We’re always advising our customers of the importance of using MFI (made for iPhone) certified charging cables. Today we are able to demonstrate why.

A customer brought us their iPhone 5S for what we both thought was going to be a simple routine battery change. The phone went dead, would no longer charge and being a few years old now, while still having its original battery, it was well overdue a new supply of power. We fitted the new battery, plugged it in and realised that it did not charge.

We verified that the charge port was not to blame and knew that this would be the very common issue of a Tristar chip failure. Failure of this chip can and does occur in any and all Apple products which use the lightning port to charge. On the iPhone 8 and newer, the chip has been renamed “Hydra” and is not compatible with Tristar chips – but essentially it does the same job, and fails just as easy.

You can avoid this issue entirely by using the correct charging cable – and no, this does not mean you need to buy the original Apple cables. They just need to be certified by Apple, which means they have a specific chip inside, sold by Apple to the cable manufacturer. Our favourite ones are made by Anker, and you can find them in our shop

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