First off, I love Luma Field. Always incredible to see what's going on inside things. Even just fun to scroll through their Twitter.
Second, Anker is one of the few companies I actually have a very high trust for. A few years back I bought a wall charger[0] from them, it has 2 USB-C and a Type A. A month in, one of the Type-C ports wouldn't charge if the other port was being used. If you send a support ticket they annoyingly give you a response with very basic trouble shooting. But if you respond to that you get a person. They just sent me a new one right away (<10 days) and there was no need to return the charger or anything. So I still use it, just blocked the bad port. I gotta say, whenever I encounter good customer service I become loyal.
I wanted to say this because I think a quality matters. Quality often takes nuances and this can often run counter to maximizing profits (Lemon Markets and all that). Looking at Luma's report, I don't get the indication that they had this issue because they were cutting corners but looks like it must be upstream[1]. But am happy to see they were giving gift cards along with the recall. Companies should minimize mistakes as best as they can, but it is important to judge them by how they handle mistakes. It can be easy to get caught in the negativity but I personally don't think I'll stop buying Anker products.
Anker is above average, but the bar for average when it comes to Chinese electronics is, "might not burn down your house immediately."
For reasons probably bordering on OCD, I watch a LOT of teardown videos of various electronics. And one thing that always strikes me is how a company with a product will routinely and often change what's inside, while the model number and exterior appearance stays the same.
For example, I wanted to buy a big 12V LiFePo4 battery and all of the cheapest ones are on Amazon. Amazon reviews are generally garbage because they're all borderline fake (from useless Viners, or wanna-be useless Viners). The only "honest" reviews of these I could find were YouTube teardowns where they basically have to destroy the case in order to take it apart. I would watch a teardown of one popular battery, and then run across a different teardown of the same model from someone else and the internals of each would be completely different. Completely different cells, battery management board, wires, construction everything. But they both looked identical on the outside.
Finished product manufacturers in China rarely have a consistent supply chain. They are negotiating suppliers and batches of components constantly, and are constantly re-engineering everything about the product, except for the external appearance of the case. This Luma Field article confirms what I've already run across myself.
This is also obvious if you think about installing OpenWRT on a router. You'll quickly find out that there's often various versions of the same product; it used to be that they would mark it somewhere, but that doesn't always happen anymore, and only some versions are compatible.
> Even Apple iphone(tbf, also made in China) double-source important components inside their phone(modem)
Samsung goes a bit further. Depending on where you buy e.g. a S23 FE, you'll get entirely different SoC architectures - the US model ships with Qualcomm Snapdragon, the international model with Samsung Exynos.
They just sent me a new one right away (<10 days) and there was no need to return the charger or anything. So I still use it, just blocked the bad port. I gotta say, whenever I encounter good customer service I become loyal.
They are good with returns/replacements. My experience with their product quality has been less good though. I had a pair with earbuds from them, I think it had some firmware issue where on an Android phone, volume would go from far too soft to 'blow your eardrums out'. No other buds had this issue with the same phone. They sent me a replacement which was fine, but it could certainly have caused hearing loss.
I also had an USB-C adapter from them (one of those USB-C with power passthrough, HDMI, etc.) it was so badly shielded that no WiFi or Bluetooth connection near it would survive.
I think people generally rave about them because the among very cheap/affordable Chinese vendors they have support that actually writes back and are helpful. The quality of their products is not great though (also see all these power bank recalls). I avoid them now.
Does not mean that all western brands are great either. My wife bought a Satechi USB-C adapter with DP-Alt mode that Satechi claimed would support 4k@60Hz. There was no way to get it running on Mac or non-Mac at 4k@60Hz. So, I did more research based on the MAC address of the device and found that it just a 'recased' version of a $20 Chinese USB-C design (which was specced to only support 4k@30Hz). Not only were Satechi just selling a rebadged USB-C adapter, they didn't even take the effort to check whether the specs that they claim to support are supported (luckily I could return it within 30 days). Also see: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness/ (in which they find that an Anker adapter is probably a rebadged Ce-Link design)
I've found Anker good although when I tried to use my 'lifetime warranty' on a broken USB C to lighting cable I got some run around from an LLM before swearing at them and getting a result. Even so they last longer than the genuine Apple ones.
I don't know about the rest of their products, but their over-ear headphones (Q45 being one specific example) have very weak attachment of the cup to the frame that often cracks and then breaks withing several months of use. This has been well known for at least a decade, and they have done nothing to fix it.
Sounds like they have alright customer service, if you live in a region where it is actually available (not me), and don't care about polluting the environment with yet more short-lived plastic trash. Not really something to support with one's hard-earned money IMHO.
And it seemed the main issue as identified by Luna was not with the cells but the bank design itself.
> If the recall is affecting units made with 18650 battery cells from multiple suppliers, that suggests the root cause of the recall stems from elsewhere in the power bank. We next focused on the PCB and assembly of the board with the cells.
> We can measure the distance to quantify how dramatically the gap between the positive and negative bus bars varies across the three units. In PB1, that distance is only 0.52 mm
But it is still upstream since AFAIK Anker just rebrands other products.
Second, Anker is one of the few companies I actually have a very high trust for. A few years back I bought a wall charger[0] from them, it has 2 USB-C and a Type A. A month in, one of the Type-C ports wouldn't charge if the other port was being used. If you send a support ticket they annoyingly give you a response with very basic trouble shooting. But if you respond to that you get a person. They just sent me a new one right away (<10 days) and there was no need to return the charger or anything. So I still use it, just blocked the bad port. I gotta say, whenever I encounter good customer service I become loyal.
I wanted to say this because I think a quality matters. Quality often takes nuances and this can often run counter to maximizing profits (Lemon Markets and all that). Looking at Luma's report, I don't get the indication that they had this issue because they were cutting corners but looks like it must be upstream[1]. But am happy to see they were giving gift cards along with the recall. Companies should minimize mistakes as best as they can, but it is important to judge them by how they handle mistakes. It can be easy to get caught in the negativity but I personally don't think I'll stop buying Anker products.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Q52CXX1
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639759