Most phones and laptops now ship without a wall charger in the box, which means the charger you buy separately matters more than it used to. The spec that causes the most confusion is wattage, and the technology behind almost every compact charger released since 2021 is gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors.
GaN chargers run cooler and can be built smaller than older silicon designs because the material handles higher switching frequencies with less wasted heat. That is why a 65W GaN charger today is roughly the size of a charger that only delivered 20W a decade ago. But wattage alone does not tell the whole story - the charger also needs to negotiate the right voltage and current with your device over USB Power Delivery (USB-PD), the protocol that lets a single charger safely fast-charge a phone, a tablet, or a laptop by stepping through different power profiles.
A few practical points worth knowing before buying one:
- Multi-port chargers split their total wattage across ports when more than one device is plugged in, so a "100W" charger might only give a phone 20W if a laptop is also charging on another port.
- Cable quality matters as much as the charger - a cheap USB-C cable can bottleneck a 65W charger down to a fraction of that speed.
- Higher wattage does not damage a device that only supports lower wattage; the negotiation protocol caps the delivered power automatically.
For a rundown of current wall chargers and charging accessories across wattages and port configurations, CairoVolt keeps a running wall chargers and charging accessories comparison page.
