The Supply Index is a design-led record of everyday products, selected for the quality of their design decisions — what each prioritises, what it sacrifices, and what those choices say about who it was made for.

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TA 105 Max Universal Travel Adapter

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The TA-105 Max collapses a drawer of travel chargers into one palm-sized block. Four regional plugs, covering the US, UK, European and Australian standards, slide out one at a time from the body, with a lock that keeps the chosen plug extended and the others retracted, so a single object works across more than two hundred countries. Inside, GaN circuitry, the technology that shrank modern chargers, drives three USB-C and two USB-A ports plus a passthrough socket at up to 75 watts total, enough to fast-charge a laptop and a phone at once. A built-in fuse, spare fuses and safety shutters round it out. It suits the traveller who wants one hub for every device and destination, and must remember its key limit: it adapts plugs but does not convert voltage, so devices need to be dual-voltage.

Design intent

  • The core decision is consolidation through GaN: the more efficient, cooler-running gallium-nitride circuitry shrinks a multi-port fast charger enough to sit inside a travel adapter, so one palm-sized block replaces a separate wall charger and a set of single-country plug adapters.
  • The sliding, self-locking plug mechanism keeps a genuinely multi-region tool compact and safe: four regional plugs retract into one body and a lock exposes only the one in use and stops it collapsing mid-charge, solving international coverage without a bag of loose adapters.

Trade-offs

  • It adapts plugs but does not convert voltage, so single-voltage appliances such as some hair dryers and shavers cannot be used safely abroad; only dual-voltage devices, which most laptops and phone chargers are, are suitable.
  • Coverage is wide but not total, missing the Type D and Type M sockets of India and South Africa, and packing a mains passthrough and six ports makes it chunkier than a bare plug adapter, if far smaller than the separate chargers it replaces.
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5 Jul 2025
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