iPhone Chargers - what to avoid and what to buy

Table of Contents

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

I’ve recently had a bad experience with my iPhone 6s and the cheap lightning cables that you can buy from eBay, China, Amazon etc and I thought I’d write up a blog post about it to try and warn others of the danger of using these cheap charging cables.

I had an Apple iPhone 6s 16GB model and it suited my needs perfectly well, got a nice protective case on it and was using the official Apple lightning cable to charge it every night. Everything was good in the world…

Then I bought a cheap lightning cable from somewhere on eBay so that I could charge my iPhone in the car as using Spotify to listen to some tunes on the way to the office was killing the battery.

For a few weeks it was all fine and I didn’t notice any problems with the iPhone, the cable or the charging. But then, after about six weeks of usage, I disconnected the cable from my iPhone and at the end which is physically connected to the iPhone, the cable was extremely hot – hot enough to not be able to touch it. So I disconnected it from the car and iPhone and chucked it onto the passenger seat and went to work.

Within an hour of being in the office, my iPhone battery died completely – what the hell?

I got hold of a colleagues official Apple charging cable and tried to charge it up – nothing, not even the little battery with the cable icon on the screen – nothing – not a sausage – dead.

At this point I started investigating on the web and found so many of these similar horror stories with these cheap cables. Basically, after time, they completely destroy the battery and if you are really unlucky – the charging port on the handset rendering it fairly useless.

So I grabbed a crappy Windows phone from work, stuck my SIM in and sulked all the way home with my broken iPhone in tow.

I purchased a replacement iPhone battery in the hope that it was just the battery that was fried and not my actual handset and when it turned up I fitted it and used my official Apple lead to charge it up overnight. I fired it up in the morning and thank god it worked!

I kept charging it only using the Apple lead for some time and it was perfectly fine. But I really needed to be able to charge the iPhone in the car. So, yet again I jumped on Google and started investigating. What I found is that obviously the official Apple leads will work perfectly well and you should very rarely have any issues with them at all and if you do, an Apple genius (I hate that phrase as they are all thick as sh…) will sort it out for you. But, you should avoid all of these £1-£3 leads from China at all costs (how much is a new handset?!).

But – there is another option and some middle ground is provided, by Amazon (where else?!)….

Having done all this research on iPhone charging and battery life etc, I found that you can buy the cheaper (than Apple) Amazon Basics lightning cable and you should have no problems with it at all and it will work very much in the same way as the official cable will. These cables are more in the region of £5 and for just that few pounds extra, you should have full piece of mind that your expensive iPhone handset is perfectly safe.

I can report from my own experience that I bought one of these Amazon basics leads and I’ve been using it in the car everyday for around two months now and I have had no problems with it whatsoever (even with my new battery – which I got cheap, probably from China!).

Anyway – just my story and I do hope that it helps someone else out there avoid having to purchase a new handset in the quest to save £2!