If i leave my charger plugged in and the switch is on without any device charging, does it ‘waste’ electricity? Why/why not?
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The power in your wall is AC. Your device charges with DC. Essentially, there is a rectifier circuit that converts the AC to DC. But now the voltage is much too high. You need 5v and you are at 120v, so they use a device called a buck converter to drop it down. The buck converter uses an inductor to smooth out the choppiness and a high speed switch to pulse the DC through the inductor to end up with a smoothish lower average voltage for the DC.
Yes, the transistors that perform the switching in the buck converter have a quiescent current at all times. Additionally, there is some magnetizing current lost to the inductor and some voltage drop in the rectifier circuit. There is a small amount of power being lost to this at all times it is plugged in.
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