Inexpensive Pleasure Part II - The iPod Cable Adventure

Even though I do not own an Apple iPod, each of my two children own an iPod Touch since they have very generous relatives. However, my son is not too gentle with his charging cable so he needed a new one.  I know we could have made the very quick trip over to the Apple Store in the St. Louis Galleria and purchased one for $19 plus tax, but I knew there were cheaper options. First I checked my favorite local retailer in the world, and sure enough the Brentwood Micro Center had something available for one fourth the price of the Apple product. It is a retractable Kensington USB cable with an iPod tip included for only $4.99. However, with my experience with retractable mice, phone cords and other such items, I know they tend to break, and the tip may be the most valuable piece included. So I thought I would look around to see what else existed. At Cyberguys you can get a product called the Bone Link II for $11.95 which looks like exactly what I would want, a solid hunk of plastic with the two ends that my son could not destroy. However, with $5.85 USPS shipping that would cost almost $16 and I could buy three sets of the Kensington cables and tips from Micro Center. I checked the crazies at BestBuy.com, and they did not sell anything that was even as cheap as the $19 genuine Apple cable from the Apple Store. I am sure not going there! WalMart.com had a Startech cable listed for $9.99, but not at their stores, so I would still prefer the Kensington cable at Micro Center to that one. Continuing on to eBay I found generic cables for $0.99 with free shipping just about anywhere and even found shipping from the US from a seller named mlephi. At that price I could buy five of those for the same price as the very reasonably priced Kensington product from Micro Center or 20 of them for the price of the genuine Apple product with tax. And since my son was willing to wait the 4 to 7 days for it to ship from Georgia we ended up going the eBay route and help out an eBay vendor in the good old USA.

Comments

The Comedian said…
I tried the cheapo route as well, picking up a low cost cable from a seller on amazon.

I found out the hard way that many of the cheapo cables are not wired properly for the latest generation of ipod touch.

IIRC, something to do with an old spec for secondary voltage/charging contacts that Apple changed years back that they finally started enforcing.

You may have better luck than I do.

If not, you can pick up one of the Apple brand (green dot) AC to USB chargers, which includes the correct Apple cable, for just over $20.
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