The other day, one of my kids was having problems with a USB charging cable in their bedroom. Their devices wouldn’t charge, despite being plugged in on both ends. As it turns out, on the wall-side, the cable was plugged in to a typical little USB wall wart that stuck out about an inch, and then had the cable sticking straight out of it, then bending down at an uncomfortable angle, because the whole works was behind a piece of furniture, which, even with the unfortunate bend in the cable, was still further out from the wall than we’d have liked it to have been (like say 3 or 4 inches total).
As an aside, I know some people think that all furniture belongs in the middle of rooms, not against walls… We will save that discussion for another time.
Anyway, I’m assuming that it was the somewhat sharp bend in the cable that was causing the failure. So, I got a different cable (from my super-well organized bin of labeled bags of USB cables (no snark!)), replaced the bent one, and pulled the dresser another inch or two out, so it wouldn’t stress the cable so much, and all was working fine.
But I realized then and there, that what we needed was a charger that let the cable come straight down, e.g., at a 90º angle, or parallel to the wall. There may be better ones available (though I failed to find any from the normal accessory brands I use (Anker, Belkin)), but I went with this one (with a standard-issue amazon product name):
It is super thin – just over half an inch, and I like that it has both a USB-A and USB-C port, because we are still in that transition period between A & C (and probably will be for another decade, honestly). At 65W, that’s fairly high power I take it, which is nice too.
I’ve just ordered my second one of these and can see more in the future any time I need a charger behind something.
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