phone. On the MacBook chargers it’s usually bashing it constantly or tugging it.

I come from a world of RF cables which cost more than a MacBook and have very limited bend limits. What we have is insanely robust these days. Just be nice to it.

Edit: my daughter had my 2010 MBP until recently which the original charger blew up on. After dissecting it the cable was fine but the main IC had cracked in half. No shorts on the cable grommet. It lasted 11 years! What are you people doing to these things?

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> if you’re careful it’s absolutely fine and it’s no worse than the other cables out there

That's clearly false, and feeling the need to include "if you're careful" in your statement exposes its falseness. No other major manufacturer makes power cables that chronically disintegrate like this so much that it has become a meme specifically about Apple's cables: https://imgur.com/AVP6riy

Not unsleeved. Disintegrated. It's because the material they use is soft and extremely undurable, unlike literally every other major cable manufacturer.

Apple's cables, and _nobody_ else's, do this when even the slightest amount of angle is applied: https://i.imgur.com/seu0xh8.jpg

Look closely at the circled part. That bulge is caused by extremely soft sleeve material that isn't bonded to the internal wires combined with inappropriately abrupt strain relief. That bulge is why Apple cables disintegrate so often, and even just the downward force of gravity from a laptop being on the edge of a table with the power cord dangling off the side onto the floor is enough to cause it over time.

The bulge is where the cable has been repeatedly knocked or compressed into an extreme angle. Of course that will happen at the strain relief. It happens on Amazon Basics lightning cables, Lenovo laptop power supplies, anything if you exceed the min bend radius of the cable.

Regarding dangling it over the edge of the table, you're pulling it down. That's one of the problems. It should lay flat on the table for a few inches at least and then drop.

I'm sitting here with my M1 MBA on charge at the moment. Is it strained? Hell no:

https://imgur.com/a/lXGpj4E

> Regarding dangling it over the edge of the table, you're pulling it down. That's one of the problems. It should lay flat on the table for a few inches at least and then drop.

And if you suspend it in zero gravity and never touch it then it will last forever. Being able to baby something into lasting doesn't make the product durable. The fact remains that Apple's cables are demonstrably and notably more prone to fraying than every other manufacturer's cables even when the same people use them in the same way.

The old mantra holds: treat it nice or pay twice.

> The old mantra holds: treat it nice or pay twice.

I mean, sure, ok, but there's another mantra that goes "nobody likes someone who blames users for product quality that is significantly worse than from every other manufacturer so that when users use the product normally without aggression toward the product this product fails while the others do not."

I mean it really seems like you've come down on the side that it's totally ok that even simple gravity on just the cable itself puts too much unrelieved strain on a cable that for decades cost $100 or more to replace because it was integrated into the charging brick. And you argue that that's a problem with the user instead of grossly inadequate strain relief.

We've staked out our sides. Let's agree to disagree.

I'm going to leave it at that I used to treat my stuff like shit and blamed the manufacturer, mostly IBM and Lenovo back then, when it broke. Then I grew up. Life got easier and cheaper.

I don't know how you can defend these crappy products. I don't want to baby a cable, and yet I have to act like a crazy person when ever someone touches my "precious" cable. Any other usb cable on my desk I can twist and bend at my heart's content, and I know they'll outlast the spec they were designed for.

The only reason I use wireless charging now is because it's cheaper and easier than using broken cables. Sadly the one in my car looks like the terminator's arm when he cuts off his arm skin.

No it doesn't, you can buy any random cheap cable in ebay any they are mostly indestructible and last years while apple cables require extreme care to last and even then they seem to turn in to a gummy substance that basically falls apart.

Surely the whole point of a strain relief is to prevent those kind of angles. Which other cables seem to do more effectively.

> That's clearly false, and feeling the need to include "if you're careful" in your statement exposes its falseness. No other major manufacturer makes power cables that chronically disintegrate like this so much that it has become a meme specifically about Apple's cables

That’s quite a strong and definitive conclusion from your part. Apple is a company that sold hundreds of millions of these cables, probably more than any other company out there, of course there are a lot of people with issues. But just like that, also based on anecdotes, I have lightning cables from the first time they released the port and they are perfectly usable. I never had an issue with an Apple cable in more than 10 years. In the same time, a friend of mine goes over one cable a year, so yes, I would say it’s also people, it’s scale, it’s manufacturing, it’s everything. But to call this an Apple issue is quite a stretch.

