The Anker Nano Power Strip Fixes the Ugliest Corner of Your Editing Desk

Every desk has one ugly corner: the gray knot of chargers and power bricks that no cable management ever truly tames. The Anker Nano Power Strip (10-in-1, 70W, Clamp) clamps to your desk edge and swallows that knot whole, and after a month running my entire charging setup off it, I'm not going back.

I've had it clamped to my desk for over a month, running as an all-in-one charging station for a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, AirPods Max, a battery pack, and an air purifier. The pitch is simple: bury the plugs you never touch under the desk, keep the ones you swap all day up top, and hold the whole thing steady enough to unplug one-handed. It mostly delivers, and the one thing it gets right is the thing most power strips get wrong.

The Design Idea

The whole product is one decision: split the ten ports into two zones. Six AC outlets and four USB ports, divided so the stuff that never moves stays hidden and the stuff you swap all day stays on top.

Underneath, a clamp body carries four of the AC outlets, two per side. That's where my air purifier, the AirPods Max charging cable, and anything else that plugs in once and stays plugged in disappears. On top, a slim bar rises just 0.75 inches above the desk edge and holds the other two AC outlets plus the ports you reach for constantly: two USB-C, two USB-A, all along the front lip. Clamped to the side edge of my desk, that low profile keeps it out of the way of my arm and my work surface; it sits at the edge of my reach without ever being something I have to work around.

The Anker Nano Power Strip clamps to the desk edge with a silicone-lined, tool-free thumbscrew, fitting edges between 0.6 and 1.8 inches thick and angling up to 45 degrees. The silicone lining means no scratches on a nice desk.

The Specs

• Ports: 6 AC outlets, 2 USB-C, 2 USB-A (10 total)
• AC output: 1,875 W total
• Single USB-C output: 5V/3A, 9V/3A, 15V/3A, 20V/3.5A, 70 W max (GaN)
• USB-A output: 5V/2.4A, 12 W max each
• Total USB output: 70 W (the two USB-C ports share a combined 70 W)
• Input: 125V, 60 Hz, 15A (USB module accepts 100 to 240V, 50 to 60 Hz)
• Surge protection: 1,500 joules, with front-face indicator LED
• Overload protection: smart cutoff with pop-out reset button
• Clamp: silicone-lined thumbscrew, fits edges 0.6 to 1.8 inches thick, up to 45 degrees
• Dimensions: 6.02 x 2.06 x 3.97 inches overall (0.75 inches above desk)
• Weight: 24.7 ounces (700 grams)
• Power cord: 5 feet
• Colors: black and white
• Price: $69.99

What It Gets Right

The clamp holds. That sounds minor until you've fought a floor strip that slides three inches every time you yank a stubborn plug. Anker's pitch is that you can unplug a device one-handed without the strip shifting or lifting, and on my standard flat-edge desk that held up completely. I could pull a tight-fitting cable free with one hand and the unit didn't budge, didn't tilt, didn't peel off the edge. After a month of daily plugging and unplugging, the thumbscrew hasn't loosened and the silicone lining hasn't marked the desk. For a device whose entire reason to exist is staying put, that's the pass/fail test, and it passes.

Charging is the other pleasant surprise. A single USB-C port pushes up to 70 W through GaN, and my MacBook Pro pulled full speed without drama. Anker claims a 13-inch MacBook Air (M3) to 50 percent in 28 minutes from that port, and while I didn't stopwatch my own machine, the port behaved like a real 70 W supply rather than the throttled trickle you get from most strip-mounted USB. It kept up with the Pro's heavier draw just fine during normal editing and everyday work; if I were going to run the machine full bore all day under a sustained load, I'd move it to one of the AC outlets and let its own adapter carry the full wattage, but for typical use the USB-C port never left it wanting. The rest of my kit lived off the remaining ports without complaint: iPhone and Apple Watch on the front-edge ports, AirPods Max and a battery pack topping up alongside, the air purifier humming away on an AC outlet below. Everything charged from the same bar I was already reaching into, no wall warts scattered across the desk.

The surge protection is rated at 1,500 joules with a front-face indicator LED, and there's smart overload protection with a pop-out reset button rather than a fuse you have to replace. Total AC output is 1,875 W, which never came close to straining under my mix of a laptop, a purifier, and a handful of chargers running at once.

