What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones? | Hacker News Reader

What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?

lumafield.com

260 pointsrozenmd101 comments

It smelled fishy right from the start.

It is obvious that energy to weight ratio is one of the most important characteristic of power banks. Reputable manufacturers will optimize for this, and if they are particularly good at it, they can ask for a premium.

If a generic powerbank beats the big names, sells for cheaper and is associated with a brand that has no reason to be associated with powerbanks, then it is very likely that the weight savings come from omitting something important rather than an optimized design. If the specs are true that is.

I think a lot of the quality issues described in the article could be fixed without substantially affecting the weight though, couldn't they?

Probably, however, it makes me think of the Galaxy Note 7 problem. For those who don't remember, these phones had a battery problem that can cause them to catch fire, resulting in one of the most infamous smartphone recall campaign.

The cause of the problem is that the electrodes were pinched inside the pouch cell, in some cases causing a short circuit and a fire. To put it simply, it was too tight in there.

So here it is possible that these defects are a result of having too small safety margins for how these batteries are manufactured.

In addition, they only focused on the electrode alignment issue, because it is visible on their CT scans, they didn't study the electronics, the casing, the connectors, etc... There may be some other issues there.

Say using 20% more electrolyte would prevent insufficient spacing and separation of the plates. You get a safer/higher quality product but it's heavier. And maintaining the same safety with less electrolyte would involve higher development costs. There's a sliding scale where something is just too cheap/dangerous to sell at high volume to a general audience.

Hopefully these high quality CT scans show the battery makers that people are going to notice when too many corners have been cut, even if there isn't a flood of reports of their product causing fires (yet).

Yeah. I remember seeing the circuit board for official Xbox controllers vs cheap 3rd party ones. The official controllers had about 10x as many components. I don’t know what all that stuff does, but I’m sure it all contributes to the controllers feeling and working better.

I wonder the same thing about chargers. I’ve recently moved from a 3rd party charger for my camera batteries I got on amazon to an official Sony charger. The 3rd party charger seemed to work great - but it was practically weightless. The Sony charger is clearly a way more complex (and more expensive) product. I don’t know if all that complexity is actually worth it. What does it all do? But I assume so.

I stick to Anker for cables, batteries and chargers. I'm sure they've had their own issues but everything I've bought feels well made. The only one I've had an issue with was a USB-C to everything else adaptor which weirdly stopped working after a week or two. I was surprised to find that their support was based in the UK (Cardiff if memory serves) and very efficiently processed a return and replacement.

I've watched Big Clive's videos for too long to trust no-name Chinese things with anything involving mains potential or energy storage.

I bought myself an anker powerbank because of all the rave around them. Mine behaves incredibly strange. Charged in seconds, then not containing half a phone charge. For a 20.000 mAh this was really disappointing. Probably a one of but still leaves the impression that this was looked at because it ruined the price for others.

That's obviously a dud cell. Contact support if it's not several years old.

Had a tangential issue with an Anker power bank (screen was sometimes showing bogus charge essentially), and can confirm Anker E-Mail support is pretty good in my experience, they sent me a second unit (even though the first is still functional and I still use it just fine to this day), free of charge after a brief exchange.

Might be worth a shot.

Okay thanks, I’ll try!

They recently did a massive recall on a line of power banks for being fire hazards. Make sure it’s not one of them.

They also did a recall on speakers (under their soundcore subbrand) for the same thing. I'm not sure if this is good or bad - they proactively contacted me to let me know about the recall.

Yeah same. I’ve bought Anker power adapters, cables, power banks, headphones. All of them have done incredibly well. They’re not immune to issues, because sometimes their suppliers let them down. But if that happens they’ll replace your product for free.

IKEA 45W and 65W Sjoss chargers and braided cables are also good. Pretty cheap too. There's also a 30W charger, but it has cheaper, presumably poorer quality components.

Those chargers have nice specs too. They support PD PPS (programmable power supply).

> but everything I've bought feels well made

No comment on Anker quality, but the "feels well made" feeling is something that has been known and gamed (for example, by including dummy weights in devices) in the hardware industry since forever. It is relatively unrelated to things you as a consumer may actually care about (like adherence to safety standards or amount of engineering effort put into the longevity of a product).

