A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is good, but not quite the best (2012) | Hacker News Reader

A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is good, but not quite the best (2012)

righto.com

84 pointspwg56 comments

FYI, this is from 2012, although I would be interested in a similar analysis done today. At a guess, name-brand third-party chargers (Anker, Belkin, etc) are probably more than "good enough" at this point, but it would be neat to see that quantified.

AllThingsOnePlace on YouTube [1] has been doing a good job of reviewing performance characteristics of many different chargers, although he usually doesn't do teardowns.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@AllThingsOnePlace

>AllThingsOnePlace on YouTube [1] has been doing a good job of reviewing performance characteristics of many different chargers

I watched one of his reviews recently[1], and while it's true that he reviews performance characteristics, it's unclear whether it's something I should care about. For instance, he talks about how that particular charger has a low power factor. Sure, having a high power factor[2] is nice in theory, but is that something I should care about? Judging from the wikipedia article it's more of an issue for the grid itself, and I'm not personally billed for it. I care far more about how much noise/ripple is being outputted by the charge, or whether it's going to damage my electronics, but that's doesn't seem to be evaluated.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uasxk9HBAtE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor

Low power factor can make other devices nearby unstable by introducing noise or uneven ac cycles. Its overblown, sure, but tends to be a reliable indicator of overall quality as most engineers will only optimize for it with higher quality designs. Lower quality designs can often be dirtier and shorter lasting due to feedback, inefficiency and parts omission.

Depends on where you are, and who your power company is. Some places have started charging you more for apparent power draw due to poor power factor.

ChargerLAB[0] does a lot of tear downs but I can’t vouch for their value.

0: https://youtube.com/@ChargerLAB

I remember when this article came out originally because I was surprised to see a random charger I owned as the winner. I still have this HP touchpad charger and a decade later it still works great.

Named brands are not necessarily good. In mid-2022 I tried to consolidate my chargers (Lots came with phones/pads etc. one 4 ports, and one 6 ports in particular. Most of those came with devices support PD and are 18w at least. However, those two multi-ports ones can only do 5v/2.4a max. Brand names were hidden here just to avoid being taken as ads) into one single charge station. So, I expected to get one with 8 ports and could do 100w at least, USB-C/PD would be desired but not a must. I did not realize I just started a saga. I had very positive experience with some generic single port PD chargers, so I decided to start from generic ones first. Not quite a surprise, none of 3 met my expectations, mostly because of false marking. The worst one doubled the current it was delivering. Others had too much voltage drop, e.g. with 1700mA load, the voltage dropped to around 4.8 etc.. I thought I cheaped out, so decided to try big brands. So the only one I found was with 10 ports, 100w total, 2.4a max per port. It came with the charging station and a huge power brick. To be fair, the power brick was actually decent as when idle, the power consumption could not be registered by my power meter. But the charging station was a total disappointment. It chewed 5w when idle. When with around 1700ma load, the voltage dropped to below 4.6v. To my surprise, the single port generic ones I had could actually maintain the voltage to about 4.8v, one was even able to keep at about 5.1v.

Eventually I gave up and returned all of them as I had exhausted all the available options but none of them were close to my expectations.

Other USB Charger review repositories:

https://lygte-info.dk/info/ChargerIndex%20UK.html

https://www.chargerlab.com/category/reviews/reviews-chargers...

Both are great. I especially love the Oscilloscope analysis of the noise characteristics and safety review on lygte-info.dk

I actually kept my HP Touchpad charging bricks (cylinders?) because they always seemed really solid. They are still useful for all of my Pi stuff as well.

Memories! I have 3 of those long cylinders from my old TouchPad too, and a stubby one from the Veer. Solid 5V2A chargers, but boy do they stick out.

I'm still using mine to power a qi charger. Everything about the HP Touchpad was overbuilt, I got mine during the firesale.

I missed the firesale but my old employer didn’t. They tried using them as POS devices and that never happened. One day they were just like “Get rid of these”. I played with cyanogenmod until all the batteries swelled up and I got rid of them.

1. This is from 2012.

2. No less importantly, I see a bunch of phone-vendor chargers, and am not seeing many of the most popular charger brands: Blitzwolf, Baseus, Kuulaa, USLion, UGreen, etc.

