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As one possible example, see Ken Shirriff's teardowns of a cheap USB power adapter: http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...

And an Apple adapter: http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-...

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Most of that had nothing to do with Apple not cutting corners.

The Apple device is UL listed, so they can't cut the same corners the Chinese manufacturer can. The same is true of any UL listed USB power adapter.

Very few UL power adapters are as good as the ones Apple makes. I ran a bunch of my USB charger "cubes" at medium load and looked at their output on my o-scope one time. Most of the UL listed adapters had way more noise than the Apple one, even at just 500mA. There was one other manufacturer's charger that was as good as the Apple charger, but I can't remember off the top of my head who it was... I think it might have been HP or Asus or something.

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