One Charger Should Replace the Four in Your Bag

Most people still haul a laptop brick, a phone charger, and a spare of something they can't remember buying. There's no good reason for it anymore. Gallium nitride chargers have got good enough that one unit, smaller than an old phone charger, will run everything you own.

The question isn't whether to consolidate. It's what wattage to consolidate at.

What GaN actually did

Gallium nitride replaced silicon in the switching parts of power adapters, and the upshot is that 65 to 100-plus watts now fits in something smaller than the charger that came with your phone five years ago. GaN also runs cooler than silicon, which you notice in a packed bag or wedged behind a nightstand.

Anything worth buying uses USB Power Delivery, which lets one port work out the right voltage for a phone, a tablet or a laptop instead of pushing a fixed output at whatever you plug in.

Choose the wattage, then stop thinking

This is genuinely the only decision that matters, and it's simpler than the product pages want you to believe.

30W tops up a phone fast and does nothing else useful. 65W and up fast-charges a phone and a laptop at once, which is where most people should be shopping.

A 65W-plus GaN charger replaces most laptop chargers outright — MacBook Air, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad adapters, all of them. A 67W single-port unit runs most laptops, tablets and phones at full speed. 100W is where you get real simultaneous power instead of two ports splitting one budget.

The three names that keep coming up

For most travellers, the UGREEN Nexode Pro 65W is the sensible default: 65W from a single port, 113 grams, three ports for a laptop, phone and one accessory.

If you genuinely need laptop and phone at full speed together, the Ugreen Nexode 100W is the one. 100W is the crossover where a single charger works as well on your desk as in a suitcase.

For heavy travel, the Anker Prime 67W keeps getting recommended — compact, powerful, and reliable across different countries, which is its own requirement separate from watts.

The cheap one is genuinely good

Worth knowing about the Baseus 65W GaN, because the value maths is lopsided. It does roughly 90% of what the Anker Prime 67W does at 65% of the price — 26 dollars, 120 grams — and it's the lightest, cheapest multi-port GaN charger anyone will stand behind.

For a second charger that lives permanently in a bag, that's the answer.

The bits that matter once it's in your bag

Foldable prongs aren't a nice-to-have. Fixed prongs snag fabric, scratch laptop lids and make a flat pocket useless. It's the most common regret with an otherwise good charger.

Weight's the other one, though not how people think. The gap between 113 and 120 grams is noise. The gap between either and a laptop brick plus two spares is the entire reason to do this.

One honest downside

One charger is one point of failure. If it dies at an airport, everything dies with it. The answer isn't to carry a backup brick — that defeats the whole exercise. Keep a cheap 30W unit at home or in a second bag instead. Enough to keep a phone alive while you sort out a replacement.

Image: ready made, via Pexels