> Apple is a company that sold hundreds of millions of these cables, probably more than any other company out there

I'm not sure how one can honestly argue that Apple has sold more laptops than every other laptop manufacturer. I they've sold more cables (I doubt it, but let's pretend), well...that would be because people keep having to replace them.

This problem is common enough with Apple's laptop power cables that it has been a meme for more than a decade now. That's not the case for _any_ other vendor, and those other vendors have sold more laptops than Apple has by several orders of magnitude.

I don't know what you're talking about, but there are zero memes about Apple's phone chargers other than the ones you're sitting here making up.

> there are zero memes

I vouched your dead comment so I could reply. (Am I allowed to do this? I don't know!)

Maybe you don't know that the word meme predates image macros and even the internet, but it does. The phrases "it became a meme" and "people make memes" are not talking about the same manifestation. Memes are ideas that take root, not funny pictures with words on them.

My assumption is that anyone who reads "became a meme" as "people made memes about" must be very young, but that's my own bias showing. A person who has no memories of a world before philosoraptors and shy penguins or whatever image macros kids are making these days might not realize the difference, but there it is.

Also...

> phone chargers

I actually did say laptops, and the reason I said laptops is because people have been complaining about Apple's power cables tearing/fraying for longer than Apple has been making phones. The problem applies equally well to their phone charging cables, of course, but standard micro USB cables are also usually complete shit whereas standard laptop power cables are not except for Apple's.

If you google image search for "Apple charging cable break", you'll find thousands of pictures of broken cables.

Do the same for Dell, and one picture out of the first page features a broken cable.

The idea that apple charging cables break is something lots of people discuss, there are dozens of news stories about it too.

I wonder if there's some weird cultural selection bias; like the kind of person who purchases an Apple product is more likely to make a meme about it vs someone who purchases a Dell?

> like the kind of person who purchases an Apple product is more likely to make a meme about it

I addressed this misunderstanding of the word "meme" in a parallel comment.

Could be a lack of clarity on my part. Make it into a meme might be more accurate?

I'm not just imagining people making image macros, but more likely to talk about or gossip about it, more likely to ask other people for help or opinions, more likely to pick up on the trend and write about it in some blog or article or go on YouTube about it?

I just imagine a Dell laptop to be majority provided/owned by a company and so such complaints end up going to IT support who ends up swapping it out or something. Whereas a Mac is more likely to be owned by creative professionals, or journalists, or people more generally inclined towards sharing memes in a contagious way or otherwise striking a chord in the cultural zeitgeist?

Most of the reports that stick in my mind (and including my own personal experience) are from people who haven't only ever used just one or the other but have experience with both and are able to do in-kind comparisons between the two experiences. My Toshiba Tecra, Dell XPS 15 and Thinkpad T41, T43, X201, and X1 Carbon power cables could be used to haul trailers (figuratively) without fraying. Apple is the only laptop vendor I know of that uses an extremely fragile soft rubber sheath on their cables and no real strain relief.

So, no, I don't think that's it. Plenty of other laptops have problems, but only Apple has this particular problem.

Going to suggest UV exposure might be a variable.

This is an irrelevant side note, but I found it amusing that your second Imgur link warned me that it might be adult content (spoiler: it’s not).

Weird and hilarious. Is it because of my fingers? Hah, I wonder.

Pretty common to hear the "you're using it wrong" W.R.T Apple products breaking...

I have a new MBP and a ThinkPad. You'd be hard pressed to say the MBP charger cable has half the strain relief of the ThinkPad.

It's wrong to blame users. To please Greenpeace, Apple removed PVC from their cables (maybe only in some markets?). Such cables deteriorated on their own. First they swelled up and turned gray near the MagSafe connector, then turned yellow, and finally became brittle and fell apart in sticky dark green bits.

I have never seen any cable, even under great stress, fall apart like that. It was an obvious chemical change, not physical stress.

I suspect deterioration was either due to heat transmitted from the chassis over the MagSafe connector, or from finger oils, as people touch the cable most near the connector.

Anecdata, on my last MagSafe system, I went through 2 units that failed within the first year but the 3rd one lived for several years.

I didn’t change my habits at all.

Which makes me suspect they changed the formula.

>I have never seen any cable, even under great stress, fall apart like that. It was an obvious chemical change, not physical stress.

