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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

This is the exact sort of situation that supports the ever increasing importance of brands.

This is obviously a cheap chinese product, and therefore there are low expectations of quality in the result. The same is still true but in a less obvious way even from more reputable channels like buying a USB charger from a shop in an airport there are so many ways that the implementation can be subtly not what you want and not give you the right charging speed with ONE of your phones. You can't read reviews of every product and even if you could, they're not going exhaustively test every last technical aspect of something.

My solution to this particular issue is that I buy all of my USB chargers from Anker (direct, not via Amazon). I know I'm getting a product from a company that has thought about it and tested it thoroughly, so my chances are much better. And the same is true with other products.

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Anker is a Chinese company incidentally. People often disparage "cheap Chinese" knock-offs, but the salient feature here is cheapness and dodgy branding, not the fact that they're made in China. Geopolitics aside, the Chinese are absolutely capable of building good stuff, as demonstrated by brands like Anker.

It's not that China universally produces garbage. It's that they can get away with producing garbage and even straight up knockoffs. Additionally they already have the equipment there to manufacture this stuff. That leads to most of those terrible items coming from Chinese companies. That's why Chinese, cheap garbage, and false marketing are associated with China. If they don't want that to be the case, someone would need to crack down on the lies and knockoffs.

A lot of good quality stuff comes from China as well, including many luxury brands. Why do they only get the reputation for the bad stuff?

China has no well known flagship brand demonstrating that level of quality.

Japan had Sony.

South Korea has LG.

What equivalent brand comes from China that US consumers know?

Aren't we literally in a thread that's discussing Anker and the quality of their products??

DJI.

Head and shoulders above the competition.

Although China also has most of the crappy knock-off drone brands that don't get the fundamentals right.

As commenter further up said: " If they don't want that to be the case, someone would need to crack down on the lies and knockoffs."

Even though China can and has done good manufacturing and engineering, I think of crappy knockoffs when I think of Chinese engineering.

Not so much for the Germans or the Swiss.

Given how much power the CCP has, they could rectify this in no time. Much like a corporation, they seem to be focused on short term gains (lots of tiny profits coming from knockoffs and frankly dangerous products which don't comply with laws of buyer's country) rather than medium/long term reputation.

To add to that, the forced data sharing and backdoors CCP forces companies to install just means they're eroding international trust in Chinese companies at the expense of long term reputation.

I feel bad for any actual Chinese engineering companies because they will have that reputation no matter what as long as they are China HQ'd.

You're right. Chinese products do have questionable reputation.

> Not so much for the Germans or the Swiss.

Since the Germans are known for cars, let's talk cars.

I drive a W212 Mercedes-Benz E250 CDI which I bought new a few years ago. My impression of German products is forever tainted.

It's lovely to drive when everything works, but everything doesn't always work.

It's designed in a complicated way that things are prone to failure, and when it does fail you'll have to take apart the whole car to fix it thereby increasing the labour cost to work on it.

It's been a money pit.

The ride and handling is pretty good though if ignore the weird suspension noises.

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Now, I don't own VWs myself, but you should look into transmission problems with their DSG dual-clutch transmission. Just Google "DSG mechatronic failure".

It's a lovely gearbox, but it's guaranteed to fail at some point. And VW knows it. Yet they still continue to fit it in VW and Skoda cars (amongst others). The rest of the car is relatively fine though. Skoda especially makes superb products (pun intended) — too bad they don't sell in USA.

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I hope you still remember the whole dieselgate scam of European car manufacturers.

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You might want to rethink your perception of German engineering.

(Note that this is not a reflection of German people or anything. The few Germans that I personally know, and the many more that I've interacted with indirectly are wonderful people.)

All large corporations are corrupt and should be considered amoral at best. This applies to VW and any other multinational megacorporation.

If they can milk you dry and get away with it, they will do so.

