[jschwartzi]

With a power-supply it's not a hard problem to avoid. You have to hire independent engineers to evaluate the product design and establish testing procedures to verify that the product isn't unsafe. And you have to do QA and design verification during receiving on all batches of product to confirm that the manufacturer followed the design. I've never had a power supply catch fire and I've done some really dumb stuff in my lab. Frankly it's a matter of paying for UL/CE marks(including testing) and actually looking at the component layout, and Amazon doesn't strike me as the kind of company to respect that kind of QA/Verification work.

Batteries are a different story because they're basically tiny plastic bombs. Somehow Samsung managed to deliver almost 15 years of Android phones before having their batteries catch fire, and that was almost certainly a result of skipping essential QA/Verification processes because they've never had a problem before.

[alistairSH]

How is a power bank different than a battery? Isn't the power bank just several batteries crammed in a casing, with a power-out port?

[rdl]

Most modern rechargeable batteries have fairly sophisticated chemistry and thus charge controllers needed -- you don't just dump electricity into them blindly and then take it out. It's not quite rocket surgery, but there's a reasonable level of engineering involved, especially if you want optimal performance with the newer standards (which increase voltage on devices which support it, etc.)

[mrguyorama]

Often times that "reasonable level of engineering" only needs to be slapping a ten cent IC on a board with some manufacturer default application circuit.

[nokcha]

jschwartzi was talking about power supplies (i.e., devices that transform mains AC power to DC power), not power banks.

[alistairSH]

Ah, I read "power bank", as that's what ikeyboy mentioned above. And when you search (google) "power bank" the results are all about portable batteries for topping up phones and whatnot. Does Amazon even brand/re-sell power supplies like jschwartzi is talking about?

[VBprogrammer]

Really? Do people describe chargers or power supplies as power banks? Surely the 'bank' part of it implies some kind of storage.

[Pxtl]

I do hear chargers with a large number of ports called "power banks" - I think the implication is that it's like a line of ATMs serving many customers.

[goatinaboat]

No, the implication is that people don’t understand the difference. These are the people who call every photo with people in a “selfie”.