For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.
The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.
The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.
The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.
Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.
That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.
---
Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."
And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.
It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.
And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.
They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.
And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.
But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
They own Eufy which sells cameras with main feature being “no subscription needed”, that are very unreliable and full of ads (which isn’t being advertised as much as lack of subscription). They do also go big on labelling a lot of simple features as AI where in reality it’s something as simple as “detect a person in a photo”.
I have Eufy cameras and it’s complete garbage, sadly competition is also mostly garbage.
Bold unsustainable claims at st the core of their business, it’s not just thumbnails.
I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rAXF_btvE to be more balanced than the LTT video, but I think it mostly depends on your expectations of the cameras. The videos themselves are stored locally, not in the cloud. But if you have thumbnails turned on in the notifications, then the thumbnails have to be stored somewhere temporarily (I think this is an Apple/Google requirement), and they're being stored on a cloud server rather than in your home network (which would require opening up a port).
Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more.
edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.
But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.
They're killing it.
They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them.
Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
Same. I ended up getting something called "FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers" on Amazon that had some 80% light blocking circles that were just the right size. The brightness is definitely a design flaw, Anker should work on that (and maybe have the color change when charging is at 100% too).
I've been using the same Anker charger brick since 2014. It was $13.99, delivered.
It has two USB A ports. It has always charged everything at a good rate, regardless of brand, model, or age. It's reasonably-compact, the prongs (it's made for US plugs) fold for convenience when traveling, and it is UL listed.
Its present duty includes keeping an iPad running 24x7 and also charging my phone every night. It has charged my phone many thousands of times so far.
I'd update it to something newer, with USB C and USB PD and the bee's knees, but this old Anker thing is exactly the right kind of consistent and boring.
I don't think about it much because it has given me no reason to think about it.
That kind of boring behavior is remarkable, I think. So many other charging bricks I've used were just trash to use (slow or fickle, causing me to waste time with a USB power analyzer before giving up), or they died prematurely.
Same with the powered Anker USB 3.0 hubs on my desk. Those have only seen about 5 years of continuous use but so far they've been resolute in their trouble-free performance.
This stuff seems to be very much buy-once, cry-never.
Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W.
Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables.
With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working.
And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port.
I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices.
It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.
If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add.
Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.
I've been quite happy with the AnkerWork S600[1], which I bought a couple years ago through Kickstarter. I don't know if it's the same chip, but they advertise a "professional NPU", and I find the voiceprint-based ambient sound rejection works very well. I can literally have my crying child in my lap and the other side of the phone call can't hear him.
It's an audio processing chip, so probably not going to show up in a charging cable. Although the engineering part of my brain says "noise" shows up in a lot of places...
It's amazing how (based on polls, like https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-th...) the public dislikes it when it's shoved down its throat in unrelated programs and products (as opposed to them explicitly using an LLM or content generation program), but companies keep shoving it and even making a big deal out of doing so.
Perhaps the best thing about 2026 Apple is how "behind" they are in "AI Integration". And even them have shoved useless features like "Image Playground" on us.
> Traditional call noise canceling relies on those small onboard neural networks and can have difficulty isolating your voice in very noisy environments, which results in ambient noise leaking through or voices getting highly compressed, making it difficult to hear. Anker says the larger neural network available on the Thus chip, plus eight MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphones and two bone conduction sensors to focus in on your voice, in its yet-to-be-announced earbuds will have significantly cleaner call audio, regardless of the environment.
Anyone who likes good noise cancellation, which is a lot of people.
Back in the day we just called it ML. But now you have to stop for a minute to read and determine what they’re talking about, because “AI” is primarily a marketing term.
Early in the article it explains that these devices already had small neural nets on board. The advancement is that they can now put larger neural nets on board.
The best noise cancellation has to be adaptive. Neural nets help this work well. If making the product work well is "shoving it down your throat" then I don't know what to say.
The public presumably didn't hate the products before this chip and before knowing they had some form of AI on board.
> Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor.
Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?
>Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?
Because if it this is just adaptive NC using some NN, I still dislike vendors using terms like "AI" to jump on the bandwagon.
And of course because I already have a huge adversion to actual generative AI shoved down my throat in products I use, including macOS/iOS (thankfully lesser), and Windows/Office (much more), and content creation programs.
