I've seen many complaints about the charge cables, but never had an issue myself. Are there just some bad batches running around, or is it a particular model that's had issues?
I think it's just the design. Where the cables exit the brick they are prone to strain -- the connection wire comes straight out. When you put the connector away, no matter how you do this, there will be some strain on the cable at this point.
To some extent all power bricks will have some problems like this. I just think that the apple power supplies are particularly poorly designed. I've had a Dell and a macbook pro. The bog standard power supply on the Dell lasted 5+ years of daily use. The apple connector -- which I cared for more than the Dell -- lasted just over a year.
It's a problem with people who think they can wind a power cable tightly around something hundreds of times, pay no attention to strain on it or to abusing the weak point where it enters the charger, and then are mystified when it finally fails.
Apple's chargers are in fact much, much tougher than the competition's; this is obvious if you just look at the construction for five seconds and even more obvious if you go read a tear-down of them.
> this is obvious if you just look at the construction for five seconds
BS. When they introduced the current design they had no strain relief, because Steve Jobs thought they were ugly. Guess what? You need a damn strain relief. Year by year their strain reliefs have gotten longer and longer, but they still have a sharp cutoff (that looks pretty, I'll grant them that) that causes the cable to bunch up and break.
And they've made mistakes with their materials choices as well. My parents had a Magsafe charger by the TV, used when sitting in the sofa. After a couple years, the plastic in the little clip you're supposed to use to wind up the cable reacted with the plastic in the cable, and if you moved it, it just tore the cable sheathing apart.
> more obvious if you go read a tear-down of them
The electronics are solid, I'll grant them that. But in the exterior they made tradeoffs for looks.
Nope. Had a white magsafe power adapter, never wound the cable tightly, cable basically fell apart. This same macbook also had the plastic case falling apart.
It was an acknowledged design flaw, and Apple fixed it with more strain relief on later models, and a changed angle for a real fix.
The durability of the charger has little to do with the presence of a design flaw in the cable.
To be fair, the windy-feet that Apple puts on their power bricks encourage users to do it. I figure that if I need a big coil for the line voltage side I might as well put the DC end in the same size loops, so I never use the built in cable winding. Haven't had any problems except for a close call with a rabbit.
Then again, I don't carry it that frequently because the battery life is usually enough. Somebody who puts more wear on them would be more likely to have problems, but I'm not convinced they're so much worse than adapters from other companies.
I've had a moderately sizeable interaction with various forms of cabling throughout my private and business life, and no, Apple cables generally have terrible strain relief. The cables might be otherwise nice, but the strain relief is generally awful.
For me the biggest issue is that Apple went too far in trading utility for portability with their adapters. For instance, there's at least one model of MacBook Pro (from a few years back) that, when it's running flat out, drains its battery even when plugged in. I know that's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for the many people who don't use the full power of their laptop most of the time, but for someone who wants to it's frustrating (especially since, so far as I can tell, there isn't even a more powerful adapter you can buy up to).
I happen to prefer "the brick" Lenovo bundled with a comparable laptop. It does the job when plugged in (can charge the battery even if the laptop is going full blast) and there are adapters I can buy down to if I want something more portable.
