9to5Mac
By Ben Lovejoy
GaN chargers have been around for a while now, but it’s only relatively recently that the price of the gallium nitride (GaN) has fallen the the point where they are becoming mainstream.
I’ve been testing both, and the benefits really do justify the relatively modest price premium you now pay for the more advanced charging tech.
What are GaN chargers? Conventional power bricks are, like the devices they power, silicon-based. Gallium nitride, or GaN, is an alternative semiconductor material.
But the effort and expense is worth it, because GaN power bricks offer some, uh, powerful advantages over silicon ones.
First, they are much more efficient at conducting current. This means that you can pack more power into the same size unit. Or, to put it the other way around, you can squeeze a lot of power capability into a far smaller brick.
Second, because energy loss is lower, they generate less heat. That’s a good thing generally, given that overheating is one of the easiest ways to kill tech devices, but also means that they don’t need a bulky heatsink like the ones inside silicon chargers. So they can be even more compact.