Apple iPhone Charger is High Quality But Overpriced

Ken Shirriff has performed a teardown of Apple's iPhone charger and found it to be a high-quality power supply designed to produce carefully filtered power.

Apple has obviously gone to extra effort to reduce EMI interference, probably to keep the charger from interfering with the touchscreen. When I opened the charger up, I expected to find a standard design, but I've compared the charger to the Samsung charger and several other high-quality industry designs, and Apple goes beyond these designs in several ways.

Apple uses super-strong AC prongs, a complex over-temperature/over-voltage shutdown circuit, and an isolation distance between primary and secondary that appears to go beyond the regulations.


The Apple charger sells for about $30; however, despite its higher quality, it's still way overpriced. Samsung's cube charger sells for about $6-10 and the Apple charger only uses about $1.00 in additional parts.

Read More [via DaringFireball]