Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it
Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it
I don’t buy that stuff of Amazon, but Aliexpress is much cheaper than Mouser or Digikey for a lot of it especially if you just want an assortment of stuff for future projects instead of exact quantities for your BOM.
Problem with Ali is counterfeit city but I do use it for certain things, absolutely.
Also stocks of things there that bullshit USA rules prevent. Back when I was repairing macbooks and apple basically controlled the entire supply of TI usb c controllers? Like they existed and you could get the datasheet off mouser but they didn’t stock it bc apple literally bought 100% of the supply for years. But aliexpress and ebay had sellers that either pulled them from lines or harvested them from broken machines and reballed them. Considering this was how the machines charged it was the only way to un brick then
I’m just a hobbyist playing around and buying the cheap loose-tolerance stuff to begin with, so it’s unclear to me how “counterfeit” could possibly be any worse than I’m already expecting, short of failing to work at all.
Depends on what “stuff” we mean mainly.
Passives like resistors and capacitors? It doesn’t really matter though it’s good practice to measure them before installation (even with good manufacturing nowadays tbh). But buying a widely cloned chip like an atmega mcu? I would just pay the extra dollar to get a few from mouser
I got some ATTiny85s and ESP32s from AliExpress; they seem fine to me. Even with microcontrollers, what do the real ones do that the fake ones fail at?
It’s entirely possible that your chips are fine.
It’s also possible that they’re grey market and might have a higher fail rate, basically. The ones that meet spec get purchased by amtel or atmega or whoever and shipped to parts warehouses like mouser. The ones that don’t are contractually supposed to be destroyed but they technically still work and china is resourceful and doesn’t necessarily give a shit about copyright so they end up on AliExpress for cheap. It’s not a bad deal, it basically means that 3 in 10 might go bad prematurely instead of 1 in 20 but for 1/3rd the cost. Given the savings it’s usually worthwhile for hobbyist stuff, I know I’ve done it. Fuck amazon but I’ll fuck with aliexpress.
The other issue though is clones and copies and that’s more complex. This is where it’s like they might just be fine or they might not work right or at all. Like the FTDI usb to serial interface for microcontrollers vs the clones, which dont always work with the FTDI drivers (though tbf this is bc FTDI purposely updates the drivers to break compatibility with clones and not inherently a fault of the cloned chip).
https://youtu.be/vUuH02o5Mpk
https://www.guillier.org/blog/2019/08/fake-attiny85-from-china/
it appears there are fakes of attiny85 out there. “Fake” esp32 is more complex bc it’s a native Chinese product. Unless you specifically want the expressif version I guess