Cheap or Pricey: Which Charging Cables Last Longest?
We tested cords from Apple, Samsung, and other brands for durability and found two clear champs—one priced at $29 and the other at $6.55
CR's test rig bent and twisted cables until they broke.
How many times have you left your phone plugged in overnight just to wake up and find that it hasn’t charged at all? It seems like a trivial thing, but when a charging cable fails, it can ruin your day.
Does that mean you have to pay a premium to get a cable you can count on? Not necessarily.
We recently took a close look at low-priced charging cables from Amazon Basics, Anker, Belkin, Bytech, and Walmart’s Onn brand to see how well they stack up against cords sold by Apple and Samsung—and found a $6.55 option that really impressed us.
We bought eleven cables in all, ranging from $4.88 to $29 (when we purchased them), and put them to the test to determine how long they could go without breaking. Five were Lightning cords designed to work with Apple’s phones up to the iPhone 14. The rest were USB-C cables used to charge Android phones from Samsung, Google, and other brands, and yes, the new iPhone 15—not to mention laptops and tablets.
We submitted each model to a pair of durability tests cooked up in the lab by José Amézquita, a project test leader for CR’s Rapid Response team, who adapted a motorized rig originally created for testing steam irons.
For the sake of this exercise, we assumed that the average charging cable gets bent or twisted five times a day in real-world use. Using that math, we estimated how many bends and twists each cable would have to endure to deliver 1.5 years of reliable use.
Step 1: The Bend Test
In the first test, the rig repeatedly bent one end of the cable into a 90-degree angle until it surrendered its power, failing to relay electricity to a small plastic fan.
Step 2: The Twist Test
In the second test, the rig twisted each cord again and again while it powered a makeup mirror illuminated by LED lights.
So Which Cable Should You Buy?
We can now recommend two charging cables.
The Apple Lightning cable, $29, for people who own an iPhone 5 through iPhone 14. (We tested the 2-meter version. There’s a 1-meter option, too, for $10 less.)
And for everyone else, the Amazon Basics USB-C cable, $6.55.
“The Amazon Basics cable was outstanding in our bend test, lasting the equivalent of six years without breaking,” Amézquita says. “The Apple cord was the priciest on our list, but given its performance, it’s worth the extra money.”
All eleven cables aced the twisting test, exceeding our 1.5-year threshold. But only Apple’s Lightning cord, the Amazon Basics USB-C cord, and the four Anker and Belkin cords (two Lightning and two USB-C) passed the challenging 90-degree bend test. In fact, the Apple and Amazon Basics cables still worked after 11,500 bends, the equivalent of more than six years of use, according to our estimates.
The Anker and Belkin cords exceeded 5,000 bends, which puts them close to three years of use.
The Bytech USB-C cable from Five Below died before reaching 710 bends (the equivalent of less than six months), while Lightning cables from Amazon Basics and Walmart’s Onn brand both stopped working before 796 bends. (We paused the rig at regular intervals to check on the cables, so we don’t know the precise moment when they failed.)
See the full set of results below.
What Else Did We Learn?
It’s mighty hard to judge a cable without a test rig of your own. You can’t always rely on brand, price, or characteristics such as thickness to guide you. Here’s why:
Brand: While the Amazon Basics USB-C cable powered on for more than 11,500 bends, the similarly branded Lightning cable tapped out before 796. Based on our calculations, that’s barely six months’ worth of use. You could buy three of the cables and still fall more than four years short of the performance from a single Apple cable.
Price: Yes, the Apple cable delivers premium performance at $29, but the $6.55 Amazon Basics cord outlasted Samsung’s $14.99 cord. So did the $4.88 Walmart cord.
Thickness: Apple’s Lightning cable is noticeably slimmer than those from Amazon Basics, Anker, Belkin, and Walmart, but it significantly outperformed all of them—more than 11,500 bends for Apple (we eventually stopped the test) to 6,510 or less bends for the others.
Final Charging Cable Test Results
All the cables logged 2,700 twists without a problem, but we found clear differences among them in the bending test. Cables started failing after around 700 bends. Two models survived 11,500 bends without breaking and were still going strong when we turned off the test rig. Here’s where they all tapped out.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include four new models, two from Anker and two from Belkin. It was originally published on October 30, 2023.
