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Literally had no idea they actually made tech. I thought they just private labelled charging cables and sold them on Amazon.

• echelon 5mo ago
  Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge. Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too. But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame. They're killing it. They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
  • bookofjoe 5mo ago
    I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
  • derektank 5mo ago
    Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
  • SyneRyder 5mo ago
    Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them. Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
    • gib444 5mo ago
      What is there to "love" about an Anker charger out of curiosity (or, well, any charger)?
      • co-ent 5mo ago
        Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
      • SyneRyder 5mo ago
        Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W. Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables. With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working. And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port. I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
      • ssl-3 5mo ago
        I've been using the same Anker charger brick since 2014. It was $13.99, delivered. It has two USB A ports. It has always charged everything at a good rate, regardless of brand, model, or age. It's reasonably-compact, the prongs (it's made for US plugs) fold for convenience when traveling, and it is UL listed. Its present duty includes keeping an iPad running 24x7 and also charging my phone every night. It has charged my phone many thousands of times so far. I'd update it to something newer, with USB C and USB PD and the bee's knees, but this old Anker thing is exactly the right kind of consistent and boring. I don't think about it much because it has given me no reason to think about it. That kind of boring behavior is remarkable, I think. So many other charging bricks I've used were just trash to use (slow or fickle, causing me to waste time with a USB power analyzer before giving up), or they died prematurely. Same with the powered Anker USB 3.0 hubs on my desk. Those have only seen about 5 years of continuous use but so far they've been resolute in their trouble-free performance. This stuff seems to be very much buy-once, cry-never.
    • hn_throw2025 5mo ago
      Apple sell Anker chargers on their website, alongside their own.
    • smohare 5mo ago
      [dead]
    • KetoManx64 5mo ago
      I have 3 of their wireless chargers, in both black and white and ended up covering the LED with electrical tape on each one. Way too bright
      • SyneRyder 5mo ago
        Same. I ended up getting something called "FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers" on Amazon that had some 80% light blocking circles that were just the right size. The brightness is definitely a design flaw, Anker should work on that (and maybe have the color change when charging is at 100% too).
• BeetleB 5mo ago
  They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. They're often the best value. (Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).
  • ryanisnan 5mo ago
    Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more. edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
    • BeetleB 5mo ago
      Oh, they've been pushing AI on my earbuds for a long time now. I just ignore them.
  • Aurornis 5mo ago
    Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
    • 28304283409234 5mo ago
      This. I bought two Anker laptop chargers and both died died within weeks. Not a fan.
      • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
        They will replace your powerbrick though
  • bashZorina_09 5mo ago
    Extremely happy with my Anker Boom 2, it's amazing how much a clear and punch it packs for half the price of the nearest JBL product.
• 4ndrewl 5mo ago
  Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).
• kqp 5mo ago
  They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
• ssl-3 5mo ago
  They've been first at a few things. For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today. The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later. The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot. The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used. Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes. That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money. --- Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works." And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves. It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot. And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do. They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry. And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all. But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
  • dpoloncsak 5mo ago
    Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
    • thejazzman 5mo ago
      Eufy was uploading the thumbnails to S3, if I recall correctly, so that they could be delivered in push notifications