> No comment on Anker quality, but the "feels well made" feeling is something that has been known and gamed (for example, by including dummy weights in devices) in the hardware industry since forever.

Yup but for Anker devices you have a lot of nerds picking them apart on Youtube. If Anker were to engage in shady practices, the uproar and resulting shitstorm would be on a scale that could tank the entire company.

IMHO, Anker is one of the last remaining (funny, the company isn't that old) "brands" in the original sense.

That said, the last two Anker power pack models I've bought were both recalled for sometimes exploding/melting down in use. Once I'll give them, but twice? In a row?

You could also count recalls as a higher quality signal: QA, people testing, how they handle the recall & replacement, etc. Way better than not hearing anything because nobody's looking. I'm skeptical Anker is doing crazy-unique things with their manufacturing, vs. an OEM manufacturer cutting corners to save pennies.

A lot of big manufacturers have had recalls (for things like laptop batteries, vehicle batteries, the infamous Hoverboards, etc) so I wonder what Anker's batting average is compared to others. It's clearly a hard problem and squeezing in the level of density that customers expect means potentially thinner safety margins.

If they had better QA (and QC) they wouldn't need a recall.

One of mine bought in 2017 was recalled and replaced, which impressed me: how many of the word salad brands of today would even be around to handle a recall if their devices decide to spontaneously combust?

14 years old is sadly pretty good by tech standards.

I'll be the voice of dissent here. I've heard nonstop praise for Anker online. Bought a couple keyboards and adapters from them and they all failed within a year. My wife got a mobile battery from them and that ended up dying in under a year as well. I'd be willing to write off one bad item, but I've had no good experiences and the pattern is clear to me.

Did you buy them off Amazon, or from a reputable reseller? I ask because Amazon mixes third party inventory together with first party inventory, so it's impossible to tell if you're getting a genuine product or a counterfeit.

They are on the way of ending commingling, thankfully.

https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-amazon...

this is great news, but:

>To avoid commingling, sellers have long had the option to apply a unique, seller-specific Amazon barcode — known as an FNSKU (Fulfillment Network Stock Keeping Unit) — to every product. This ensures their inventory is tracked and shipped separately.

... is that really all that was necessary all along? I can see that being a problem for, like, 10 cents worth of stuff, but a lot of the commingling complaints have been around expensive items. It's not zero cost of course, but for your average $30+ thing it doesn't seem very difficult to justify.

Amazon charges you for the “privilege”

Requiring seperate Amazon only sku's (especially if they need it to be printed on the product label) is a giant PITA.

Definitely worth doing, but keeping up with all of Amazon's compliance requirements requires a fairly robust logistics system.

Unless things have changed, Amazon is the official and only reseller for Anker products in Canada and probably many other countries.

It's mediocre trash. But in relative terms... the bar is so low now and the market flooded with randomly named fly-by-night operators that even mediocre trash stands out as exceptional just by existing long enough with a consistently spelled brand name to not be perceived as a fly-by-night operator.

I feel like anker combines mediocre quality control with pretty good customer service. A lot of the praise I hear from them includes something like "it died but they replaced it for free".

FWIW, after reading a few comments below you, I discovered that their usual warranty is 18-24 months. I've got a power bank that I had assumed was out of warranty (> 1 yr) but I'm still within 18 months so back to them it will go! You might find an equally pleasant surprise.

I still have an old Anker 20,000 mAh power bank that works fine. Might not have the same charge ability as it once had but I can still get 2-3 charges out of it for a Pixel 8 Pro. Has 4 LED's to display charge level and a button that flashes them when you want to check status.

I bought a UGREEN bank on a recommendation and it was a buggy mess. It discharged more than it should when charging and when plugged in it rapidly charged to 100% which was sus. Graphical menu was weird and displayed ambiguous graphic messages to avoid text. These things feel like time bombs.

I also still have an old 20,000 mAh Anker power bank, and my only issue with it is that the micro-USB charging port is starting to wear out. For the rest, it's still brilliant, and it holds its charge very well while in storage.

