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I'm pretty sure you can easily do that with a presumably legal USB-A male to USB-C male cable.

Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).

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> Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).

It's forbidden to make a charger like that unless it has a chip that actually speaks the protocol and does power negotiation properly. Same for anything that has a female USB-C port.

The trick is that USB-C has a pair of pins that identify what type of cable is connected. Different value resistors on the pins identify different types of cables, so the USB-C charger will know that the cable plugged into it is a legacy A to C cable, and not actually connect its VBUS.

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