Apple sells a polishing cloth for about twenty bucks. TESSAN is out here offering a 20,000 mAh power bank with 30 watt USB C charging and built in USB C and Lightning cables for less than that. One cleans fingerprints off your screen. The other can recharge your phone several times, top up a thin and light laptop, and keep a tablet alive through a long flight. It is hard not to see the contrast as a snapshot of the current accessory market.
For roughly the price of Apple’s most meme worthy add on, you can buy a brick that quietly solves the most common charging headaches. No extra cables to pack, no hunting for outlets in crowded airports, no arguing over the one free plug at a conference. Just a single charger that covers most of the devices you actually carry. The polishing cloth may be softer. The value proposition is not.
Designer: TESSAN
The built in cables are what make this thing actually useful instead of just another rectangular battery that sits in a drawer. You get a Lightning cable and a USB C cable permanently attached to the bank itself, plus a separate USB C port and USB A port on the side. So you can charge an iPhone, an Android phone, and something like a tablet or a laptop all at once without carrying a single extra cord. The 30 watt output means you can actually fast charge modern phones or keep a thin laptop limping along during a long meeting. TESSAN says it will push an iPhone 15 Pro to 53 percent in half an hour, which tracks with standard USB C PD speeds.
The 20,000 mAh capacity is enough to fully charge a MacBook Air once with a bit left over, or get about three to four full phone charges depending on your device. Real world usable capacity will be closer to 13,000 or 14,000 mAh after conversion losses, but that is normal for every power bank on the market. You are still looking at multiple days of phone backup or one solid laptop rescue. The whole thing weighs enough that you will know it is in your bag, but it fits under most airline carry on battery limits, so you can actually travel with it.
At 17 dollars, this feels like one of those weird Amazon lightning deals where the price accidentally makes sense for about 48 hours before it jumps back up. Most 20,000 mAh banks with any kind of name recognition sit closer to 40 or 50 bucks, and the ones with built in cables usually add another 10 or 15 on top of that. TESSAN is an Amazon brand that does travel adapters and charging accessories, so you are trading some of the premium build quality and safety margin you would get from Anker or Belkin for a price that just barely registers as a purchase. If the cables fray in a year, you discard it as e-waste and buy another one for less than the cost of replacing a single USB C cable from Apple. Sounds bonkers, no?
