When un-boxing your new iPhone for the first time, it's safe to say that you're probably drooling over the device too much to even notice the included charger, let alone appreciate its complex and surprisingly sophisticated internal components.
Fortunately, the charger is getting its rightful attention and praise this week in a new report highlighting the charger's guts. In a review summary provided by Ken Shirriff that was profiled by Engadget, a teardown of the charger is shedding light on why this little charger is so valuable and expensive.
"Apple's power adapter is clearly 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," he writes. "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's design provides extra safety in a few ways... the super-strong AC prongs, and the complex over-temperature / over-voltage shutdown circuit," Shirriff concludes. "Apple's isolation distance between primary and secondary appears to go beyond the regulations... Apple's iPhone charger crams a lot of technology into a small space. Apple went to extra effort to provide higher quality and safety than other name-brand chargers, but this quality comes at a high cost."
So with better quality and more expensive parts than most smartphone and tablet chargers on the market today, the new teardown is perhaps making some iDevice users more appreciative about the gadget's design and a little better about how much they may have paid for an iPhone charger at one time.
Source: Engadget
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