I dug out some old cables from the end of the featurephone era and noticed that the USB data cables had chemical disintegration, like the plasticizer up and left the synthetic rubber or whatever it's made out of. This left the outside crumbling off. I really do wonder what they were made out of and why it does this. Similarly the rubberized coatings so popular on mp3 players of the late 90's, early 2000's do this as well.

To contrast I have 30+ year old NEMA connector cables (kind for server/desktop PSU's) with zero signs of wear, maybe they got a little stiffer over the years but no cracking. I have also used extension cords this old and again, none of this chemical degradation. I think lead stabilizers were used in outdoor cables and this is why they hold up better, and also carry lead warnings sometimes on the cables?

> I dug out some old cables from the end of the featurephone era and noticed that the USB data cables had chemical disintegration, like the plasticizer up and left the synthetic rubber or whatever it's made out of. This left the outside crumbling off. I really do wonder what they were made out of and why it does this. Similarly the rubberized coatings so popular on mp3 players of the late 90's, early 2000's do this as well.

I looked this up a few weeks ago!

It's because the rubber-like coating (TPE, or thermoplastic elastomer) interacts with body oils, causing it to eventually degrade:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/6fznfp/cant_compa...

I've always thought that it was because of heat and humidity.

I'm not sure this is accurate; on both classic magsafe adapters (mid 2012) and 2019 adapters, I've not had an adapter fray, and both my 2012 and 2019 MacBook Airs are getting daily all-day use (and because I and my friend are clumsy, weekly coffee baths). A quick search for Apple magsafe pvc removal suggests (from Greenpeace's own site) that the change you are commenting on was done in 2009.

The original cables for both survived just fine for their entire life time, and the 2012 machine travelled all across the globe, and the 2019 even more so in a shorter amount of time, again, with very active and heavy use.

I don't think this is a widespread issue, and sounds isolated.

> A quick search for Apple magsafe pvc removal suggests (from Greenpeace's own site) that the change you are commenting on was done in 2009.

Anecdotally, the MagSafe charger that came with my 2008 MacBook is still going strong, but the one that I got with a 2013 MacBook Air is a hot blue mess that I occasionally bring to Apple Stores to try and get replaced.

I wouldn't be surprised if that oils and bacteria, and if that's dependent on particular user's hand microbiota. Apple should and could test it on users who report fraying, IMHO. Mine mbpro USB-C charger cable is just turned to yellow after a year of use. I'm going to add some shrinkwrap before it turns to goo, hopefully it'll work this time.

>>It's wrong to blame users.

That is the Apple Way. Apple is never at fault, they have prefect engineering.. They have Genius "Technicians".. and so it is impossible for them to make a mistake..

Remember it was not Apple Engineering that was a problem years ago, it was because people simply did not know how to hold their phone correctly, Stupid users thinking they could just hold their device however they felt like, no when you buy an Apple Product you do it the Apple Way...

You could literally use one of those bog standard black PC laptop chargers as a weapon and it would be fine. Those things are indestructible. You could repel off a cliff with one. Have you ever seen one frayed or damaged at all? I haven't. Meanwhile, go to any college lecture hall and you will find about half the macbook chargers are covered in tape or frayed. This is "You are holding it wrong" all over again.

Maybe the macbook charger is stronger than your expensive RF cables, but it is far weaker than anything else the competition puts out and that's a huge annoyance, as a mac user myself who gets maybe 3 years out of a given apple cable, be it magsafe charger, lightning cable, or even the wired headphones. It's a distinctly Apple issue, cables in my hands from other manufacturers, even no name junk looking cables, don't have these issues.

We've got a box of fucked up Dell chargers in the office and a box of fucked up Dells as well. Oh and some HP ones. That does not hold.

> You could literally use one of those bog standard black PC laptop chargers as a weapon and it would be fine. Those things are indestructible.

These fail. And good luck getting an OEM replacement if it's more than a couple of years old and from a low-end laptop.

> You could literally use one of those bog standard black PC laptop chargers as a weapon and it would be fine

The cable itself may last, but the connectors sure as hell don’t. Barrel jacks are well known for getting loose and making poor connections over time.

Well known among whom? My thinkpad barrel chargers still go strong, the oldest is from 2006.