I'm pretty sure that the good sentiment for German engineering is rooted in smaller and more specialized goods, i.e high quality gardening tools at this point. The time when carmakers considered anything but short term profits is long gone

All engineering has tradeoffs. There is still nothing I have driven that compares well to a high end German BMW in regards to how it feels on the road. Smooth, quiet, but powerful and stuck to the road. The 3 and 5 series are different cars. The 750+ series is where it's at. And like the Mercedes, things break often and are ridiculously expensive to fix. They have obviously prioritized other things. But if you want that premium, BMW feel that makes driving anything else feel and sound like a fun can on wheels, that high end German engineering with all it's flaws is about your only option.

BMWs tend to be more reliable than Mercedes, based on acquaintances who drive BMWs.

> But if you want that premium, BMW feel that makes driving anything else feel and sound like a fun can on wheels

You forget Porsche ;)

Anyway, before the end of this century computers will probably be doing the driving, and high-end handling likely won't be a priority for anybody anymore.

I digress.

DJI is pretty much the most respected brand for camera drones.

Lenovo. Aside from Apple, they're one of the core "premium" computer brands and are also one of the big ones for business fleets.

TCL seems to be the new Vizio in TVs.

Anker is probably the most trusted company for third party chargers, cords and other phone accessories.

Polestar is a growing name in luxury cars.

I don't know what the sentiment about Haier appliances is (they also bought GE's appliance division), but they definitely have a presence in stores in the US.

Lenovo is a big one but they acquired IBM and Motorola so not looks like Chinese homegrown.

Huawei except in the US, but it's gone. Maybe Honor will be.

> China has no well known flagship brand demonstrating that level of quality.

OnePlus.

Ha. OnePlus had a hit with the OnePlus One due to being high spec and low cost but they've slid since then. Costs are now up to the level of other flagships but they still operate like they're selling a cheap phone. My previous phone was a OnePlus and despite me running into a nasty issue, they didn't respond to my support requests.

They're also effectively out of reach of western regulatory reprisal.

If a Chinese company ships a batch of garbage electronics to western markets that lead to a string of house fires there's basically no chance that anyone will be held accountable for it; whereas, if a western company did the same they'd be far easier to hold accountable.

So Chinese producers can, and do, assemble and ship dangerously unsafe electronics in order to cut costs.

There's cases of US/Western companies getting screwed even worse. A Chinese person sees it as fair to save money any way they can, so it's relatively common to have your design modified on the fly FCC or other regulatory approval be damned. In some cases the resulting product doesn't work, but you've already paid, and there's no way to get your money back.

Anker isn’t cheap though. If you’re looking for the cheapest accessory on Amazon it’s rarely going to be Anker.

The problem is people buying the absolute cheapest item, which is most likely going to be from China. If anything it’s a testament to their industrial prowess that they can crank out “good enough” equipment this cheaply.

But seriously if you actually care enough about quality to dump the USB data, maybe don’t buy the cheapest thing on Amazon. Or buy it with the assumption you’ll need to run diagnostics on it first and hope it doesn’t short out anything or catch fire.

Anker's business model is exactly identifying these quality manufacturers and doing the QC.

It's a fantastic, valuable service, and they do it really well.

This is the exact sort of situation that supports the ever increasing importance of brands.

There are many brands that still profit off their good name, but by now are just selling generic Chinese designs with fancier enclosures. E.g. my wife bought a Satechi USB-C On-the-Go adapter. One of its stated features is that it supports 4k@60Hz. Except that it didn't work. We tried different 4k screen models from different manufacturers and two different MacBooks and a Windows PC. All of which work fine with a USB-C DP alt-mode cable and a Lenovo USB-C Dock [1]. We contacted their support and they recommend that we do a firmware update. They send you a completely undocumented Realtek firmware updater (Windows-only) that doesn't work.

