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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

Original source is the DailyMail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10607077/Apple-make...

As is typical for the outlet, the sources for the figures include stirring attributions like, “critics argue” and “experts believe”

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They also assume that everyone who bought an iPhone bought a charger at full price directly from Apple.

I'd be surprised if even half bought a new charger, most people who needed one probably just got a cheap one from Amazon.

It's funny to me if it's true that people buying $1000+ phones would all be buying those low-end white-label chargers. They are somewhat notorious for being unreliable, and even dangerous.

Edit: Yes, there's decent, branded, 3rd party chargers too. Just commenting on the really cheap ones.

I suspect it’s a mix, but if you stay off the absolute bottom of the barrel, there are plenty of third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.

Anecdote of one: wife bought an iPhone 13 mini yesterday at an Apple store and turned down all the hard sells on accessories and AppleCare.

> third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.

Have you checked those chargers against the UL certification database to confirm that the people who check the "won't catch on fire" part of the "works great" is actually true?

I do not cross-reference the UL database on each of my online shopping trips. I trust that the middle-priced brands (Amazon, Anker and the like) are not selling crap.

That's mighty self-assured, given Amazon's track record of selling (and commingling) crap.

I still mostly use the charger that came with my HTC Legend. It has been under the bed and its usbA port has seen at least three types of cables over the last decade (12 years even I think).

The Anker iPhone accessories like cables, chargers, and charging pads are MUCH higher quality than Apple’s. Their cables are so much better than Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage. You wonder why Apple would damage their “high quality” brand image with their terrible accessories.

How many of your Anker chargers carry a UL or other safety approval mark on them?

All of Apple's do.

Having a UL mark is not an indication that a product is 100% safe to use, but it at least shows that the manufacturer cares enough about making a safe product to do the paperwork and have a 3rd party like UL review their design and manufacturing to ensure the product is as safe as can be.

How many people even know what a UL safety approval mark is or cares about it's existence on a charger?

Effectively no one, unless you're an engineer who has part of their job be UL compliance or until you as a consumer have to talk to an insurance company about why your house burned down.

Mine is IEC 62368-1 conformant (the corresponding UL standard is also 62368-1). It also has a TÜV SÜD marking for US compliance.

That's good to hear! Maybe Anker has improved in this area since the last time I bought one of their products.

>Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage

We must be using them very differently then.

I still have charger cables for my original iPod (2007) which I use regularly that are not broken or frayed.

Also from older phones - which is one of the reasons I was happy that they stopped shipping all the chargers and headphones as I still already had them from previous purchases.

Cableitis is unfortunately a wasteful by-product of our current electronics culture.

Anecdotally, people I know who aren't tech people and who have expensive phones almost always have cheap chargers and off-brand charging cables. The general public seem to perceive that the phone is the valuable thing, a charger or cable is a commodity so they're all the same and work equally well/poorly.

Clearly this is misguided, but I think if I tried to explain how to shop for a good and reliable USB charger to my mom, dad, brother, or sister that they'd each roll their eyes at me.

Of note, the last time I bought a new multi-port USB charger (a few years ago now), it was very difficult to find one which was reasonably priced and which carried the UL (or equivalent) mark in the USA. Another previous multi-port charger I had bought made by Anker had claimed "getting UL approval" in the product description and showed the mark in the pictures on Amazon, but once delivered the physical charger did not have any safety marks present on it. The Anker charger failed after a year and Anker sent me a replacement under warranty, the replacement also did not carry any safety mark.

For some people, a $1000+ phone comes with bragging rights. The charger? Not so much.

I'd wager that's one reason some people buy the expensive phone and the cheap charger. The other is simply that most people can't tell the difference between chargers - they both charge, right?

Ok worthless claim then. I did buy 4 usbA-lightning cables to put in several places (iPhone 12 mini is my first iPhone) though. But not from Apple.

I also have a non-Apple MagSafe charger in the car. The only thing I hardly ever use is the included usbC-lightning cable ironically. They could have earned some more money on me.

Or they already owned an old charger

they also claim that the changes reduced shipping costs by 40% (not even a slightly realistic figure)

Hating on apple is fine, but right now a lot of the tech world is looking like uncles that believe facebook posts over fauci.

For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

For those who don't know, much of Wikipedia should be considered "generally unreliable" by the public.

Looking for information on Wikipedia is like asking a bunch of strangers at a bus stop and then going with the loudest voices with the most free time.

