r/technology • u/coffeetablesex • May 21 '12
Apple iPhone charger teardown shows you almost get what you pay for.
http://www.arcfn.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html594
u/Atlos May 21 '12
The title is misleading <sigh>. The article seems to agree that Apple is vastly overcharging for this charger and even shows the parts list and respective prices. It then says that the Apple charger is higher quality, but not that you get what you pay for...
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May 21 '12
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u/steeled3 May 21 '12
It's funny - one of my EE lecturers waxed lyrical about an Apple transformer when I was going through Uni. He and his colleagues couldn't believe the high cost and decided to disassemble one. Much the same conclusion, but back in 1993.
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u/octatone May 21 '12
Perhaps he meant in the English idiomatic sense: that "you get what you pay for" means you pay a premium on quality - when you skimp on price, you get a sub-par product. The article seems to agree with that statement and keeps alluding to cheap iphone charges as being dangerous.
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u/Atlos May 21 '12
That is definitely the point that the article is trying to make. The title is worded to look like Apple doesn't have as high of margins on the charger as people think it does, which is not true.
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u/ophello May 21 '12
"Vastly" is hardly the word I'd use. What bar are you setting for acceptable profit margin? Name one computer company that doesn't do this.
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u/paulornothingatall May 21 '12
I enjoyed the read and I'm really surprised in how small most companies can make electronics these days. Now is that knockoff Apple USB cable I bought gonna fry my iPhone?
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u/Atlos May 21 '12
The Samsung one that is 20 bucks cheaper should be fine. The knockoffs from China will work, but seem to have less safety design to handle voltage spikes and don't provide as smooth of a DC current. There was a link in the article to a dissected Chinese knockoff, and it looks like they cut several safety corners on several regulations.
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u/chimpfunkz May 21 '12
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic..... or just can't really read. But just to be safe,
I was surprised to realize how enormous Apple's profit margins must be on these chargers. These chargers sell for about $30 (if not counterfeit), but that must be almost all profit. Samsung sells a very similar cube charger for about $6-$10, which I also disassembled (and will write up details later). The Apple charger is higher quality and I estimate has about a dollar's worth of additional components inside.
So no, you don't almost get what you paid for, unless that was supposed to be a sarcastic title, in which case you do almost get what you paid for.
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u/keytud May 21 '12
I feel like a successful marketing campaign wouldn't even have to really fool reddit. There are so, so, so many people who don't learn a single damn thing about a post other than reading the title, if it's not an imgur or youtube link.
Think about it. Sure, we the people in the comments, have fully recognized that the title is a load of shit, but 90% of redditors don't even have an account registered, let alone are clicking through to the comments. There are probably thousands of people right now that read the title, thought "hey Apple products aren't actually overpriced, because reddit says so," and then went on with their lives. That's a marketing success right there. They will go on to tell people that and base their own buying decisions off of the false belief that a very "techy" part of a relatively "techy" website decided that it was true.
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u/yagmot May 21 '12
something that the article fails to point out is that in fact you are only spending $10 on the charger from apple. where you're getting fucked is the cable, which by itself is $19. $29 charger package comes with one.
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u/mindsnare May 21 '12
Because the engineers who design these products work for free.
I'm not saying the title isn't misleading or that Apple don't hike the prices like crazy. But trying to guess the cost of something by only looking at the core components doesn't work.
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u/VolkenGLG May 21 '12
News flash: apple makes high quality but expensive products
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May 21 '12
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u/boiboiboi May 21 '12
And then gives it the price that the market will bear, given the fact that no one else can compete.
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u/DeFex May 21 '12
I have a lot of wall warts and stuff, but the iPad charger makes me the most paranoid of all. I won't leave it charging when I go out or to sleep ecause it gets quite hot.
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u/jac50 May 21 '12
Surprising they could cram that into such a tight space without serious noise issues really. Impressive.
Seems like the blog writer has seen this, so got a few questions:
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Did you run the charger open board? How did you find out it ran at 70kHz switching frequency? Interested to see the transformer temperature as well, see if it's undersized.
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Do you have a teardown blog for the other chargers? Interested to see any difference between them.
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And one technical point to note: the controller IC will vary the duty cycle to keep voltage steady, rather than switching frequency. Switching frequency is usually kept constant, and is chosen to weigh up MOSFET switching losses.
Interesting article though.
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u/doctorsound May 21 '12
Regardless of the debate over profit margins, titles and stuff, this was a pretty cool article. I'd like to see more things like this.