I’m curious about the brands you mention, as I haven’t heard of them too much. I usually just shell out for Anker stuff since it’s performed well for me.

Would you say they’re all typically good quality? Or am I reading you wrong and you’d like to see analysis of how bad they might be despite being popular?

I would recommend: http://reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware

Apart from top tier brands like Apple, Belkin etc which are generally good all of the others tend to be more mixed. Some products are amazing and best in class others a bit average.

What multiport charger options are the top of the line now? For example I saw [1] and bought one but then cancelled the order because there was no precise shipping details (waited more than 5 days for shipping information after the payment).

[1] https://eu.ugreen.com/collections/gan-chargers/products/ugre...

I have that exact one and it has been solid given the power it is putting out.

Satechi just released a competitor which isn't shipping yet but is a good brand:

https://satechi.net/products/6-port-gan-charger?variant=4019...

Those seem to be the most popular on aliexpress. I'm assuming you've mostly been exposed to advertisements in US/European media?

Anyway, I've bought a few Blitzwolf and Baseus chargers and have been satisfied with them, but I've never done any charge-time measurement, stress testing, exact voltage testing etc.

> I'm assuming you've mostly been exposed to advertisements in US/European media?

Spot on! I'll definitely be taking a peek at them. Not like I've seen much actual testing on Anker and the like, so a little anecdotal evidence might be enough for me to try out something cheap. Thanks :)

The article dates from before most (if not all) of those companies were founded. For example, Baseus is from 2011, and Blitzwolf is from 2015.

> not seeing many of the most popular charger brands: Blitzwolf, Baseus, Kuulaa, USLion, UGreen, etc.

I see that we’re rapidly approaching the point where the only remaining words available to be trademarked are “Popplers” and “Tasticules.”

Probably could use a (2012) label.

The USB situation continues to deteriorate. We needed some usb hubs that would charge a device (that we are prototyping) at a decent rate and at the same time allow us to talk to it via usb. Found a grand total of one, everything else only had separate fast charge and data ports. And even that one would only charge at 12.5W, nothing does USB PD (to a downstream port) and data at the same time. Not only that, but it was really hard to tell what a hub supports from the specs (plenty will charge an upstream port, eg your laptop, but not a downstream port, but this is hard too tell from the description)

Acroname has several, though they aren't cheap. Their S99-USBHUB-3C-PRO does 100W (20V 5A) PD to each downstream port and 10Gbps data.

Edit: And if you're just analyzing one device and don't need a true hub, TotalPhase has some very capable analyzers. I've used their "Beagle USB 480 Power Protocol Analyzer", it captures USB frames and monitors voltage & current. Very handy for low-level USB stack debugging. Also very pricey. Used it in combination with a 2GHz bandwidth oscilloscope, which is even pricier, try not to have to troubleshoot USB signal integrity issues it gets expensive fast.

This is pretty useful information to me, but I was actually commenting that even ordinary fast charging of devices on usb hubs at the same time as data seems to be pretty rare. The only one we found that could do it was a startech HB30C5A2CSC.

What's "ordinary fast charging"? USB-PD 3 or USB-PD 2 or the older Qualcomm QuickCharge? Because the older Qualcomm versions (very common, pre-dates USB-PD 3) uses the data lines to communicate and thus requires a multiplexer to disable the normal data connection for it to work. USB PD 2 works similarly to Qualcomm.

There are a lot of "USB-C" devices (including hubs) that only actually use USB 2.0 signalling, and don't support USB-PD 3.

Sorry, wasn't being clear. I just mean the USB standard maximum before PD, 1.5A at 5V Most hubs only support 500mA at max on a data port.

That'd be USB BC 1.2 spec. The phrase to look for there is "CDP" or "Charging Downstream Port". There are quite a few options for this, though most hubs with USB-A ports do only provide Standard Downstream Ports (500mA max) and often there are only one or two CDPs on the hub (with the rest SDPs).

I think I went through a similar saga and unfortunately I had to give up as none was even close to my expectations. What I was after was only a charger with 8 or more ports.

Not PD, but we've had good results otherwise with an Orancgeck i10. However probably what you're getting at is that the total power output of these devices is quite limited, the i10 only gives 60W in total, each port can do 12W but it will have to limit some if everything tries to draw at once.