All the people at the bus stop will also largely agree that the Daily Mail is unreliable, so I can't find fault in your argument ;)

Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though. In the US, the Mail has carved out a niche as a benign entertainment site - in the UK it is a tedious, dangerous rag that is effectively OAN in print form.

But it was used as an authority figure when their editors and government are quite controversial.

On average it's as good or better than printed encyclopedias. We don't go around saying Britannica was a big book of lies but it unknowingly published many inaccuracies and urban legends. They did an honest effort, and we know what the results of that look like statistically these days.

> Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though

Perhaps, but Wikipedia's unreliability means that it is not in a position to meaningfully comment on reliability of other sites.

Unreliability insofar as Wikipedia is concerned means it’s articles are of varying quality. That’s a fact somewhat inherent in its design.

Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality? That page’s findings are not public-editable, for the record.

> Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality?

The same reason I don't feel like Fox News or Breitbart provides a reliable view of the news, political bias.

A lot has been written about wikipedia's political bias. I don't care to rehash the entire debate, but let's start with the fact that one of the original creators believes it has a problem with bias: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Is that the end-all be-all? Probably not, but it's reasonably concerning.

This has not been true since at least 2005: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Now someone will say Nature is unreliable and we need to wait for findings to replicated in more applicable domain-specific journals…

Which is why it's remarkable that the quality of Wikipedia is so high.

I've found english wikipedia to be quite reliable actually, especially for scientific knowledge. It's an excellent source of references too.

It's quite literally saved me in school too. Once I had to present my work in class and my classmates wrote a few things in the slides they didn't fully understand. Of course my PhD professor zeroed in on that. She was asking them question after question and nobody was answering. She asked me and I answered correctly because I had spent days reading about bacterial gene transfer on wikipedia out of curiosity.

I actually hated that subject until I discovered how awesome it is thanks to wikipedia. She would make us memorize seemingly endless factoids about all kinds of micro-organisms. I hated every second of it and nearly failed that class. Then I started reading about this stuff on wikipedia and everything changed.

Memorizing those factoids builds the base for appreciating the really cool stuff. It's like a language class: you learn a bunch of vocab words so that you can read amazing literature or visit far-off places.

Science classes are really bad about motivating this. I don't think I would have made it through the intro-class grind if I hadn't worked in a lab first. Language classes offer an interesting parallel, in that you can either have the old school "learn these 250 flashcards" or more enjoyable short stories that build up to something.

On wikipedia I learned a lot more facts and it didn't even feel like memorization. I still remember the feeling.

I started with the general bacteria article on wikipedia. I was having trouble absorbing this knowledge and didn't know what to do, so I just randomly searched it on wikipedia and started reading. I didn't even expect anything but I got hooked on it. I especially remember reading about bacterial flagella and the little molecular engines that power them. Then I learned about how it could have somehow evolved into the type 3 secretion system, an almost literal needle some bacteria have that they can use to inject toxins into cells. Totally awesome, and it's just one of many bacterial virulence factors I had been mindlessly memorizing. I just kept following links and reading everything, the microbiology articles are so detailed. My attitude to this class completely changed, I was filled with curiosity once again. I was happy to go to the lab and experiment with our cultures.

Due to wikipedia I learned even more than what I needed for my class. I started discovering all sorts of cool stuff I had no idea even existed in nature. My favorite example is the article about cnidocytes, explosive cells that deliver stings. They have an organelle that stores large amounts of calcium ions. When triggered, the ions are released and the massive osmotic gradient causes a rapid influx of water into the cell, increasing volume and applying absurd amounts of acceleration to the stinger which is ejected outside and into the target on a nano- to microsecond time scale.

That analogy only works if you also ask the strangers at a bus stop for sources. Like wikipedia, some won't give them to you, others might give you the daily mail, and others might give you reputable peer reviewed research.

Then which one would you trust?

AFAIK, wikipedia doesn't reference itself as a reliable source for obvious reasons.

Yes, but it has easily the best homepage design of any news site on the Internet.

I dare you to scroll to the bottom without clicking on something!

> For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

This is kind of like two pathological liars arguing over who's the bigger liar. Wikipedia is not all that reliable itself. It has a well-known political bias and junk gets through all the time. See the recent debacle over the Scots language page.

That's ironic. Considered "generally unreliable" by a source that could itself be aptly described as "generally unreliable."

It's probably true, but at this point Wikipedia is also considered "generally unreliable" for politically controversial subjects

The Daily Mail is considered and described by many using much more colorful language than simply "unreliable". Especially in the UK.

That said, is the Daily Mail article factually wrong? How many purchasers of iphones end up buying a new charger and power cable?

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