We’ve all been tempted by those too-cheap-to-believe $10 packs of charging cables. Cables feel like a thing that should be cheap, and the prices charged by first-party manufacturers like Apple and Samsung can be hard to justify. But be warned: those cheap charging cables aren’t worth the trouble.
In the video above, I go over best practices when shopping around for replacement charging cables. It’s relatively easy to avoid fake or knock-off cables as long as you stick to MFi certified cables for your Apple devices and trusted brands like Anker or Belkin…
MacDailyNews Take: The cheap cables break and end up costing you more than if you bought a quality cable instead. Along with Apple cables that come with Apple products, we extensively use and highly recommend Anker cables and, for that matter, Anker chargers, especially Anker’s new fast GaN chargers.
I once bought a cheap cable (equivalent of 2 bucks) that was broken after one or two days. Literally.
That’s when cheap is actually quite expensive.
Yes, there are times when one thinks they are penny wise, but end up being pound foolish, as the English would say. “You get what you pay for” Is another way of putting it!
AND environmentally unfriendly to boot. Cost to produce, package, ship, and then trash substandard electronics, especially cheap Androids using years-old tech that can never be updated and break within months, is horrendous.
Sometimes they get recycled, but you hear plenty about how terrible the non-Apple foreign electronics recycling facilities are.
Don’t be a w*nker – buy a genuine Anker!
If Apple mifi licencing wasn’t so obscene, unsuspecting consumers would not be tempted by Lightning cables that cost about what a durable quality USB cable costs. Apple is too greedy.
You must really enjoy zapping your iPhone with rogue electricity then. Wish I was as rich as you, “rest of the storyographer!”
Yeah, I mean after plunking down the dough for a $4 iPhone, where do they expect folks to find the money to buy a $20 cable!!
Wait, the iPhone is several hundred dollars so it’s actually kinda insane that anyone would have a problem paying for a cable that would protect that investment??
Understood.
Yep, it is understood that you are wrong… again.
Too bad no one here has mentioned the underlying issue, which is Amazon choosing to not vet their merchants, which enables the extensive sales of counterfeit products.
I would think more that it’s Apple supplying cables that are not very durable and then charging very high prices to replace them with another of the same Apple cables. Every one of my Apple supplied cables for my iPods and iPhones and even the power supplies on my MacBook Air have been replaced with higher quality aftermarket cables for less than the lousy Apple cables. Just don’t go too cheap on the aftermarket cables.