I bought a counterfeit charger once (on purpose) and gave up using it after it sparked while I was in bed. Having that protection circuitry is really useful when your whole laptop case is grounded.
I mentioned in another post, but this is why I'm excited for USB-C power delivery. Finally companies can deliver the AC mains cable, the power brick and the charging cable as separate replaceable components.
Same experience here; the chargers are electronically long-lived, but cables fail for me within 2-3 years. Most recently, the rubber insulation disintegrated, and it wasn't due to strain. It just crumbled away.
I bought a replacement cable from Amazon for around $7 delivered and soldered it in place -- a 15 minute job. Only difficult part was cracking open the charger case.
Search (online retailer) for "magsafe 1|2 cable". Here's a link to the one I bought: http://www.amazon.com/ElementDigital-Lovely-Adapter-Connecto...
tl;dr If you can solder, replace the cable yourself. Heck, you could buy a solder station AND a replacement cable and still be ahead by a few dollars.
[1] http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/de/95/72/de9572cfef6e...
Apple is ripping us off. There's no way that a quality charger actually costs any significant fraction of $65. (Putting aside the lack of proper strain relief and generally shitty, failure-prone cable; MacBook chargers are practically guaranteed to need replacement at least once in the device's lifetime, in my experience.)
Unfortunately, Apple's dodgy chargers are still better than anything else by leaps and bounds, so they remain the most economical choice despite being wildly overpriced.
I feel like there's potentially a big market for decent quality third-party MacBook chargers at a decent price. It's a shame that nobody makes anything like that.
> That's why many people will still buy chargers with an obvious flaw like a plastic ground pin.
Somewhat unrelated, but what confuses me is: the US MacBook charger comes with a long three-prong cable and a short two-prong cable. Either the ground pin isn't necessary, and I'm being needlessly inconvenienced by not being able to use the long cable with two-prong outlets, or it is necessary and I'm being endangered by the two-prong. Either way I'm not sure why they'd do that.
"additional parts provide better power quality and improved safety in the real charger; this is part of the reason genuine chargers are significantly more expensive"
is not really true, those additional parts add maybe $10 to the BOM. $80 for $20 worth of charger, $30 for $2 cable, you are being screwed on every single Apple branded accessory.
I see some non-Apple branded chargers on Amazon Prime for around $40. I wonder if those chargers have the high quality electronics in them since they are from companies that are trying to develop a good name for producing accessories?
The Apple accessory that I feel is worth the money is their $30 ear buds. I use ear buds a lot. You can get decent ones for $15-$20, but I think the apple ones are worth $30.
UK plug is earthed for one.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/EU-US-Plug-Converter-Power-Ad...
http://image.ceneo.pl/data/products/13603422/i-hama-29167-00...
I think most people feel like Apple is ripping them off on replacement chargers. That's why many people will still buy chargers with an obvious flaw like a plastic ground pin. They just think it's not quite as nice as the metal version but still works fine (they probably don't know the pin is for grounding at all... or what grounding something even means).
An irony is that people do trust they are getting value Apple's expensive primary product (iPhone, Laptop, iPad...)