Please do not save money by using unlisted electrical equipment. Spend the extra $20 for a product that is tested and listed by UL/CE/ETL, it’s not worth burning a building down over $20.

You couldn’t pay me enough money to plug this into a building’s electrical distribution system, it’s drawing ~3A at 120V (60W at 5V plus inefficiency) and in a very small form factor, I sure hope the engineering and QA of that $5 charger is up to par. Did they include an internal fuse or did they forego that to save $0.03? Who knows!

OP is in the UK where every circuit has a GFCI, making it pretty much impossible to get an electrical shock due to isolation failure (in a typical year, not a single person dies from electrocution in UK homes).

Fire is more of a concern, but this is indeed internally fused and the IC has both overcurrent and overheat protection - both of which are effectively 'free', so there are no cost savings to not include them.

Gotcha, there are still locations where non-GFCI receptacles are allowed in residential homes in the US, they’re required in basements, garages, exteriors, and within a certain distance of a sink/plumbing tap but not in bedrooms or general ‘living space’. AFCIs are required in most areas but don’t protect against ground faults, which aren’t as concerning with a device that is injection molded plastic anyways.

The triple built-in protections alleviate the rest of my concerns, my apologies for overreacting but I’ve seen people plug some scary things into receptacles.

In the last 4 years china has really cracked down on dangerous products, so anything newly made will generally have at least the basics of protections. For example all products with batteries have over and under voltage protection with a dedicated chip rather than some microcontroller hopefully stopping the charge at the right time as used to be done in 2018 to save a few cents.

Diodegonewild might disagree with you.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfUGOPyKWwiriWhjmdtvjBw_J...

Only relatively new (past 20 years or so) buildings in the UK are required have GFCIs (called RCCBs in the UK) on every circuit.

Older installations can be retrofitted but there is no requirement to do so.

Not seeing UL or ETL or FCC certification on those Apple A3365 chargers. Not finding Apple's own Declaration of Conformity for that product.[1]

Anyone know the switching frequency?

[1] https://regulatoryinfo.apple.com/en/eurocompliance

You can see the UL logo on the label of the charger on the first picture on the product page. I have no idea about the EU version, I live in the United States.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGKN4AM/A/40w-dynamic-pow...

Does it follow the protocol properly? I’ve had some chargers that don’t default to the lowest output for dumb usb-c devices

Yes it does. Multimeter on the output shows 5.2 volts

I’m seeing $17+.

I think aliexpress A/B test prices. Clear cookies and refresh a few times and you'll get the $5.50 price.

AliExpress offers lower (subsidised) prices for first-time customers. So you often see very low prices when casually browsing, but when you log in with an existing account, the price goes up. When shipping to my country they also don't add sales tax / VAT until the final confirmation page, which is illegal.

Yep. AliExpress things, it is rarely as much of a good deal as it first appears. I have been burned many times. For things that you don't care about or don't need to rely on it's fine but there is too much fuckery going on to trust it for anything of importance.

That being said, Amazon isn't much better nowadays and I have been pleasantly surprised by some items from AliExpress. However one should not expect western quality standard for most things...

Oddly I find the reverse. They apply random coupons only at the final checkout stage and I often end up paying only half for the items I'm buying, especially if I order many items.

I seem to get the 'delayed delivery' coupon every time even if the delivery is on time for example, and sometimes that coupon is worth more than the item itself for low value items.

I haven't made any purchase recently so maybe that's their way to subsidize the cost of various laws put in place in the EU recently (tax and shipping). But maybe it's also because you buy from the US?

It doesn't matter much anyway; I stopped buying there because I am a bit tired of too random quality that doesn't make the "savings" really worth it. For example, I bought a connected outlet that was half the price of ones from an EU brand but the app is pretty bad (data logging and display is terrible) and build quality worse. I also bought various RCA cable for an old amplifier and all of them were producing noise, I got a good one from Amazon (made in Germany) and no problem.