Oticon real chargers

Just to followup for anyone coming across this thread, we ended up buying a used Phillips Travel Charger for my dad’s Oticon MiniRITE-Rs. It was about $140 on eBay from a seller that had a number of them. It works great, he can get about a week worth of nightly charges from it.

Even at that price, it’s an awful lot for an inductive charger not much different than what’s included free with many earbuds, but the fact that Demant gets almost twice as much for the ‘premium’ Oticon branded charger as a functionally identical new Phillips-branded model is disgusting. It makes Apple’s $79 for a replacement AirPods charger look like a bargain! Attempting to abuse customers with an artificially captive market like this is a good way to lose them; Dad will certainly be checking out the Costco alternatives next time he replaces them.

“Steep” is one way of putting it. “Ridiculous”, “Ripoff”, “Downright theft” are other terms that come to mind. Mine is only about 4 months old and stopped working. I will have to see if I can get it covered under warranty. In the meantime I thought I’d just get one on Amazon and get it delivered right away. I was hoping a charger, like any other USB charger would be like $20. Ok, maybe more because it’s induction based. So $100 would be expensive but not surprising. But $300? That’s just plain theft. Maunufacturing costs are probably around $10, maximum. Makes me angry!