I have an older Anker power bank that would be considered giant by today's standards. I bought it for the specific feature of it having a 2.4mm power port that can be switched between 6v and 12v. It was one of the very few power banks that I've seen with this feature.

I call Anker the Oxo (kitchen gadget company) of the tech world. Does Oxo make the absolute best gadgets or tools? Nope. But they are among the best designed and made and typically the best bang for your buck hitting above its weight. Anker is similar, it may not be the absolute best of the best but for the money you get solid design and build and rarely would you purchase something you need and be disappointed.

I haven't used any of their power banks, but have used a LOT of chargers from Anker and UGreen over the years and most have run without any issues for years. Getting good cables for charging vs. data/video is a different story though.

Currently have a relatively high watt USB PD charger in my livingroom and handles everything I've thrown at it including laptops, phones, tablets, earbuds, etc.

Seems most of the issues in these threads are with the power bank (portable battery chargers).

Not that it changes your point but the funny thing is that Anker was a no name Chinese brand on Amazon like UGREEN back then.

And like UGREEN, it was noticeably better than the other Chinese no-name brands.

> Not that it changes your point but the funny thing is that Anker was a no name Chinese brand on Amazon like UGREEN back then.

They company was one of the first to construct a business plan around the idea of "Storefront and logistics will be handled by Amazon."

However, Anker always did their own engineering rather than just being a rebadger of Alibaba.

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence.

Anker is a Chinese manufacturer and Alibaba is a market place. Why would rebadging Alibaba mean there? Outsourcing design and production while only being an exporter?

They already are in China. It's highly likely they outsource part of their production process and supply chain. They just have good quality control like any other serious manufacturer.

I've had a couple issues, but their support replaced them pretty quickly no questions asked

The same Anker that recalled over a million devices across five product lines this June? https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/06/30/anker-power-...

There's widespread issues with power banks in China, with a new CCC certification required, and recently something about upgraded enforcement because previously certified devices having been found to have issues.

I'd rather go with a brand that does proper costly recalls over one that just lets everybody keep the dangerous products around.

The difference here is that Anker will recall a faulty product. Lesser known brands will not. If you know of another brand that has a better safety and reliability record, please share.

Toyota is the largest automaker, still has a lot of gravitas, and they've had some recalls that were doozies.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Unless they become a pattern.

It may be their branding but anker has gained some trust despite some issues… I ordered a battery bank that was recalled, sent it back for a new one. Then a few months later the replacement battery bank was recalled which is not great. That being said I do trust they will recall a protect and notify me when there are issues with their products which is reassuring.

I have an Anker powerbank. It will no longer charge using the USB-C port. I have an older Belkin that is certainly less stylish but has a higher capacity and still works perfectly, including charging via USB-C, so I'm not inclined to buy Anker again.

Of course neither of us has a lot of first hand data so it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions.

Have you checked the warranty?

It was bought in another country, it's not valuable enough to bother with.

I moved away from Anker to UGREEN following Anker’s Eufy using unencrypted feeds and sending data to the cloud with no user consent, which was bad, but their gaslighting response to the tech media and overall handling of the situation made me completely lose all trust in them. Maybe they’ve gotten better since, happy to be proven wrong.

UGREEN fit that niche of ‘tech products that are generally of quite good quality’ for me fine. They feel like neither an upgrade or a downgrade to the Anker stuff I still have.

I highly recommend avoiding their cables. Their 100W rated cables fail when connected to to 60W chargers (of thier own brand). I had tons of issues with devices intermittently charging or continuously connecting and disconnecting. Narrowed it down to Anker cables. Replaced them all and have had no issues since.

The more interesting thing is that they were actually pulled. Did the manufacturer send a recall notice? (And if so why didn't they send a statement). I can't imagine Amazon themselves taking any action since they allow other junk to stay up

Why these batteries got all the attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135

FWIW, the Haribo charger seems to be rather well made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_t5nvFcoY (26:50, by ZeroBrain, a German YouTuber that disassembles electronic devices)

Well.. it was probably too good to be true. I'm a hiker - and was in on that first wave of purchasers. For $24, the 2000mAh battery was pretty light for what it is - 10.16oz. (more capacity for what I usually need) In comparison, I think my nitecore NB10000 is around 5.98oz for around $50, which is one of the better ones out there. On the cheaper side, the INIU 1000mAh is around 5.96oz for about $26 which does OK. I see amazon already pulled the page to order the haribo battery pack.

