Electronics & Tech · The Strategist Files
Dispatch № 02
INIU has three power banks. We only kept one in the bag.
A week of airports, hotel desks, and one panicked soldering job later — two of these are filler, one of them is the friend we keep texting people about.
By Reza Mahmoud / Tech & Audio Editor
April 25, 2026 / 4 min read
INIU is the brand the group chat keeps surfacing — they show up on every roundup because they hit the technical bar Anker hits and charge roughly a third of the price. That math holds up here, mostly. The wrinkle: their catalog is small but oddly cross-listed, and only one of the three units we hauled around for a week actually earned its slot in the bag.
We ran every unit through the same trip: a 14-inch laptop idling between meetings, a phone nightly, a USB-C soldering iron during a favor we owed someone, and the Apple Watch that never quits. Filed below in the order we’d hand them to a friend.
The 45W mini — the one we actually packed
Ten thousand mAh tucked into something roughly deck-of-cards sized, and the 45W PD output is real — it pushed a 14-inch MacBook Air from flat to 36% in twenty minutes flat. Pass-through charging works, the shell stays cool when you’re leaning on it, and the built-in USB-C cable means one less thing to forget on a hotel desk. This is the one. Close the tab, click buy.
INIU
Portable Charger, Ultra Mini 10000mAh 45W Fast Charging Power Bank, USB C Battery Pack with Cable, Flight-Safe Travel Powerbank for iPhone 17, Xiaomi 17 Pro, Teen Girls, Student, Light
$29.99 / $36.99 −18% / 4.5★ 24,314 reviews
The slim 22.5W — back-pocket energy, phone-only ceiling
INIU’s long-running bestseller, and the case for it is genuinely the form factor — flat enough to slip into the back pocket of jeans. The ceiling is PD 22.5W, which fast-charges a phone happily and throttles a laptop into a sulk. Cheaper than the mini above, so if the job description is "keep a phone alive between LAX and JFK," this earns the slot. Plug anything thirstier into it and the ten bucks you saved will start to itch.
INIU
Portable Charger, Slimmest Fast Charging 10000mAh USB C in/Out Power Bank, 22.5W PD3.0 QC4+ Battery Pack, Portable Phone Charger for iPhone 16 15 14 13 12 Pro Samsung S22 S21 Google Air
$19.99 / $22.99 −13% / 4.6★ 16,109 reviews
A two-pack of wall plugs we didn’t mean to keep
A pair of 30W PD GaN bricks the size of a sugar cube each. We ran both through a USB-C power meter and they hit rated output without flinching. The reason this made the file: $17.99 for two undercuts a single Apple 30W block by about forty dollars. The plastic feels a little chattery when you flex it, but the internals are doing the actual work and they’re fine.
INIU
USB C Charger, 2-Pack 30W PD QC Fast Charging Type C Charger Block With 5ft USB-C Cable, Compact USB C Wall Charger With Foldable Plug For iPhone 17 Pro Max, Samsung S25, Commuter, Trav
$17.99 / $19.99 −10% / 4.7★ 1,063 reviews
The cull, if you skimmed
Get the 45W mini. It’s the only one of the three with the output to actually move a modern laptop, and it disappears into a coat pocket. The slim 22.5W works if your battery anxiety only ever involves a phone. The wall-plug two-pack is a legitimately good deal, just not a must-add.
We’d skip the rest of the INIU lineup until they ship something faster than 45W or larger than 10,000mAh in this same shell. The group chat is whispering about a 65W version dropping this summer — we’ll update if it’s real.
— Reza Mahmoud / April 25
From the editor’s desk