My HP laptop charger blew the circuit breaker in my house. At least when my iPad charger failed, it wasn't that dramatic -- it just stopped working.

I'm unconvinced. I used a MacBook for about three years around 2010, and had to have the charger replaced twice as the cable started cracking near the MagSafe connector. The third charger started falling apart (insulation yellowing and cracking along much of its length) while sat unused in a drawer. I've also had two or three Lightning cables fail in a similar manner until I switched to Anker cables.

I've only ever had one non-Apple laptop charger break in a similar way, and that was after five years of heavy daily use. I've never had the insulation break on a micro-USB or USB-C cable (I used Windows Phones until I got an iPhone 11). If it were entirely due to user behaviour, I wouldn't expect to see such a disparity between Apple and non-Apple cables.

I have the complete opposite experience aligning with the OP.

Out of all the hundreds of cables I've used, only the white iPhone cables tend to fail in this manner. In fact, not a single white iPhone cable has been spared from this insidious fault.

This is a direct unarguable observation for me - how come so many other cables I own and use in similar manner don't fray?

I'm using the cable that came with my 6s on my 12. There was an intermediate XR as well.

The only unarguable thing is the disparity between what we're doing.

In fairness, any cable of this style I've bought has failed the same way. I have a bunch of generic lightning cables that are white, with the little nub of rubber strain relief like the genuine cables, and they fail the same way too. They look nice, and even on the ones where the insulation is torn, I've only had to throw one away for not working at all (Apple or generic) of the probably dozen I own.

But I've also recently started buying braided cables to replace the Apple/apple-like varieties. The fabric braided ones from Monoprice look nice and seem a bit more durable - likely because the sleeving is also thicker and you can't bend them at sharp angles without feeling like you're doing something obviously wrong.

The iPhone Cables are the only ones that does it without some sort of strain relieves, which means they have a far higher rate of failure.

I brought Anker PowerLine II and III ( Not the + version ) for my family and friends and so far apart from one connector failure ( Not the cable ), all of them have survived the years of usage with no signs of cable damage. It is such a relieve knowing your cable should last years if not decades.

We used to joke apart Apple made the cable so bad because they expect us to buy a new iPhone every two years anyway, which is when all of our lightning cables somehow failed.

I am also wondering, if it is really that environmental friendly to make your cable free of certain material but they break 10 times easier and end up so much more in landfill. Compare to make one that last literally forever. Lightning Cables are sold in hundreds of millions unit a year. And Apple earns money and commission from lightning chips, connector and MFi.

I had a black Amazon Basics cable that failed, although the insulation had more of a clean break rather than disintegrating.

So what you are saying is, they are holding it wrong? Sure, if you treat almost anything with kids gloves it will last forever. But that isn't how people use the product. The reality is, the cords from apple are the only ones I've seen break like that.

> So what you are saying is, they are holding it wrong?

People love to dunk on that Jobs quote, but he was right. If you took the iPhone 4, wrapped your whole hand around it, and squeezed hard, you could make the bars drop. If you held like a regular cell phone, it worked fine.

As proof I offer the fact that the iPhone 4 sold very well for years, even after Apple ended their free bumper program. I had one (sans bumper) and the reception was fine.

Also, the same treatment to all the other major phones of the time produced the same results. Samsung phones even had a warning in the user manual about it.

I'm extremely careful with my Macbook magsafe charging cables. But in ten years I've had three fray into uselessness.

My current cable has black electrical tape at both the charger block and connector ends. No matter how carefully one loops these things before putting them in a bag, the rubbery material eventually abrades and cracks.

In contrast, I used Powerbooks for 15+ years and never had a single cable go bad.

Strain relief for cables has been a solved problem for decades, but Apple intentionally switched to an inferior design around 2008 [1] for aesthetic reasons.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/yAywo.jpg

I've only ever had two cables fray and I've also only ever had two Apple products: two iPods that had their cables fray within 2 years of owning them.

I've had countless other mp3 players, laptops and other electronics and have never had a cable fray.

So sure, it might be user related, but that does not change the fact that other manufacturer's cables don't have that issue.

When I first got an iPhone 7 (the first one without a headphone jack) I bought a second adapter straight away, because I looked at the one that came in the box and figured it would last about five minutes.