I also picked up their earbuds, which - for $11, sound and work far better than I expected.

I'd be interested to know if a headphone battery can suffer thermal runaway.

If the surface area to volume ratio is high enough, however badly it is made doesn't matter - it's not gonna catch fire anyway.

If that's the case, there is no safety issue with the headphones - a 0.5mm safety margin either end of a battery which is only 6mm long is insane anyway - and I don't fault the engineers for looking for other ways to get equivalent safety without compromising in capacity.

Batteries that undercut the market price have serious flaws... who would have thought!

FWIW, I have one of the Haribo products, the 65W 3-port GaN charger. No battery to fail. I’ve run the charger standard enumeration test with a ct-3 and it supports everything except for VOOC. I’ve also load tested it with an adjustable usb load tester and it matches all the specs as advertised. It seems like they probably use the same controller as the Anker 3 port charger, but would need to see the teardowns. Otherwise, I’ll continue to recommend it.

I love the summary at the top. Cool thing to have.

How or why does a candy company decide to electronics? That's the mystery I need an answer to. What's next, Durex pizzas?

Duracell gummies (AA battery shaped) would be pretty cool

That would be incredibly dangerous. Infants and small children would get used to the sight of adults eating batteries and before long, one would end up swallowing an actual battery and get seriously injured.

> How or why does a candy company decide to electronics? That's the mystery I need an answer to.

A few years ago, Haribo was in a serious crisis [1] - they didn't catch up on competition when it comes to new trends such as vegan candy, and a few years prior they had dismissed their marketing face Thomas Gottschank [2]. The closure of the Saxony plant also seriously soured relations with local politicians [3]. Some of all of that is attributed to the death of Hans Riegel in 2013 [4].

I don't have any particular insights into Haribo, but what I do know is that (especially struggling) brands tend to go towards making money off of the brand by licensing out rights... some of such deals tend to go well for everyone involved (see e.g. anything Lego touches), some run okay-ish (e.g. that's how you end with a "CAT" rugged phone made by Bullitt [5] - the things were rugged, but the performance was abysmal), and some end up in a massive clusterfuck like the Haribo batteries.

[1] https://taz.de/Haribo-Werk-im-Osten-vor-Aus/!5755771/

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/thomas-gottschalk-tren...

[3] https://www.rnd.de/promis/werksschliessung-in-sachsen-thomas...

[4] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/haribo-chef-ha...

[5] https://www.heise.de/news/Outdoor-Smartphones-Bullitt-Group-...

It is just a generic battery you can buy e.g. in South Korea (for about $10 to $15) and some company got the license from Haribo to slap their branding on it through some crowdfunding project.

Well obviously. But someone at Haribo still decided to get in to that market.

It doesn't seem like it was Haribo that started it off, but rather the company HK DC GLOBAL got a license to use the Haribo branding to market the powerbank through this crowdfund:

https://www.makuake.com/project/haribo_dcglobal/

Durex adhesive tape?

Durex socks.

I'm curious how the cost of performing these CT scans compared to the profit reaped by Haribo while the batteries were selling.

Lumafield sells CT scanners, so these posts serve double duty as advertising for their capabilities. Given how many times their previous posts have been shared I'm sure the ROI is great.

This is basically good marketing content for Lumafield that sell the CT scanners. Cost to them is almost nothing, just opportunity cost of doing something else on the tool.

I’ve seen airline training videos about in flight battery fires. But I’ve never considered the risk of ear buds catching on fire. Normally, you should feel them heating up before they catch but they might just blow, that would be very sore. Also if you’re sleeping with buds in you could end up with a fire before you woke up.

The thought of a runaway thermal reaction in a cell that’s sitting in your ear, albeit a small one, is pretty sobering.

I would avoid anything exceed 100 watt-hours (which this does) as you can't fly with it. I do a lot of backocuntry bike trips so flying isn't the primary concern, but I'm not going to own multiples. Anker and other reputable brands tend to design around these type of use-cases which helps.