And don't get me started on generative AI slop shoved down my throat in HN submissions, YouTube, and every major platform, from X to Substack, and even into places it should never have even touched, like Art Technica, which I've been reading for a quarter of a century.
So, yes, excuuuuuuse me, for not liking such announcements, even if they're not about generative AI.
According to the article, it's used for noise cancelling and calling that can better isolate voice from background noise. It's not an AI assistant or an LLM. These are totally different and the public's feelings on LLMs do not apply to their feelings on active noise cancelling.
I distinctly remember a comment chain here, I think from last year, where someone made a remark they would never implement AI features, they wouldn't touch that tech "with a 10 foot pole" because of the public perception and backlash. Another comment immediately chimed in with skepticism about the general public having a negative view of AI.
I genuinely believe that the people pushing these features live in an algorithmic bubble. The internet supposedly connects us all, but I have to wonder how much hidden segregation goes on behind the scenes.
The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully.
Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you.
If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.
It kind of seems the opposite to me. I'm seeing so much marketing budget and and positive media exposure. It's the people that don't like it because of what it is and what it represents.
It isn't needed in every device. I don't need ai in a plug, or in a charging bank. I am perfectly capable of making a decision myself. I can use a piece of software without AI being helpful. Often I just want easy to use items that I have full control over and this lumping AI into everything is removing that.
Literally had no idea they actually made tech. I thought they just private labelled charging cables and sold them on Amazon.
They've been first at a few things.
For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.
The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.
The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.
The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.
Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.
That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.
---
Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."
And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.
It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.
And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.
They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.
And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.
But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
They own Eufy which sells cameras with main feature being “no subscription needed”, that are very unreliable and full of ads (which isn’t being advertised as much as lack of subscription). They do also go big on labelling a lot of simple features as AI where in reality it’s something as simple as “detect a person in a photo”. I have Eufy cameras and it’s complete garbage, sadly competition is also mostly garbage. Bold unsustainable claims at st the core of their business, it’s not just thumbnails.
Eufy was uploading the thumbnails to S3, if I recall correctly, so that they could be delivered in push notifications
This sounds right? All I can find is an LTT video on the topic and I'm not in a place to watch a video at the moment
I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rAXF_btvE to be more balanced than the LTT video, but I think it mostly depends on your expectations of the cameras. The videos themselves are stored locally, not in the cloud. But if you have thumbnails turned on in the notifications, then the thumbnails have to be stored somewhere temporarily (I think this is an Apple/Google requirement), and they're being stored on a cloud server rather than in your home network (which would require opening up a port).
I've just had 30kwh of their battery system installed. its working very nicely so far.. the Anker Solix X1
They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. They're often the best value.
(Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).
Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more.
edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
Oh, they've been pushing AI on my earbuds for a long time now. I just ignore them.
Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
This. I bought two Anker laptop chargers and both died died within weeks. Not a fan.
Extremely happy with my Anker Boom 2, it's amazing how much a clear and punch it packs for half the price of the nearest JBL product.
They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).
Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge.
Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.
But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.
They're killing it.
They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them.
Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
I have 3 of their wireless chargers, in both black and white and ended up covering the LED with electrical tape on each one. Way too bright
Same. I ended up getting something called "FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers" on Amazon that had some 80% light blocking circles that were just the right size. The brightness is definitely a design flaw, Anker should work on that (and maybe have the color change when charging is at 100% too).
Apple sell Anker chargers on their website, alongside their own.
What is there to "love" about an Anker charger out of curiosity (or, well, any charger)?
I've been using the same Anker charger brick since 2014. It was $13.99, delivered.
It has two USB A ports. It has always charged everything at a good rate, regardless of brand, model, or age. It's reasonably-compact, the prongs (it's made for US plugs) fold for convenience when traveling, and it is UL listed.
Its present duty includes keeping an iPad running 24x7 and also charging my phone every night. It has charged my phone many thousands of times so far.
I'd update it to something newer, with USB C and USB PD and the bee's knees, but this old Anker thing is exactly the right kind of consistent and boring.
I don't think about it much because it has given me no reason to think about it.
That kind of boring behavior is remarkable, I think. So many other charging bricks I've used were just trash to use (slow or fickle, causing me to waste time with a USB power analyzer before giving up), or they died prematurely.
Same with the powered Anker USB 3.0 hubs on my desk. Those have only seen about 5 years of continuous use but so far they've been resolute in their trouble-free performance.
