Big charges in a smaller footprint are coming to Apple stores across the country, as Anker taps into Gallium Nitride for charging phones, tablets, and laptops.
A spare laptop charger is always a good thing, and these days now that USB-C is the ubiquitous port used for almost everything, it means that the same charger for your laptop can be used for almost anything else.
Provided everything has USB-C, the same charger can recharge your phone, your tablet, your laptop, your headphones, your speaker, your camera, your Kindle, your mouse, your keyboard, and even a few other accessories and peripherals you may or may not have.
The problem is they can’t typically charge it at the same time. The port is right, but the number and lack of abundance is not. Even if you have a laptop charger, it also could be too big, giving your luggage that little bit extra weight to deal with.
There are solutions, and in the past few years, they’ve been doing double duty to make things easier, with smaller chargers able to offer more power and ports.
Making this happen is a technology that can run hotter in a smaller size. Gallium Nitride or “GaN” provides that capability, and we’ve seen it deliver larger amounts of power in smaller charge packs, so much that even Apple adopted the technology for its two-port optional MacBook Air charger.
GaN isn’t entirely new to the world — it started popping up in 2020 — but companies are still working with the technology, and the latest appears to be Anker, offering a recent range of charge packs with special sensors to monitor the temperature and adjust the power to keep the temperature safer.
The range consists of five options, with a compact single-port 30W charger, a two-port 50W, a three-port 70W, and two four-port options delivers either 150W or 240W, the last of which is more likely to be desk-bound rather than the sort of thing you carry with you.
The latter two are definitely made for folks who need a lot of ports, and are reminiscent of the 200W options we’ve seen from Satechi previously, as well as other brands, such as Mophie.
Anker’s difference could well be the materials their chargers are made from, offering 75 percent post-consumer recycled plastics in the design, while incorporating the aforementioned power and temperature sensors.
Locally, the options will start from $60 for the single-port 30W option, while the 50W 2-port charger will cost $75, the 70W 3-port for $120, the 150W 4-port for $150, and the 240W 4-port for $200, with availability at Apple stores online and offline.
