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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

> Anker’s products haven’t always proved completely reliable, but it has made up for any foibles with excellent, no-questions-asked customer service.

I have a bunch of Anker products because they have been, in my experience, the best quality and most reliable at good prices. I have a 5-port charger with "PowerIQ" that was the first for me that could fast-charge both Android and iOS devices (that for a while followed different charger standards, haven't checked recently) and not just on one port. My team also bought a box of some of their USB3 hubs/chargers because they worked well with some of our finicky pre-production hardware.

In summary: Anker provided what I wanted from a "brand" in a field flooded with dubious no-name products: quality I can trust.

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I've only ever had one Anker product fail out of 50+ over the years. It was a USB A to micro B cable - the micro B connector started to bend and eventually snapped off. There was a lot of complaints on Amazon - it seems that it had affected a large number of customers. I contacted Anker, who readily acknowledged that this was a batch issue with that particular model but as they couldn't ascertain exactly which batches were affected, a replacement may well develop the same fault.

The offered me the choice of another cable (different product line) or a refund.

In that one instance where I had a problem, I think they handled it really well. The acknowledged the issue, were completely honest that a replacement with currently circulating stock could develop the same fault, and offered a solution.

With that sort of service at that price point, it's hard NOT to recommend them.

I too have always found their products to be very high quality for the price point. I trust them more than a brand like Belkin. I once heard that Anker was started by a bunch of ex-Googlers, does anyone know if that's true??

I didn't know this either, but it's true...

https://www.anker.com/about

"Anker was founded in 2009, the brainchild of a group of friends working at Google. Fast forward a few years and we’re now the industry leader in mobile power."

Our vision is to create a world where mobile truly means mobile. A world where nothing holds you back from where you want to go, or what you want to do.

Oh god, I just understood the ironic pun in the name, Anker/"Anchor".

It's a surprise their customer service is as good as people are saying it is, considering that.

Google's customer service is excellent, if you're a paying customer.

Meng Yang the CEO was a software engineer at Google for about 5 years

I agree. And the result of their reputation and my own personal experience is that I now seek out Anker products. I've been impressed with the solar panel, the external battery, and the braided Lightning cable.

I do have some failure to report. We have 4 of their 5 port chargers and 1 of the 6 port, each ordered at different dates. Curiously two of the 5 port chargers have had the fifth port stop working after a while (the first 4 work fine).

(I haven't bothered chasing it up with customer service since I don't know which unit corresponds to which purchase date, or cared enough.)

Interestingly, I had exactly the same thing happen with an EasyAcc five port USB charger.

I wonder if Anker and EasyAcc use a common component on those products, one which is prone to this sort of failure.

One of the EasyAcc 5 port chargers looks literally identical to the Anker one. I suspect at least one of them is re-badging?

One of the things I noted recently is that I have purchased RAVPower, Aukey, Anker, and OMAKER products which all came in nearly an identical packaging style. I suspect many of them use the same products or same distribution vendor which whitelabels the products for them.

I used to notice this a lot more often for Anker, but their stuff seems to be diverging. I wonder if they bootstrapped from some of that stuff but have been moving more towards their own products.

I understand that each port has a circuit-breaker which can be reset (by unplugging everything and powering it off and on again, or something like that).

EDIT: Apologies, it looks like they used to use fuses before they switched to resettable circuit breakers. Here's a Reddit post where somebody shares an (excellent IMHO) customer service email from Anker on the issue: https://m.reddit.com/r/perktv/comments/2fd00z/anker_dead_por...

Agreed. Anker does indeed seem to be notable in the way of quality.

That said another contender for this category, may be Aukey. Although somewhat opaque, they appear to be a Chinese company founded in Germany.

While I can't speak to any of their cable products, the power adapters are simply marvelous in my experience.

My first Anker product was some USB cables. They were faulty. The excellent customer service though completely won me around and the replacements they sent have not failed yet (unlike many other usb cables I have owned).

I agree, I use probably a very similar charger for you along with a few other products and they're very high quality and were well priced.

I use their screen protectors too, and when it chipped they sent me a new one no questions asked.

I too have had positive experiences with their products. The products I used were well-priced, high quality and generally work. Why aren't they using their own brand?

I was just perusing the Anker site [1] last weekend and noticed these products (and more) listed in the Appliances category.

[1]: https://www.anker.com/products/taxons/115/Appliances

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