You can buy smartphone chargers, charging cables, and such at any drugstore or grocery store these days. WalMart, Target, and their ilk stock many different types. Lots of after-market and discount stores sell them, too – your Dollar Generals, Family Dollars, Marshall’s, TJ Maxxes, etc.
OK. So every now and again I need to replace a phone charging cord. I’ve always just went and got one at anyplace convenient (as opposed to going to an electronics retailer or back to where I bought the phone). But I’ve been vexed lately at how quickly all these cables stop working. On my wife’s and daughter’s Samsungs, the metal tip that sticks in the phone invariably loosens over time and stops making a good-enough connection to charge. Something similar happens to my iPhone chargers, except that it seems to take a little longer. Plus all the cables we’ve been getting seem to crimp and/or split a little too readily.
So … what’s the deal from an engineering standpoint? Just another case of cutting manufacturing corners to produce a “disposable” product that only works just long enough and just well enough for people not to make too much fuss? To get a cord with a reliable lifespan measured in years – not weeks – I really have to spend 5-10 times the amount of the cheaper “everyday” drugstore cables?
I used to think “a cable is a cable is a cable”. Apparently, that’s not so.
Not all do. I got 2 iPhone extra-long, extra-thick cables for $40 from Costco about 3 years ago, and they have functioned flawlessly and are still in great shape.
Still, in too many cases, you are right, and I think it’s best summed up simply with an old adage, “You get what you pay for.” The promotion is that you are “buying the same thing” at a much cheaper price when, in reality, the quality is poor in comparison.
In manufacturing, every 10c counts. But it’s not just materials. Apple spends millions on development: it’s hard to see a new cable coming in with less than $50,000 development costs (I’d be guessing even more), and that’s only because they have prior experience.
When you spend $200 on development costs, you take a chance: the product will probably have some problems, probably not very important problems if you make a lot of similar products with no very important problems.
What? No. Electronic engineer here. There are no development costs for a cable, assuming it has standard connectors. You just say what you want and the sub-contractor ships it.
This is generally happens with no-name products. There is no incentive for long-term quality control, because there is no brand to protect. So long as it works out of the bag and doesn’t fail during the store’s return period, the manufacturer is off the hook.
Cheap calbles like this are often made in bulk in factories in China or elsewhere, then re-sold and given disposable brand names so they can be sold on the shelf.
My guess is that the common failure in cheap power cables or cheap iphone cables involves substandard metal contacts that corrode/oxidize very quickly. If you’ve got a failing cable, take a pencil eraser and try to clean the contacts with it. You may get some more life out of it.
Twenty bucks each? That’s actually a lot of money. An actual one-meter-long Apple charging cable is $19, so I don’t think these were the sort of cheap stuff the OP was referring to.
Somebody spent a lot of money designing that standard connector. And your sub-contractor has already spent a lot of money building an assembly line that produces that type of cable.
I haven’t had a problem with any of my cheap charging cables, but I never wind them up “to keep them neat.” Tightly winding cheap cords of any type usually ruins them. One extreme example was about a dozen “wall wart” multi-voltage power supplies we bought for ninth grade science classes. They lasted through a few uses, since the less knowledgeable teachers had their students wind the cords up tightly around them when they were finished using them. This broke the wires inside the insulation on every one of them.
How you use the product affects its lifespan. I purchased two identical iPhone charging cables, one for me and one for my gf. Hers stopped working after a month. I ordered two more of the same and again hers died in a month or so.
I gave her the other and stressed that hers were dying while my first was still going strong. Hers lasted a bit longer, but died after about six months. She complained that I was buying cheap crap and that she’d get her own. I have backed off (and am still using the first one).
Treat it like a delicate electronic accessory! Do not disconnect by yanking on the cable. (To which my gf rolls her eyes)
My phones last until I upgrade because I treat them with care also. I shudder when I see people toss their phones around like they were disposable crap.
ETA: if cables begin to weaken where they join the connector, I reinforce the connection with black electrical tape.
Often when I have trouble with a charging cable coming loose, it turns out that it is gunk and fluff at the bottom of the socket which builds up and stops the plug locating correctly. Turn off the device and poke around with something like a safety pin. You might be surprised at how much stuff you can hide in such a small hole.
Another thing; newer phones support wireless charging. At first, I thought this was ridiculous but it makes it easy to recharge the phone and it reduces wear and tear on the cable and charging port on the phone itself.
Things like charging cables and ear buds are tricky to design. They are small cables, so it is necessary to put tiny wires in them. Tiny wires break easy, usually at stress points like right where the cable meets the connector. The way to solve this is to make them bigger and bulkier, and no one wants that.
Like Kayaker mentioned above, extending their life means treating them gentler. Don’t wind up tightly, crease the cable or forcefully plug in and remove.
So you haven’t designed that cable at all: you are depending on some other design engineer.
And you take a chance. How well do you think that cable will hold up to consumer use? How well do you think the appearance will match your consumer product? How well do you think the color will match your product?
You can, depending on who you buy from, get answers to some questions (like "How many insert/remove cycles will it last?), but only because some other engineer has done the work.
On the other hand, if there is only a single machine in a co-operative farm outside Shanghai, there won’t even be answers to those questions. Apple knows the answers because they and their suppliers have an actual design and test cycle, which they can afford because of volume.
Moreover, when you rely on a “standard cable” like, say, USB, you mean someone else (the USB-IF) paid for the development costs and recover it by charging licensing fees to device manufacturers.