Nearly 5 years later, that same flimsy adapter is still going strong in my car. It’s been plugged and unplugged thousands of times (my fiancée’s phone needs a USB-C adapter—what a fun world we live in), stood on, left on the floor, left in both sub-freezing and summer heat wave temperatures. Still haven’t needed that second one. I’m kind of amazed (but would still prefer a headphone jack).

It's definitely user related. My Apple cables last indefinitely—unless my wife gets ahold of them. Then? Look out.

I'm just careful not to twist them or sharply bend them. If I pack them I usually just very-loosely wad them up and put them in a not-too-full part of a bag. That's the extent of my "care".

[EDIT] However! This does not mean Apple shouldn't make their cables better so they survive whatever people are doing to them to wreck them, since it's evidently very common.

Oh yes exactly - my ex wife could fuck up a cable or some earpods in about 3 months. I lost count of the amount of earpods that went down the toilet.

I use litz wire for headphone cables. For a cable that's constantly on you, there's always some chance something happens unexpectedly. I've broken my share of earpods.

Litz wire doesn't increase the durability as such, merely reduces skin effect in RF applications. Sennheiser used to sell steel cables for their professional headphones. Now those are durable. I ran over mine with my chair about 50 times a day and the cable was still going after 10 years.

Steel makes sense for extreme durability - I suppose you could use extremely thin steel wire for in-ears to make it flexible, though it might require a very special alloy to be thin and low resistance?

In my experience, litz wire is exceptionally flexible and suitable for getting shoved in a pocket frequently. Each wire can be quite thick due to the flexibility.

As far as reliability goes, I do see a lot more frays in Apple cables (though not ones that remain exclusively in my care) than others, but part of the reason is that other cables seem to have a weirdly-high rate of mysterious failures in absence of evident physical damage. They just die after 6-24 months. Maybe they'd fray eventually too, but they crap out before it happens. I don't get it. The only Apple cables I've seen do anything similar are usb(-a/-c)-to-lightning charging cables (and I suspect I just need to rubbing-alcohol the contacts on the lightning-plug ends on those, to solve the problem)

> I'm just careful not to twist them

This is the difficult part when the whole cable is a single solid color and the plug fits either direction. I have a Lightning cable in my car that only gets used hanging straight down from my dash-mounted iPhone, and I've noticed the device-end strain relief finally giving out from this after a few years.

Agreed that some kind of stripe would make this a lot easier. Save me testing directions and trying to judge which has more tension. I do the same thing with keyed plugs, though—if anything, I find it easier to accidentally introduce more twists in those, since I'm more likely to need to half-twist it one way or the other to get it oriented the right way.

>It's definitely user related. My Apple cables last indefinitely—unless my wife gets ahold of them. Then? Look out.

I had a Belkin lightning nylon charge cable I used for years and it worked great, then my gf borrowed it for 2 days and "gorilla'd" the end. Since she had a habit of chewing through the regular cables in only a few months, I was curious to watch and see what she does different.

It was two things:

1. She uses the phone while charging frequently and has the cable kept taut, this strains the connector.

But more importantly

2. She yanks the phone off the charger by grabbing the cord and pulling the phone at an angle, this can destroy a worn cable in a matter of days.

Agreed, when my wife gets them they end up with knots in them. Knots!

If Apple's cables were so great fewer people would be buying replacement cables and/or complaining about them. To me, it indicates that they were not designed tough enough to accommodate the average person's use. You can reject it as anecdotal but almost all of my apple cables have frayed at-least once in their lifetime - headphone, charging, lightning/usb. The only one that didn't fray is the power cable to my mac mini.

The only cables that ever broke for me with less than 12 month use has been Apples, which I subject to same treatment as other devices, frequently Apple devices weren't even used as primary. I've since switched over to universal magnetic adapter heads and braided, magnetic charging cables with 90 degree heads.

I agree that for MagSafe cables this is really rare. Granted, I haven't had any issues with the USB-C cables ever since they switched to them when they came out with the Touch Bar MBP.

The lightning cables though... those things seem to break super easily. USB-C vs. USB seems to make no difference-- the strain relief is pretty terrible. Doesn't help that some of these cables get a lot of use (eg; for Apple CarPlay). I've found that it's usually the lightning end that goes not the other end. I wonder if switching the iPhone to USB-C might not help. But at this point it sounds like they're aiming for full wireless.

I’ve had the same experience: Apple cables last years for me. The cable that came with my iPad Pro survived years of use at home and abroad.

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