I’ve traditionally used Anker for charging gear and cables where Apple doesn’t provide.
A few years ago CGP Grey recommended the Minix
and since then I’ve bought 5 of them.
One for me for travelling per the link.
One for my wife for travelling with 2 x USB C and 1 x USB A
One each for my daughters to power things while minimising the number of plug sockets used.
One for my personal desk to allow me to reduce the number of sockets I use by one.
One of the best features of this is that while they come ready for the US (without using an adaptor) they also come out of the box with UK and EU adapters. so when we go abroad the only thing we need a standalone plug adapter for is my wife’s hairdryer which (even in this day and age) doesn’t run off USB C.
Recently I picked up a second HomePod mini (second hand) for my Work desk (at home) and setup a stereo pair, but it used the twelfth and final socket at my desk, so I busted out my travel minix to check it would power both HomePods and they’re both happily playing Come Together by the Beatles at a good volume to check they can work fully.
This, of course, means that I have a large number of 20w charging plugs which will likely never be used again.
My question off the back of this, is whether you have any interesting uses for power adaptors
I don’t necessarily have any interesting uses, but I know that chargers are one of those things that you want to be careful with, and especially avoid cheaply made ones. (A house in our town burned down a few years ago because a charger caught fire.)
So I am just hopping in here to “second” the praise of the Minix charger. I also heard about it from Grey (Coretex podcast), and have used it, safely and reliably, on multiple international trips.
Agree that branded with these devices is the way to go. I have an Anker PowerPort Atom 3 which will even charge my MacBook Air (it has 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A). The reason I like it so much is that it takes a standard C7 power cord which you can get a local one anywhere for under a fiver. I find this a bit more physically stable than having the whole brick part hanging off the wall.
In terms of interesting uses, the only thing I have which is slightly unusual is a USB-powered electric toothbrush charger as half the hotel rooms don’t have that shaver port that it otherwise takes.
What I don’t like about the Minix charger is that it has to plug directly into the wall.
I’m using ugreen ones that use figure of 8 power leads. Have an assortment of uk, eu and us power leads that I can use when travelling.