This stuff seems to be very much buy-once, cry-never.
Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W.
Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables.
With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working.
And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port.
I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
[dead]
It's basically a DSP for noise cancellation. They just call it AI because, presumably, that'll increase their stock price.
It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices.
It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.
If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add.
Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.
I've been quite happy with the AnkerWork S600[1], which I bought a couple years ago through Kickstarter. I don't know if it's the same chip, but they advertise a "professional NPU", and I find the voiceprint-based ambient sound rejection works very well. I can literally have my crying child in my lap and the other side of the phone call can't hear him.
[1] https://us.ankerwork.com/pages/a3319-s600-all-in-one-speaker...
https://archive.ph/itJP1
It's an audio processing chip, so probably not going to show up in a charging cable. Although the engineering part of my brain says "noise" shows up in a lot of places...
I just want a battery pack with no ai
It's amazing how (based on polls, like https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/polling-reveals-th...) the public dislikes it when it's shoved down its throat in unrelated programs and products (as opposed to them explicitly using an LLM or content generation program), but companies keep shoving it and even making a big deal out of doing so.
Perhaps the best thing about 2026 Apple is how "behind" they are in "AI Integration". And even them have shoved useless features like "Image Playground" on us.
Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor.
Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?
> Traditional call noise canceling relies on those small onboard neural networks and can have difficulty isolating your voice in very noisy environments, which results in ambient noise leaking through or voices getting highly compressed, making it difficult to hear. Anker says the larger neural network available on the Thus chip, plus eight MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphones and two bone conduction sensors to focus in on your voice, in its yet-to-be-announced earbuds will have significantly cleaner call audio, regardless of the environment.
Anyone who likes good noise cancellation, which is a lot of people.
Back in the day we just called it ML. But now you have to stop for a minute to read and determine what they’re talking about, because “AI” is primarily a marketing term.
Early in the article it explains that these devices already had small neural nets on board. The advancement is that they can now put larger neural nets on board.
The best noise cancellation has to be adaptive. Neural nets help this work well. If making the product work well is "shoving it down your throat" then I don't know what to say.
The public presumably didn't hate the products before this chip and before knowing they had some form of AI on board.
> Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor.
Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?
>Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?
Because if it this is just adaptive NC using some NN, I still dislike vendors using terms like "AI" to jump on the bandwagon.
And of course because I already have a huge adversion to actual generative AI shoved down my throat in products I use, including macOS/iOS (thankfully lesser), and Windows/Office (much more), and content creation programs.
And don't get me started on generative AI slop shoved down my throat in HN submissions, YouTube, and every major platform, from X to Substack, and even into places it should never have even touched, like Art Technica, which I've been reading for a quarter of a century.
So, yes, excuuuuuuse me, for not liking such announcements, even if they're not about generative AI.
According to the article, it's used for noise cancelling and calling that can better isolate voice from background noise. It's not an AI assistant or an LLM. These are totally different and the public's feelings on LLMs do not apply to their feelings on active noise cancelling.
They're not putting them on hubs and chargers, Anker make more than that. In the article it says that they're being used first in earbuds.
I distinctly remember a comment chain here, I think from last year, where someone made a remark they would never implement AI features, they wouldn't touch that tech "with a 10 foot pole" because of the public perception and backlash. Another comment immediately chimed in with skepticism about the general public having a negative view of AI.
I genuinely believe that the people pushing these features live in an algorithmic bubble. The internet supposedly connects us all, but I have to wonder how much hidden segregation goes on behind the scenes.
VCs
AI is polarizing.
The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully.
Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you.
If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.
It kind of seems the opposite to me. I'm seeing so much marketing budget and and positive media exposure. It's the people that don't like it because of what it is and what it represents.
I would love to see this supposed "positive media exposure".
All I see are doom and gloom forecasts, "bubble" talk, and how bad it is for the environment.
It isn't needed in every device. I don't need ai in a plug, or in a charging bank. I am perfectly capable of making a decision myself. I can use a piece of software without AI being helpful. Often I just want easy to use items that I have full control over and this lumping AI into everything is removing that.
> Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?
USB-C and hdmi cable issues are right up there as causes of frustration for me. But me day the external minute works, next it doesn’t.
Having cables fail in new and unexpected ways with AI sounds amazing.