Published on December 28th, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi

Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter Review: The Only USB-C Power Adapter You Will Ever Need

Introduction

Today, owning multiple devices is the norm. Most of us today have at least two cellphones, a tablet and a laptop. And if you are a frequent traveler, you will often end up carrying multiple power adapters in your travel bag. And then you need to search and pull out the correct one from the bag to use it, which can be annoying and/or frustrating when in a hurry. Moreover, if your family owns multiple laptops for many purposes, traveling together means lugging along the bulky power adapter bricks. Fortunately, Innergie has a brilliant solution to this problem. In case you have not heard of them, we had reviewed their PowerJoy 30C wall charger one and half years ago and found it to be extremely reliable. Recently, they launched the 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter that unifies a laptop, tablet and phone power adapter into an ultra compact 55cc package. You only need to carry one of this and it will power all your electronics. Right now, we have a Innergie 60C with us for review, sent to us by Innergie themselves. So how does it perform? Read on to know more.

About the product

The Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter is an ultra-compact multi-voltage AC-to-DC power adapter that can power all your electronics equipped with a USB type-C port. Here are the highlights from the product page:

WORLD SMALLEST CHARGER: Innergie 60C is the world’s smallest 60W power adapter, which fits perfectly inside your pocket, purse and etc. Just the size of a 55cc shot glass (1.18” x 2.36”) with ultra-light weight (88g).
UNRIVALED VERSATILITY: Interchangeable charger plugs (US, UK and EU) fulfill uses across more than 150 countries in the world.
60W USB PD: Innergie 60C is equipped with advanced PD technology, providing max 20V 3A power output and can fully charges your iPhone 8/8 Plus/X up to 50% in 30 minutes, and MacBook series in 1.5 hours.
BROAD COMPATIBILITY: Innergie 60C supports and automatically detects 5V, 9V, 12V, 15V, or 20V output, enabling fast charging from laptop, tablet, smartphone to 6000+ devices, including ASUS ZenBook 3/ HP Spectre x360/ Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon/ iPhone 8/8 Plus/X/ Nintendo Switch/ GoPro HERO5/6.
OVERCHARGE PROTECTION & ULTIMATE CUSTOMER SERVICE: InnerShield technology protects charger from overcurrent, overvoltage, overheating, overpower and short circuit. Enjoy Innergie laptop charger with a 3-year global guarantee promise.

Now that we’re familiar with the product, let’s move on to unboxing it.

Unboxing

Innergie sent us the International Edition of the Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter, which comes in an attractive see-through packaging.

The sides of the box have a features summary of the product.

The bottom of the box has regulatory information.

We break the seal and take out the tray inside the box. We are greeted with a user manual at the top and the power adapter itself below.

The manual is very professionally written and illustrated. This is a nice and refreshing part of unboxing a product, making you more interested in the product.

After keeping the manual aside, we see that the box has a flap yet to be uncovered.

Opening up the flap, we see the accessories included with the charger: a USB type-C cable, and 3 travel plugs (1 US, 1 Europe and 1 UK).

Here are all the items taken out of the box and placed side-by-side on the table.

Here are some close-up views of the power adapter. This is the front side having the USB-C port.

This is the side view.

This is the back side, which has a socket to mount the travel plugs.

Since, we’re reviewing it in India, where 2-pin sockets follow European convention, we open up the European plug. Here are the front and back views of the detachable plugs.

Once the plug is attached to the adapter body, the assembled unit looks like this.

Now, we attach the USB-C cable to the adapter. Finally the Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter looks like this.

We have successfully unboxed the product. Let’s move on to using it.

Usage and Experience

Performance evaluation

We want to know how the Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter would behave in real world scenarios. So we brought 3 devices to test, a Xiaomi Poco F1 smartphone, a OnePlus 6 smartphone and a 13″ Macbook Pro with Core i7 and 512GB PCIe SSD and see how the power adapter behaves when connected to each of them. We used a USB multimeter to determine the voltage and current draw by the devices and verify if they are charging at optimal speeds.

To get rid of transient discrepancies, we used the 60C for 3 power cycles for each of the devices and recorded their readings.

Xiaomi Poco F1

The Xiaomi Poco F1 is the cheapest near-flagship device in the smartphone world having a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, with support for dual-gigabit-LTE and dual-VoLTE. The variant we have used for testing is the 256GB flash + 8GB RAM armored (Kevlar) edition. This edition comes with a massive 4000 mAh battery that lasts more than a day of heavy use and supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 and 4.0 standards. The QC 4.0 charger included with the phone takes about 2 hours to charge the battery from flat to full.

We connected the Innergie 60C to the wall plug, then connected the USB multimeter to the Innergie 60C, and then connected one end of the USB-C cable to the output of the USB multimeter and the other side to the phone’s USB port.

We were expecting that the phone will charge at 5V/2.4A since the power adapter has no support for QC 3.0 or 4.0. However, we were shocked with the findings. Initially, when the phone is connected to the Innergie 60C, it draws 5V. About 5 seconds later, the voltage gets upped to 9V with a maximum current draw of 2A. Throughout our 3 charging sessions, the current draw peaked at 1.7A and averaged at 1.02A. After the battery crosses 80% capacity, the charging voltage comes down to 5V, and the current draw declines from 1A to 0 as the capacity reaches 100%. This behaviour is similar to the QC 4.0 certified charger that comes out of the box. This means that the Innergie 60C charges equally fast as the OEM charger. However, the phone’s UI does not show ‘quick charging’ or ‘charging rapidly’ while being connected to this power adapter. Why so? It is probably because the Innergie 60C is only USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) certified, and not Quick Charging (QC) certified. What does this mean? This experimental evaluation shows that the Poco F1 supports USB-PD but Xiaomi does not advertise support for it. So can you use Innergie 60C with Xiaomi phones at full charging speed? For most of their phones, the answer would be yes.

