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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

Anker should focus on its core business which is batteries. Recently they had multiple safety recalls for batteries. If they can't get batteries right anymore, which is their core business, they can't conceivably get anything else right.

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Afaik they have always been a marketing company putting their name on no-name chinese stuff they didn't design. They did earn some points for checking on quality and not just branding anything, and sometimes paid for better engineering if good couldn't be found - this is valuable of course.

This has been my experience, and I've found the price seems to reasonably reflect the quality one can expect.

I've had a few Anker power related devices, those pushing £100+ seem to be of better quality, I recently bought a new GAN charger for ~£80 and it's decent, but I also bought a 20000 mAh power bank on sale for ~£15 and it was one of the recalled models.

Their cables generally seem to be pretty reliable too, but I draw the line at "accessories" and wouldn't buy anything "intelligent" from them, cameras, other IoT devices etc.

I wouldn't buy cables from them. Their 100W cables dont work even with their own 100W chargers. Bought multiple at different times, since I'd been using them with 60W chargers before. All of them had the same issue with dropping out with 100W chargers from Anker or other brands. I ended up throwing them all out and getting 100W cables from another brand, and those have been quite reliable.

Hmm that's not great. I don't have a 100W charger and my laptop is the only thing that I have that could draw that much, the 140W GAN charger I got from them is a total and only does 65W per C port.

I'll keep it in mind if I decide to grab a 100W charger, thanks for the heads up.

I guess we really can't be sure from product to product with Anker and will just have to take each product on reviews or test and return.

I think their gambit has more been "power", being battery packs, chargers, cables, etc. They are technically not a battery tech company, they assemble 3rd party batteries into consumer products.

The Apple of power packs?

There is a market for that, if they manage to design their devices properly and avoid safety issues in the future. A brand that people could trust would have value, if the customers were reasonable confident to get well-designed batteries, PV panels or adaptors without worrying too much about the quality of the components inside.

I know I’d rather pay a small premium to get good hardware than gamble with bargain bin no-names on Amazon. That being said I am not sure they are quite there. I’ve never had any issue with their chargers but the string of batteries recalls is not encouraging.

The fact that they do product recalls should bias you in favour of them. Other brands simply don't do them at all, and the reason is not because nothing ever goes wrong with them.

Battery business is cutthroat and there's already more reliable and better performing alternatives to Anker (CIO for instance, Aohi is also getting there). And brands like Ugreen are going after the "household name" slot as well.

Diversifying is a pretty existential in that market IMHO.

Your comment is the kind of MBA-school nonsense that destroys companies because they can't get one thing (anything) right. There are people who are willing to pay for good quality and capacity, who don't want the cheap $20 battery. Anker's bigger higher-quality batteries have had no recalls.

The Zolo 20.000mAh model just got recalled, so not exactly true.

I would not consider 20000 mAh to be high end. Consider Anker's laptop power bank with 25000 mAh, and there are similar models.

This happened because cell vendor Amprius changed the battery design and did not notify the power bank manufacturers.

Hardly seems an Anker issue.

I never claimed it was, just that they did have a recall. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723508

The names don't seem to resonate to you. CIO is a japanese company specialized in batteries, chargers and charging cables, and they're consistantly outranking Anker in third party tests. And their products usually cost more than the equivalent Anker ones.

https://connectinternationalone.co.jp/

Aohi is in a similar niche, but with more attention to design and high capacity models

https://iaohi.com/

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