If you like this kind of stuff you'd like BigClive on YT, who does lots of teardowns of cheap chargers and other stuff.

The IKEA one was very good he said

I can confirm about IKEA chargers and power supplies: they have a high quality/cost ratio, plus a reasonably clean output. They also rebrand really good LED lamps, and batteries; maybe not like Eneloops but still good quality while a lot cheaper.

10+ years outdated

This is a much better roundup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa4SLWXtwi0

I still have several of those HP Touchpad chargers. After I originally read this article years ago I tracked a bunch down when the Touchpad was having its big sell off. A little limited by today's standards but all of them still working really well.

[2012]

Can't see how this could comparison from 2012 could still be relevant with the advent of GaN chargers.

GaN has also had a big impact on the size and thermal wattage budgets/waste heat of a whole bunch of types of microwave and millimetre wave Tx power amplifiers, anywhere from 4 GHz to 120 GHz.

If you look at the current state of the art for a "money is no object" manpack size VSAT/SNG terminal for geostationary use in a random very hard to reach area, such as might be owned by CNN or the BBC, the GaN Tx RF chain BUC/SSPA is remarkably small now compared to ten, twelve, fourteen years ago.

ah yes the dreaded "request for quote" pricing.. how much do one of these puppies cost? $20k?

if you have to ask...

way, way more than $20k

as your geostationary-transponder-kHz using SNG terminal gets smaller you are still forced into using really rudimentary modulation so the other calculation is the $ per month for a dedicated piece of transponder space lease, or the even higher costs for occasional-use transponder space.

What aspect of migrating to GaN PA's degrades the link budget for this application?

GaN doesn’t really change the link budget (it does have different compression characteristics than GaAs, but you just back off a little), the OP said as the size of the terminal gets smaller, so I assume they’re talking about the aperture size. You can compensate somewhat for the lost antenna gain with a higher power PA but depending on the antenna pattern, you might hit the ESD (energy spectral density) limit earlier.

I see, the reduction of antenna gain with terminal miniaturization makes sense. I didn't know if the noise figure of a GaN amplifier was worse.

Why would a change in the antenna radiation pattern limit the power spectral density, is it a regulatory limit?

Smaller diameter parabolic antennas have wider center beam peak gain area in focal axis, and less precise dead on aiming at a specific satellite. Something like a 90cm flyaway is worse than a 120cm flyaway.

In general the radiation pattern envelope (RPE) gets worse when viewed on an azimuth and elevation plot chart as the circular parabolic (or elliptical offset parabola) gets smaller.

Same general idea of why you might be able to successfully coordinate a fcc part 101 fdd band plan link terrestrially in a major urban area with a 120cm antenna with tighter RPE than same theoretical link if you submit it with cheaper antennas.

The link budget is still often the same just the terminals are even smaller now for the smallest flyaways and manlpacks (expecting to be used in a very hot ku band spot beam) and the BUC is half the size it used to be. Cuts down in equipment transport bulk and weight.

Yeah, I got a tiny 65W GaN charger with USB-C/A ports that charges practically everything I own and is so much smaller than my Apple 60W charger. I just throw it in my bag and don't even notice it's there until I need it.

GaN is great, but still pretty expensive.

The price has plummeted over the past 18 months. Enough to be responsible for the entire "inflation is receding" statistics.

OK, fallen a lot (like 75% over the last 18 months) but the adaptor volume may not be enough to move the stats. And power adaptors are probably not part of the basket of goods.

Not at all, I think mine was about $35 CAD, with 2 Type-C, 1 Type A, and foldable AC prongs.

They aren't all that expensive. You can get a 65W GaN charger from a reputable brand for $30 - $40 now.

I would like to see a recent comparison. Even 2020 or 2021 would be okay.

Is there somewhere I can read a moderately technical breakdown of what a GaN charger is, and the benefits it has? I have been seeing mentions of this but nothing explaining why it is something I want, so I have not felt motivated to buy one.

Here’s a more in-depth explanation: https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/10-things-to-know-about...

But the main takeaway in terms of power adapters and immediate benefit to buyers is smaller bricks delivering more power at a time. The big chungus 60W bricks are now little chungus bricks.

Gallium nitride has roughly 3x the bandgap of silicon. You can move the same amount of power through a much smaller charger or move much more power through a similarly sized charger.

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