Pouch cells is interesting - I would've expected cylindrical cells in all but the smallest of battery banks. The lack of heavy steel casings might explain the high gravimetric density which was attractive to hikers.

Prismatic cells have an (obviously) higher packing density. They also tend to have better discharge performance.

If your goal is weight, pouch cells use mylar or aluminum for the pouch. Cylindrical cells are typically steel I think?

This is a shame, really. I got a few of these power packs and they have a nice design. I'd be happy to pay 2-3x as much and not have my house at risk of burning down.

not sure what is more interesting, the detailed information on lithium battery construction, or how they got a CT(cat) scanner, or the idea of having an industrial cat scanner around. those batteries were bizarely cheap and there was prior suggestion that these(others) were actualy fake with empty space or filler, which isn't the case, and all in all they just need to up the precision of there automated processes. nice piece of journalism.

> how they got a CT(cat) scanner

I think they are becoming a lot more prevalent in labs, these days. They aren't the monster devices that many of us may be (unfortunately) familiar with.

They can be a lot smaller when neither dose nor movement is a factor in imaging.

> how they got a CT(cat) scanner

Lumafield is a CT company: https://www.lumafield.com/

Yup! And their whole social media “thing” is doing these kinds of on-topic analysis of (mostly consumer) devices

Good use of an advertising budget, much better than classic ads.

One of the few advertising campaigns that I'll happily read/watch, despite recognizing that it's all advertisement.

It's like a highbrow nerd version of "Will it blend?".

CT scanning is widely used for analysis of batteries to determine safety and failure analysis.

Gummy bears?

My indulgent aunt once let me get a five pound bag of them from one of those Scoop Your Own candy stations. I left them in the rear window of her VW Rabbit for the better part of a summer day and they melted into a horrible blob that scarred me for life. Not sure why this Gummi Bear post is giving me flashbacks to that.

But yes, those folks. Check the product shot in the article for their logo.

Good thing you didn’t try and drink the hot gummy bear juice… turns out, molten sugar is surprisingly brutal

a struggling company will often license their name without much fuss

struggling to the tune €2B/yr

This reminds me of when pvs-studio would post every single analysis they would make of popular C++ projects. It was a fun novelty back in the day. Just like these scans, which now are boring and overplayed.

Has anyone reported issues with this battery, from what I've seen online everyone has been happy with its performance. Maybe the uneveness called out by the article is not enough to matter. Not following the industry standard is not necessarily the tipping point of everything going wrong.

"Well the batteries haven't caught on fire yet. I'm sure they're fine, despite the serious manufacturing defects that increase the risk of a fire substantially."

You realize they stopped selling them, right? They don't do this for "nothing to worry about."

>increase the risk of a fire substantially

The article doesn't state by how much it increased.

>You realize they stopped selling them, right?

I don't think Amazon is an authority on battery safety and are airing on the side of safety than making an actual judgements on the safety of it.

No they are definitely not. You’re completely correct! They are, instead, an authority on what might get their asses sued to the moon and back and apparently found the cost/ benefit of selling this popular product to be negative. Any ideas what might cause that?

In the past, Amazon didn't care about dangerous products until lots of houses had been burned down by them, so if they ban a product it must be really bad.

They don't care about safety, life, or limb. Amazon didn't enforce the ban of literal suicide kits until legislation was in the works.

It's quite clear: until it threatens to blow away their "we're not an intermediary- We're a service provider." Smokescreen they don't care.

That lower than .5 mm margin on those edges may not have caused fires - yet - but if nothing is done about it then one day they will. That's an accident waiting to happen.

> The article doesn't state by how much it increased.

This is a really strange response. How would you go about quantifying this when you don't care to add to their profit by buying a bunch of them, and can't get the product anyway because it was pulled for safety reasons?

>when you don't care to add to their profit

I was going to, but it was delisted. I didn't expect that to happen so I was waiting until the next time I was going to travel before ordering it.

In regards to quantifying the risk I would expect there to have been prior research on the dangers of lithium ion batteries that could be referenced due to it being such a common battery chemistry.

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