I have travelled a lot this year, and after yet another trip where I lugged too many things around, I’ve been thinking about ways to cut back. The classic guide for this is onebag.com, which covers a very interesting mix of techniques and some carefully-chosen lightweight gear that will take you to the farthest corners of the map. Perma-nomad Vitalik Buterin has his own take on living out of a 40L backpack; one of his key points is to run everything you can off of USB-C. The benefits should be obvious: you cut down the number of charging cables you need to carry and your power bank can recharge any of your devices. While I’m a bit of a luddite, I can see a lot of people travelling with at least a laptop and phone, and possibly also a tablet, earbuds, and/or a smartwatch, all of which need power.
Vitalik’s guide mentions a USB-C “wall wart” charger that he uses to power his stuff. I disagree with this choice, at least for international travel: I think you want a desktop USB-C charger that takes an IEC C7 (“figure 8”) cable.
I’m not aware of any good articles that spell out the “desktop charger + replaceable cable” trick and how to actually find a suitable one, so a full explanation, research procedure, and some tentative recommendations are spelled out in laborious detail after the jump.
I am specifically writing about “desktop”-style USB-C chargers with an interchangeable mains cable. For travel, a charger with a mains cable has a few big advantages over a “wall wart”:
Older outlets sometimes do a poor job of gripping the pins of a mains plug. The weight of a wall wart can cause it to fall away from the wall where a lighter mains plug will happily remain connected;
A small plug will be able to reach into recessed power outlets where a wall wart might not fit; and
Wall warts are often quite wide and block multiple outlets on a power board, getting in the way of other plugs.
A charger with interchangeable cables lets me purchase the shortest practical cable for my setup. For international travel, a local mains cable for each destination region is all I need to charge my stuff, and lets me skip the lumpy travel adaptor (which has many of the same problems as a wall wart).
It’s important that the charger accepts an IEC C7 cable. This is an international standard, so you’ll be able to find local mains cables at office supply stores or borrow them from nearby appliances, and it’s a two-pin design. Having a two-pin mains lead means you don’t have to worry about finding three-pin (earthed) power outlets in areas where they are not yet universal. It also means that an ultra-compact travel adapter like the Road Warrior can serve as a backup option if you don’t have a local cable.
“International” USB-C chargers make a superficially appealing pitch: a worldwide plug converter plus USB charging in a single package. I think they’re unsuitable for several reasons:
Long story short, I wouldn’t to trust my electronics to one or sleep in the same room as it.
Some chargers include a battery so that they can double as a power bank. While packing one fewer item is appealing, batteries wear out faster than chargers and I’d rather not ditch a perfectly good charger just because its batteries have gone bad.
So far, I’ve mostly written about physical dimensions and features I don’t want. But the guts of the charger need to meet the needs of the gear being charged. To summarise, here’s what I’m looking for in a USB charger:
It seems to be very hard to find thorough reviews of power adapters. I’ve been pretty impressed by AllThingsOnePlace’s videos, which are impressively thorough. Most product websites and online stores neglect to mention exact PD or PPS modes or whether the mains cable is captive or replaceable. AllThingsOnePlace also looks at the efficiency and thermals of many chargers, which is useful to know. This is a good first-pass filter for whether a charger is worth considering, and he deserves more from his Patreon than he’s getting right now.
ChargerLab is a passable fallback: lots of detail (the website more than their videos), and while a decent amount of data are available in their videos, the analysis is somewhat lacking compared to AllThingsOnePlace.
Once I have a promising candidate, I look for reports of it going wrong. A charger like the Rocoren 100W tested fairly well on AllThingsOnePlace’s bench and ticked many of my boxes, but enough people have reported failures within six months of purchase (and terrible experiences with support) that I’d shy away from it.
Here are three chargers that seem promising, depending on power and connectivity needs.
AllThingsOnePlace calls it his daily driver, so it’s got to be good. Many other Satechi products don’t seem to test that well, but the 165W adapter in particular got an exceptionally good review. It’s a bit on the large side for travel, but 4×USB-C is compelling for those who have the laptop AND the phone AND the tablet AND the earbuds AND the smartwatch. USB-C to micro-B cables (or even compact adapters; an earplugs case stops them getting lost) can charge legacy devices. Great range of power modes, including up to 100W on a single port. That max 100W means it can’t charge the beefiest and most recent devices at top speed (like the 2023 16” MacBook Pro, which wants 140W), but if you’re lugging something like that around you’re probably a different type of traveller.
A midpoint price/performance option for those who don’t need four ports or the full 165W. While it’s designed for drones, it supports a lot of PPS and PD charging modes for other devices. No AllThingsOnePlace review, unfortunately, but the ChargerLab teardown shows a lot of heatsinks and insulation, so it seems solid.
A budget option. The main problem with this charger is the maximum output of 45W through a single USB-C port. This is probably insufficient for modern devices, and I’d expect modern laptops to charge slowly or even discharge under heavy load. But if you’re the sort of person who runs old gear for as long as absolutely possible, 45W might be enough and the 2 USB-A ports makes it easier to charge legacy gear. No Quick Charge on the USB-A ports though, which does limit their usefulness. Overall, it’s cheap but probably too dinky as a long-term option given modern laptop power needs. And after the whole Eufy thing, I’d understand if you didn’t want to give Anker your money.
An old Anker 735 Charger (Nano II 65W), which I think has been superseded by the Anker 735 Charger (GaNPrime 65W). It’s impressively small and great for domestic travel (where there’s no need to swap the international plug). It can keep my laptop charged unless I’m doing heavy compiling, and the spare port can top up a tablet or power brick. Despite what the product page says, it doesn’t like charging through the USB-A port while anything else is connected, but my laptop’s ports work well enough for that.