The second drawer of my desk had become a place where cables went to be forgotten. When I finally emptied it onto the floor, I counted fourteen power adapters. Two of them belonged to laptops I sold years ago. Three were identical white bricks for the same phone model. One had a barrel connector I could not match to any device in the house. I had never bought a single one of them on purpose. They simply arrived in boxes and stayed.
That is how the pile builds. Every device ships with its own adapter, and nobody throws away a working power supply, so the surplus quietly compounds year after year. The drawer was not a storage problem. It was a decision I had postponed roughly fourteen times. Sorting everything into keep and discard piles took ten minutes and solved nothing, because the real question was not which adapters to remove but what would replace all of them.
Counting watts before counting cables
Gallium nitride adapters change the arithmetic here. They run cooler and pack more output into far less volume than the silicon bricks in my drawer, which means one unit with three or four ports can cover a laptop, a tablet and a phone at once. The catch is that ports share a total power budget, and the split shifts depending on how many are occupied. A 100W unit might give the laptop 65W on its own but drop it to 45W the moment a second device is plugged in.
Spec sheets rarely print that second number. Most of the models on my shortlist came from Korean brands, and review sites there tend to publish port-by-port measurements rather than a single headline figure, so I worked through a Korean breakdown of GaN charger wattage and wrote down what each port actually delivered while the others were busy. That was the figure I needed, not the one printed on the box.
The answer turned out to be less than I expected. My laptop draws 61W under load, the tablet 30W, the phone 25W. A single 140W four-port unit covers all three with headroom, and it sits on the desk rather than inside a drawer. I kept two adapters as spares, one for travel and one for a camera battery that refuses to charge over USB-C. The remaining twelve went to an electronics recycling point. The drawer now holds stationery, which is what a desk drawer is meant to hold, and I no longer dig through a tangle of identical white cables to find the one that fits.