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Postedabout 1 month ago
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But yes, those folks. Check the product shot in the article for their logo.
I've watched Big Clive's videos for too long to trust no-name Chinese things with anything involving mains potential or energy storage.
Might be worth a shot.
No comment on Anker quality, but the "feels well made" feeling is something that has been known and gamed (for example, by including dummy weights in devices) in the hardware industry since forever. It is relatively unrelated to things you as a consumer may actually care about (like adherence to safety standards or amount of engineering effort put into the longevity of a product).
Yup but for Anker devices you have a lot of nerds picking them apart on Youtube. If Anker were to engage in shady practices, the uproar and resulting shitstorm would be on a scale that could tank the entire company.
IMHO, Anker is one of the last remaining (funny, the company isn't that old) "brands" in the original sense.
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-amazon...
>To avoid commingling, sellers have long had the option to apply a unique, seller-specific Amazon barcode — known as an FNSKU (Fulfillment Network Stock Keeping Unit) — to every product. This ensures their inventory is tracked and shipped separately.
... is that really all that was necessary all along? I can see that being a problem for, like, 10 cents worth of stuff, but a lot of the commingling complaints have been around expensive items. It's not zero cost of course, but for your average $30+ thing it doesn't seem very difficult to justify.
Definitely worth doing, but keeping up with all of Amazon's compliance requirements requires a fairly robust logistics system.
I bought a UGREEN bank on a recommendation and it was a buggy mess. It discharged more than it should when charging and when plugged in it rapidly charged to 100% which was sus. Graphical menu was weird and displayed ambiguous graphic messages to avoid text. These things feel like time bombs.
Currently have a relatively high watt USB PD charger in my livingroom and handles everything I've thrown at it including laptops, phones, tablets, earbuds, etc.
Seems most of the issues in these threads are with the power bank (portable battery chargers).
And like UGREEN, it was noticeably better than the other Chinese no-name brands.
They company was one of the first to construct a business plan around the idea of "Storefront and logistics will be handled by Amazon."
However, Anker always did their own engineering rather than just being a rebadger of Alibaba.
Anker is a Chinese manufacturer and Alibaba is a market place. Why would rebadging Alibaba mean there? Outsourcing design and production while only being an exporter?
They already are in China. It's highly likely they outsource part of their production process and supply chain. They just have good quality control like any other serious manufacturer.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Unless they become a pattern.
I'd rather go with a brand that does proper costly recalls over one that just lets everybody keep the dangerous products around.
Of course neither of us has a lot of first hand data so it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions.
UGREEN fit that niche of ‘tech products that are generally of quite good quality’ for me fine. They feel like neither an upgrade or a downgrade to the Anker stuff I still have.
Those chargers have nice specs too. They support PD PPS (programmable power supply).
You realize they stopped selling them, right? They don't do this for "nothing to worry about."
The article doesn't state by how much it increased.
>You realize they stopped selling them, right?
I don't think Amazon is an authority on battery safety and are airing on the side of safety than making an actual judgements on the safety of it.
It's quite clear: until it threatens to blow away their "we're not an intermediary- We're a service provider." Smokescreen they don't care.
This is a really strange response. How would you go about quantifying this when you don't care to add to their profit by buying a bunch of them, and can't get the product anyway because it was pulled for safety reasons?
I was going to, but it was delisted. I didn't expect that to happen so I was waiting until the next time I was going to travel before ordering it.
In regards to quantifying the risk I would expect there to have been prior research on the dangers of lithium ion batteries that could be referenced due to it being such a common battery chemistry.
I think they are becoming a lot more prevalent in labs, these days. They aren't the monster devices that many of us may be (unfortunately) familiar with.
Lumafield is a CT company: https://www.lumafield.com/
A few years ago, Haribo was in a serious crisis [1] - they didn't catch up on competition when it comes to new trends such as vegan candy, and a few years prior they had dismissed their marketing face Thomas Gottschank [2]. The closure of the Saxony plant also seriously soured relations with local politicians [3]. Some of all of that is attributed to the death of Hans Riegel in 2013 [4].
I don't have any particular insights into Haribo, but what I do know is that (especially struggling) brands tend to go towards making money off of the brand by licensing out rights... some of such deals tend to go well for everyone involved (see e.g. anything Lego touches), some run okay-ish (e.g. that's how you end with a "CAT" rugged phone made by Bullitt [5] - the things were rugged, but the performance was abysmal), and some end up in a massive clusterfuck like the Haribo batteries.
[1] https://taz.de/Haribo-Werk-im-Osten-vor-Aus/!5755771/
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/thomas-gottschalk-tren...
[3] https://www.rnd.de/promis/werksschliessung-in-sachsen-thomas...
[4] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/haribo-chef-ha...
[5] https://www.heise.de/news/Outdoor-Smartphones-Bullitt-Group-...
It is obvious that energy to weight ratio is one of the most important characteristic of power banks. Reputable manufacturers will optimize for this, and if they are particularly good at it, they can ask for a premium.
If a generic powerbank beats the big names, sells for cheaper and is associated with a brand that has no reason to be associated with powerbanks, then it is very likely that the weight savings come from omitting something important rather than an optimized design. If the specs are true that is.
The cause of the problem is that the electrodes were pinched inside the pouch cell, in some cases causing a short circuit and a fire. To put it simply, it was too tight in there.
So here it is possible that these defects are a result of having too small safety margins for how these batteries are manufactured.
In addition, they only focused on the electrode alignment issue, because it is visible on their CT scans, they didn't study the electronics, the casing, the connectors, etc... There may be some other issues there.
Hopefully these high quality CT scans show the battery makers that people are going to notice when too many corners have been cut, even if there isn't a flood of reports of their product causing fires (yet).
I wonder the same thing about chargers. I’ve recently moved from a 3rd party charger for my camera batteries I got on amazon to an official Sony charger. The 3rd party charger seemed to work great - but it was practically weightless. The Sony charger is clearly a way more complex (and more expensive) product. I don’t know if all that complexity is actually worth it. What does it all do? But I assume so.
If your goal is weight, pouch cells use mylar or aluminum for the pouch. Cylindrical cells are typically steel I think?
I also picked up their earbuds, which - for $11, sound and work far better than I expected.
If the surface area to volume ratio is high enough, however badly it is made doesn't matter - it's not gonna catch fire anyway.
If that's the case, there is no safety issue with the headphones - a 0.5mm safety margin either end of a battery which is only 6mm long is insane anyway - and I don't fault the engineers for looking for other ways to get equivalent safety without compromising in capacity.
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