It is obvious that energy to weight ratio is one of the most important characteristic of power banks. Reputable manufacturers will optimize for this, and if they are particularly good at it, they can ask for a premium.
If a generic powerbank beats the big names, sells for cheaper and is associated with a brand that has no reason to be associated with powerbanks, then it is very likely that the weight savings come from omitting something important rather than an optimized design. If the specs are true that is.
Probably, however, it makes me think of the Galaxy Note 7 problem. For those who don't remember, these phones had a battery problem that can cause them to catch fire, resulting in one of the most infamous smartphone recall campaign.
The cause of the problem is that the electrodes were pinched inside the pouch cell, in some cases causing a short circuit and a fire. To put it simply, it was too tight in there.
So here it is possible that these defects are a result of having too small safety margins for how these batteries are manufactured.
In addition, they only focused on the electrode alignment issue, because it is visible on their CT scans, they didn't study the electronics, the casing, the connectors, etc... There may be some other issues there.
Say using 20% more electrolyte would prevent insufficient spacing and separation of the plates. You get a safer/higher quality product but it's heavier. And maintaining the same safety with less electrolyte would involve higher development costs. There's a sliding scale where something is just too cheap/dangerous to sell at high volume to a general audience.
Hopefully these high quality CT scans show the battery makers that people are going to notice when too many corners have been cut, even if there isn't a flood of reports of their product causing fires (yet).
Yeah. I remember seeing the circuit board for official Xbox controllers vs cheap 3rd party ones. The official controllers had about 10x as many components. I don’t know what all that stuff does, but I’m sure it all contributes to the controllers feeling and working better.
I wonder the same thing about chargers. I’ve recently moved from a 3rd party charger for my camera batteries I got on amazon to an official Sony charger. The 3rd party charger seemed to work great - but it was practically weightless. The Sony charger is clearly a way more complex (and more expensive) product. I don’t know if all that complexity is actually worth it. What does it all do? But I assume so.
It is obvious that energy to weight ratio is one of the most important characteristic of power banks. Reputable manufacturers will optimize for this, and if they are particularly good at it, they can ask for a premium.
If a generic powerbank beats the big names, sells for cheaper and is associated with a brand that has no reason to be associated with powerbanks, then it is very likely that the weight savings come from omitting something important rather than an optimized design. If the specs are true that is.