I was surprised by all of this, because Satechi used to be a reputable brand for Mac adapters. So, I investigated the adapter a bit more and the MAC address stood out. The MAC address was registered to Part II Research, which doesn't really seem to exist anymore. However, looking at their website through archive.org showed that they were a division of the Chinese brand Power 7 Technology. After browsing their website, I found an adapter that was more or less identical to the Satechi USB-C On-the-Go. The same port layout, the same touted features, but with a different enclosure:

https://www.power7tech.com/page/305

Power 7 makes reference designs and sells them to manufactures that rebrand them. This explains why Satechi couldn't provide proper support and couldn't even provide a working firmware updater. They didn't design the device or the firmware. Needless to say, we returned the adapter.

When I was researching this, I found a nice blog post that opens up several adapters from reputed brands (Satechi, Icy Box, Anker) and finds that they are just rebranded generic designs of typically pretty miserable quality:

https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

After several bad experiences with adapters and docks that do USB over USB-C, I try to buy Thunderbolt accessories when possible. You see some of the same crap (Realtek RTL8153), but on average the quality seems to be better.

[1] The 4k@60Hz support, the Lenovo Dock has other issues.

I'd be interested in what is inside the hood of my Belkin USB-C adapter (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B08X5168HM/). It works flawlessly, with the only downside being that it forcibly removes 15 watts from the Power Delivery budget which is enough for my s/o's Acer Switch X notebook but not for my 2019 16-inch MBP.

EVGA made a line of capture devices that I suspect were made by either this brand or another similar OEM selling generic designs. They got nailed for advertising a lot of specs that were basically completely fake (the device could not do some of the modes at all, not just fake internal resolution but couldn't even output them) and then went through a couple rapid iterations of similar specs that were just fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsICWRnj-60

EposVox has been doing a whole series. The whole market seems to be really shady and hit-or-miss if you don't go with a name-brand like elgato or blackmagic.

Huge number of sellers are just slapping their brand on an OEM design and the OEM doesn't seem to mind lying about what their design will do, and then the OEM is caught in the middle of angry customers and an OEM who just flagrantly doesn't care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnM6cip2lk

The value of Apple products when it comes to dongles and cables is pretty clear to me. While most people laugh at that $100 usb C hub thing, I haven’t been able to find a single alternative that is as good and significantly cheaper. Most products with the same ports cost almost as much and were constant sources of issues when we used them at work while the Apple one just always works in every case.

I got one of the basic usb 3.0 A to C cables on eBay and while it generally works, I was only able to get 300mbps over it while the apple one did the full gbit I was testing.

These specs are never written anywhere. You only know when you test it out. And I find the Apple one just passes all tests while 3rd party brands are a roll of the dice.

The specs are often buried in the description on places like Amazon where you get this junk. I don't think the Apple ones are trouble free either. They don't even list what wattage the USB C power port on their dongles takes on the store page [0]. Just a completely separate support page for some reason [1].

[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1L2AM/A/usb-c-vga-multi...

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207807

My guess is as part of the Apple "Just works" philosophy, they just make sure the wattage is high enough to power everything they list on the compatible section and then they can exclude the spec since the user need not ever worry about it.

They don't actually. The 15"/16" MBP are listed as compatible but need 87/97W at full tilt but the most the VGA adapter will do is 60W. They do have that on the separate support page but not on the store page.

Have you had any knockoffs of Anker when purchasing via Amazon?

I ask as I do a bunch of my shopping on Amazon (trying to cut down because of the fakes/inventory commingling) and recently bought some Anker stuff - as far as I can tell it looks legit.

I usually make sure the product is sold by Amazon, or some trusted brand (here, sold by AnkerDirect and shipped by Amazon). Have you had bad experiences and hence recommend always ordering direct from manufacturer?

I think I've been relatively lucky - I've had one cheap product that wasn't quite what it should have been, but nothing from Anker. My policy is to avoid ordering from Amazon if at all possible. This is both because of the risk of counterfeits, but also for the 'vote with your wallet' approach that I don't agree with a lot of what they do.

Same, although I haven't yet tried to purchase direct from Anker. I think I tried once and it just sent me back to Amazon.

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