Anker 33W 2-Port on a MacBook Air: Measured

Anker's 33W two-port charger measured on a MacBook Air M5: 31.4 W delivered, a full PPS range, and a charger that identifies itself as Southchip Semiconductor rather than Anker.

Anker’s 33 W two-port charger, tested against a MacBook Air M5 with a low battery, per the methodology .

The numbers

Rated33 W
Negotiated33 W (20 V up to 1.65 A)
Live draw31.4 W (19.9 V at 1.57 A)
ProtocolUSB PD 3.0
Cable readPassive, USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), 5 A, EPR - Anker

Profile menu:

ProfileRail
15 W5 V up to 3 A
27 W9 V up to 3 A
33 W15 V up to 2.2 A
33 W20 V up to 1.65 A — active
PPS3.3-11 V, up to 3 A

31.4 W of a 33 W rating, on a rail holding 19.9 V of a nominal 20. Well inside spec on both counts, and its full rating offered twice - 15 V at 2.2 A and 20 V at 1.65 A - so a device can take whichever its converter prefers. The Mac takes the 20 V.

Note also that 20 × 1.65 = 33 exactly, and 15 × 2.2 = 33 exactly. Both rungs were sized to land on the rating rather than near it.

The name is not Anker

macOS reports this charger as:

Southchip Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. 33W Charger

Southchip does not make chargers. Southchip makes the USB Power Delivery controller inside this one.

This is the second time in the series an Anker product has done this. The Anker 20,000mAh power bank reports itself as Chipsea Technologies - a different silicon vendor, same behaviour. Two Anker products, two chipmakers’ names, no mention of Anker on either.

What makes that notable is that Anker can do better and sometimes does: other Anker units answer PD Discover Identity with Anker’s own registered vendor ID, 0x291A. So this is not a company that never registered an ID - it is a company whose identity reporting varies from product to product, presumably following whichever PD controller the design used.

The practical consequence: an unfamiliar company name in this field is usually the chip, not a counterfeit. Southchip and Chipsea are both real, ordinary silicon vendors. See why only Apple chargers show their name .

It lets the Mac read the cable

The cable row is populated here, and that is worth more attention than it looks:

Passive, USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), 5 A, EPR - Anker

A USB-C cable’s e-marker chip has no power of its own. It runs off VCONN on the unused CC pin, and only whichever device owns VCONN can interrogate it. When you are charging, the charger is the one in that role - your Mac is just the sink. The Mac can only ask the cable anything after the charger agrees to hand VCONN over, and under USB Power Delivery that handover is optional.

Most chargers decline. This one doesn’t, which is why you can see the cable’s specification above.

The same cable on a different charger disappears entirely. Tested minutes apart, on the same Mac and the same port, a cable that reports fully through this 33 W charger produced no cable identity at all through an Anker 25 W unit. Nothing about the cable changed. The charger decides.

So on a charging-only connection, “no e-marker detected” is not a statement about your cable. It is a statement about your charger’s willingness to let you look. Any tool that reports the absence as a fact about the cable is wrong on this exact case.

A 5 A cable that runs at 480 Mbps

One more detail in that cable line, because it surprises people: this cable is USB 2.0 - 480 Mbps - and simultaneously rated 5 A with EPR, which is to say up to 240 W.

Speed and power are independent properties of a USB-C cable. A cable can be built to carry enormous current while moving data no faster than a 2001 flash drive, and that is a perfectly sensible design for a charging cable where nobody needs 10 Gbps. It is also why “is this a good cable?” has no single answer - good for power and good for data are different specifications, listed separately. See e-marker chips explained .

This is the cable from our own test rig , used for every measurement in the series precisely because its 5 A rating never becomes the limiting factor.

The PPS range is a real one

PPS 3.3-11 V, up to 3 A is a full-width adjustable range, reaching well past the charger’s own 9 V step. Compare the golf ball charger and the Target dealworthy car charger , whose PPS stops at 5.9 V and cannot reach their own 9 V rung.

PPS lets a phone request a precise voltage in 20 mV steps to match its battery’s charging curve, wasting less power as heat. macOS never uses it - the Mac charges from the fixed 20 V rail - but for an Android phone this is the difference between fast charging and ordinary charging.

Worth buying?

The Anker 33W 2-Port charger delivers 95% of its rating, holds its voltage, offers a genuine PPS range for phones, and is small. For a MacBook Air it is a capable travel charger rather than a full-speed one - an Air wants closer to 65 W to charge at its best under load.

Its second port is USB-A, which is a different story entirely: see the USB-A side measured for what that connector costs you.

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