Somebody just threw the design together with the bare minimum care and effort. Didn't work, tweaked it, seems to work. Ship it.

1 out of 100 short/fail? That means 99 worked fine. WORKED PERFECTLY FINE.

If you read HN you probably write software, and may have seen a fair amount of code written with the same philosophy ... some people would say it's appropriate sometimes, anything more is a waste of expensive developer time ... but clearly in some situations it's not fine.

Probably the same reason they often have typos and stuff in the fake labeling - they just don't have the know-how to do it better.

It's difficult to know why anyone laid out a circuit one specific way, especially without a complete schematic, layout, and a few hours to think about it. It may be that this design was the only way to fit the circuit into an already designed enclosure, or it could be that this was done for some sort of manufacturability reason, they may have also had some issue with noise and done this to shield some part of the circuit. In addition, though the design may not meet the UL standards, it might be good enough. UL standards are neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee safety and reliability.

I find many of the OP's criticisms to be rather facile, and would prefer to see this 'counterfeit' tested to failure, with the results compared to a genuine Apple product. Armed with this comparison, we could judge whether the cost savings were achieved wisely or through foolish design.

Any reader of hardware teardowns should remember that the majority of people writing these pieces have never designed a challenging, original circuit; almost all of them are just implementing designs given to them by IC manufacturers in 'application notes'.

I would guess the company does not have design safety reviews or processes. The mechanical design could push the layout into an unsafe zone, but no safety review to push it back.

The spacing rules are certainly real requirements, look for clearance and creepage:

https://www.ieee.li/pdf/essay/safety_considerations_in_power...

I know of and understand the spacing rules, but even one millimeter of (air) clearance can isolate up to 1500V if the board is clean (and more if you take solder mask into account). You can have as many design reviews as you want, and processes are very well and good, but they really don't answer the question of whether the design is sufficiently safe and reliable. Testing to failure is the only way to know what the product is capable of, as many designs have failure modes which are very difficult to imagine.

I agree the design doesn't comply with UL or IEEE standards, and that means it cannot be sold at retail in North America, but that doesn't mean the product is unreliable or unsafe.