The Fine Print Worth Knowing

The dual USB-C ports share a combined 70 W, not 70 W each. Charge one device and it can take the whole budget; charge two and they split it. If you're running multiple USB devices at once, Anker's own guidance is to move any laptop needing more than 45 W to an AC outlet, and anything over 65 W should always live on AC. USB-C2 specifically gets throttled first in a multi-port load. In practice, none of this came up for me, and it's easy to sidestep even if it did: with six AC outlets on the unit, you can just run the laptop off its own wall adapter in an AC socket and leave the USB-C budget for everything else. The sharing limits only bite if you insist on fast-charging two power-hungry devices off the two C ports at once.

There's a Samsung-specific quirk in the sharing logic too: a Samsung device charged next to a non-laptop gets priority 45 W, and if both connected devices are Samsung, USB-C1 takes the 45 W. Niche, but worth a line if your kit leans Galaxy.

One thing is simply absent: there is no on/off switch anywhere on the unit, so cutting power means pulling the cord. The cord itself is 5 feet, which Anker compares to the width of a queen bed, and it reached my nearest outlet without an extension.

One safety note that comes with the design: putting live AC outlets right at desk level means a spilled coffee or water bottle is suddenly a lot closer to energized contacts than it would be with a strip on the floor. It never bit me in a month, but I got more deliberate about where I set a drink. Keep liquids away from that top bar and you're fine; forget it's there and you're introducing a risk a floor strip simply doesn't have.

Who It's For

The clamp restrictions rule out a chunk of desks before you buy. No glass surfaces, no curved or sloped edges beyond 45 degrees, nothing thinner than 0.6 inches or thicker than 1.8, and nothing without a clampable lip. Check your desk edge before you order. If you've got a standard flat-edge desk, though, the Anker Nano Power Strip drops the floor clutter and puts your charging ports where your hands already are.

More than any spec, this is a device for people who care about convenience and efficiency, the ones who notice friction others tune out. If you're the type who resents ducking under the desk to find a free socket, who hates that the one charger you need is always the one buried at the bottom of the pile, who wants every device that leaves your bag in the morning to be topped off and in the same spot every time, this is built for how your brain works. It collapses a half-dozen scattered charging habits into one motion: set the device down at the corner, plug in, done. That's a small daily saving, but it compounds. A month in, the setup runs itself, and the mental overhead of keeping six things charged has basically vanished.

At $69.99 the price is reasonable for what it does. It isn't the cheapest way to add outlets, and if all you want is more sockets on the floor, a $20 strip does that. But what you're paying for is the zoning and the clamp, and the payoff is a kind of convenience that's hard to appreciate until you live with it. Everything I charge in a day sits on the front corner of the desk, six inches from my hand. Phone, watch, earphones, laptop, battery pack: no bending under the desk, no fishing a cable off the floor, no wall-wart shuffle. The Anker Nano Power Strip turns the corner of the desk into a single dock I reach into without thinking, and after a month that convenience is the thing I'd miss most if it were gone. It comes in black and white, though white was sold out on Anker's site at the time of writing, and it carries a 4.76-star average across the reviews posted so far.

What I Liked

• The clamp genuinely stays put. One-handed unplugs didn't shift, tilt, or peel the unit off the desk edge.
• A single USB-C port delivered real 70 W GaN charging; my laptop pulled full speed with no throttling.
• The two-zone layout works exactly as pitched: permanent plugs hidden below, daily-swap ports up top and within reach.
• The above-desk bar is genuinely slim at 0.75 inches, so it stays clear of your arm and work surface.
• Silicone-lined clamp means no scratches, and the pop-out overload reset beats hunting for a replacement fuse.

What I Didn't Like

• Live AC outlets at desk level put a spill closer to energized contacts than a floor strip would; you have to stay mindful of where drinks go.
• Clamp compatibility rules out glass, curved or steeply sloped edges, and desks outside the 0.6 to 1.8 inch range.

Verdict

The Anker Nano Power Strip does the boring job better than the boring competition. It stays clamped when you yank a plug, it charges a laptop at real speed, and it hides the plugs you never touch while keeping the ones you do within reach. The catches are honest ones: don't expect two laptops to fast-charge off the C ports at once, keep liquids away from the desk-level outlets, and confirm your desk edge fits. None of those broke the experience for me. For a photographer who wants the corner under the desk to stop being an eyesore, it's an easy recommendation.