OnePlus 6

OnePlus advertises their phones as ‘flagship killers’ giving features found in more expensive phones from Samsung, Sony and Apple at a fraction of the price. The OnePlus 6 is currently the second latest phone OnePlus has released with dual-gigabit-LTE and dual-VoLTE support. We tested Innergie 60C with the 64GB storage + 6GB RAM Mirror Black edition. The OnePlus 6 has a 3300 mAh battery that lasts up to a full day of heavy use and charges from 0 to 60% in half an hour with DASH charge. DASH chargers have a power rating of 4A at 5V. Does Innergie 60C deliver what a DASH charger would?

We plugged the OnePlus 6 into this charger and for the duration of the tests, we found that it charges at the typical 5V/2A USB 2.0 specs. The maximum current draw is 1.46A and maximum voltage is 5.30V. Unfortunately, the OnePlus 6 does not support USB-PD.

Macbook Pro 13″

We performed the final test with a laptop that has a power draw that can max out the Innergie 60C at 60W: the Macbook Pro late 2017 13″ with touch bar. The stock Apple power adapter that comes with it is rated at 61W, but is about 3 times the volume and twice as heavy as the 60C. How does the Innergie 60C behave with the Macbook?

On plugging the Macbook to this power adapter, we see that it starts charging as it should immediately. On opening ‘System Report’, macOS shows that a 60W power adapter is connected and the laptop is charging. We briefly swapped out the 60C with the stock charger to see if there is any change in reported values. macOS reports the stock 61W charger as a 60W charger. So in the software, the Innergie 60C shows no difference over the Apple adapter.

How fast does it charge the laptop? Does that 1W make any difference? In our test runs, we found that both the Apple adapter and Innergie 60C take the same amount of time (a little less than 2 hours) to charge the Macbook from 0% to 100%. This made us doubt if Apple’s extra 1W is a gimmick.

Looking at the readings from the USB multimeter, we find that over the course of a charging session, the voltage remains steady at 19.9V, while the current draw starts off at 2A at 0% and decreases gradually, reaching 1A at 100%. At half way, i.e., 50% charge, the current reading is 1.23A.

We can safely conclude that that the Innergie 60C is a drop-in replacement for the Apple 61W USB-C power adapter.

Build quality

The Innergie 60C is made of premium quality plastic that quite light as well as sturdy. Its build quality is better than most laptop adapters. It can withstand daily wear and tear and drops from several feet high. The only major issue we find with its body is that it has a glossy finish which causes cosmetic problems like attracting fingerprints, dirt and a myriad of fine scratches. I would have preferred the body to have a matte finish, which reduces these problems by a huge extent.

The USB-C cable that comes included with the 60C is extremely high quality. It is strong, yet not too stiff, and the plastic is wear-resistant. It even has a ferrite bead at one connector to suppress high frequency noise that can unintentionally leak from the AC power supply. The USB-C connectors are themselves quite strong to withstand breakage due to bending and twisting. What I liked most about the connectors on the cable is that the tips are rounded and blunt and will not scratch or break your USB-C device port. Getting an USB-C cable of equal quality on any online marketplace will cost you atleast $15.

Ergonomics

The Innergie 60C is extremely light (88g) and extremely tiny (55cc) for its given power capacity. I am surprised about the extent Innergie has gone to miniaturize and optimize the construction of this little power brick. It makes you wonder how science and technology has advanced over the course of a year. To put this in perspective, the PowerJoy 30C wall charger we reviewed earlier was slightly bigger than this one and had only half the power output of the 60C.

Apart from that, Innergie has made a lot of improvements over the PowerJoy 30C. The 60C keeps the same connector style for the travel plugs, but the new shot-glass shape makes it easier to attach and detach these plugs compared to its predecessor. On top of that, the 60C’s plugs click into place when twisted, whereas the 30C’s plugs require significant pressure to twist into place. If you have used the PowerJoy 30C before, then the 60C is a worthy upgrade.

Heat dissipation is surprisingly well-optimized for this power adapter. According to physics, the smaller the surface area, the higher the heat dissipation per unit area and higher the body temperature. Going in that direction, the Innergie 60C should run hotter than every other power adapter in existence. But no, there is little or no heat while charging a phone or tablet. And there is only a mild heating while charging a laptop. At all times, one can touch the power adapter without worrying about discomfort.

Getting for yourself

You can purchase the Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter on Amazon.com for $119 or on Innergie’s own store at $120. Its quite reasonably priced compared to Apple’s 61W charger and also charges other brand laptops as well as smartphones and tablets.

Summary

Pros

Tiny and light for its power output
Strong build quality of the power adapter and the USB-C cable
Wide device compatibility
Interchangeable wall plugs
Heat dissipation is properly managed

Cons

Honestly, we could not find any.

Conclusion

The Innergie 60C USB-C Laptop Adapter is hands-down the best USB power adapter that we have ever reviewed at Techno FAQ. It is not only a very handy product but its very existence demonstrates how far technology has advanced and how its likely going to advance in the future.

Techno FAQ rating: 10/10

Tags: 55cc, 60C, adapter, Innergie, Innergie 60C, laptop, power, power adapter, PowerGear, USB-C

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.