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Universal Power Adapter Struggling For Support
Ian Lamont writes "Last year, there was a lot of hopeful discussion surrounding an initiative to have the consumer electronics industry standardize their products on a USB-based universal power adapter devised by Green Plug. Eight months later, the effort has stalled. The reason: manufacturers have balked from using Green Plug's technology. '... Gadget makers seem to have no compelling financial incentive to adopt Green Plug's technology. It would require them to add Green Plug's chip, or similar hardware and software, into every phone, camera, or music player they build, making them more expensive and more complicated to build. Another stumbling block for manufacturers: A universal power supply would kill the market for replacement power supplies. Manufacturers sell these at a steep markup price to customers who lose or break the original one that came with the device, and aren't tech-savvy enough to procure a low-cost generic replacement.' Green Plug is now trying to drum up public outcry through a (slow) website, but the number of supportive comments and votes remains relatively low."
The few companies that produce and sell devices that have standard USB ports, customers will jump all over that, and the other companies will have to change their products to use USB to become competitive. Either that or the consumer electronics industry is being noncompetitive and the US Department of Justice needs to lay the smack down on them.
My blackberry, and bluetooth earpiece both charge off mini-usb. I've got a mini-USB to nintendo DS adapter (fits in the DS case nicely) and the only other mobile electronics I use are my electric shaver (stays in the bathroom) and iPod (charges in the FM broadcasting cradle in the car) during my drive to work. USB 3.0 is supposed to handle 1.5amps, or three times what it is designed to handle currently.
Just because the company has the name "green" in it doesn't mean it's automatically a substantially better idea than what already exists (mini-usb) and what is in the pipeline (USB 3.0).
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There is little reason to even get a universal power adapter. USB is standard for just about every modern phone today along with most low-cost MP3 players, etc. There are a multitude of reasons not to go with a universal power adapter other than "the evil corporations are making us pay more". The most obvious one is that some devices require more power than others. Other reasons are some of the port sizes are too large/small for the device to be useful. For example, a tiny MP3 player might not have room for even a mini USB plug, however it can use the headphone jack to power/sync it. Similarly larger electronics may need more secure connections (as in not falling out, not like encryption) than others. Some might need to be designed to be easily yanked out, others might need ways of making sure it doesn't fall out.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable. About the only industry that I would see benefiting from this is laptops, a standard laptop connection cable (like desktops) would be a lifesaver some times.
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Actually no they don't. Maybe for handheld devices but some devices really work a lot better with higher voltage. I am all for standardized power adapters but the USB port is far from prefect for every device.
Now why they can not standardize wall worts so you can not plug a 12V wall wart into a 5V device I will never no.
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The only problem with USB as a standard for power is that the power output is too low for laptop computers to charge and operate at the same time. I feel that USB and mini USB is ideal for thousands of small devices, but we either need to up the power capacity of USB or have one standard for low power devices, and another for mid-range power users like camcorders and laptop computers.
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USB was around for years, but it didn't explode until Apple forced the issue with the iMac.
I'd say there are two reasons USB took off. The first is Intel. It started putting it on all it's chipsets which made it in most Wintel computers by default. I believe they also didn't charge licensing fees on their controller implementation so others could copy/improve it for free and not have to start from scratch. They just recently did the same thing with their USB3 controller.
The other thing is what it was competing again. There really wasn't that much other there. If you wanted low bandwidth, you'd either hijack the PS2 port or one of the serial ports. If you wanted high bandwidth you either had your own expansion card (tough), piggybacked on the printer port (often didn't work as pass though), or used SCSI (expensive). You couldn't have multiple parallel devices, so you'd need extra cards if you wanted to do that. If you had many serial devices (like a modem, a tablet, etc) you might need an extra serial card. It was a mess. USB just simplified everything, and the hub concept was a nice addition.
Intel forced availability before it became popular, and Intel made it a relatively cheap option. It was a huge improvement over the mishmash of old connectors for the consumer. Then Apple came along and made it mandatory forcing a huge number of devices on the market (where many weren't before since USB wasn't popular).
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My wife lost her phone charger and bought a replacement for $70!!! Can't be more than a few dollars worth of parts and plastic. Pretty obvious that they wouldn't want to jeopardize that income.
Either my Google-fu is weak, or GreenPlug's "standard" is of the "Well, if everybody in the entire world licences our technology, it will be standard" flavor. Unimpressive. If you are all fuzzy and care about bunnies and the earth, then come up with an open spec(which, incidentally, we largely have for low power devices, in the form of USB, and could probably come up with pretty easily for higher power stuff by producing a 12 or 24 volt USB analog). If you just want to have every electronic widget ever depend on your proprietary chips, then fuck you.
proprietary tech company can't force industry to "standardise" on it's proprietary tech? fetch me my tiny violin.
If companies had any incentive to use USB for power then there is nothing stopping them implementing it themselves. As for "powering" laptops and such things then USB just isn't upto the job in terms of voltage / current (also known as power) so they would need to fork USB anyway.
What? It had enjoyed steady increase in use. Apple went to it becasue more people were using USB then firewire, AND manufacturers where clearly moving towards USB for devices.
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It's still a cool idea. It would be great if a group of large corporation just bought them opened the spec.
Oh, wait, since these slimeballs are trying to force everyone to use their chip under the guise of 'everyone wants it' and there goal is to get the public to browbeat these corporation so they can give the green plug people money, I hope the corporation find a way to do the same thing through a different design.
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I fail to see why replacing a myriad of proprietary solutions with a single proprietary solution is supposed to be a good thing.
I would just be happy if all manufacturers would put voltage and polarity indications on their products.
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Actually no, I have a PowerBook G4, it has two USB ports, and they are on different sides. Got the same problem with an external hard drive: It works with one plug on nearly all computers I have access to, but not on the Powerbook - here I need to use the splitter.
you do realize very few USB ports provide enough power for hard drives right? It isn't just apple but, dell, and HP too.
external flash drives will work. As they don't have motors which require power.
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From the web site: "Green Plug is the first developer of digital technology enabling real-time collaboration between electronic devices and their power sources..."
First class marketspeak, that is. Collaboration, you say, between electronic devices and power sources. In real time. Using digital technology. Do I need to worry about my devices and power sources becoming mutinous, then?
Or can I just stick with USB which seems to power almost every electronic device I carry around? I daresay I don't actually know WHERE the chargers that came with most of my devices are, since I just charge them all though USB. Green Plug has already lost its battle. The only hope they might have is to embrace and extend the USB standard.
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Why isn't it working for Firewire? I'm sure we'd all love to kill off USB in favor of Firewire.
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Windows 98 and the iMac were both released around the same timeframe. Since Windows is far more common, I would guess that Windows 98 had a lot more to do with the prevalence of USB than the iMac.
Depending on what version of Windows 95 people had, they either had no support for USB or really bad support for USB. It didn't make much sense to buy USB devices until you had an OS that supported them.
From the various discussions that have shown up here on /. an in other places (like Ars Technica) it seems like there are a two reasons.
The main one, by far, is cost. USB is cheap to implement (economies of scale only make this worse). USB doesn't need nearly as much logic (being polling based, one master) where as FireWire has quite a bit (each device is a peer, supports DMA). Then there is the fact that no one made a free controller available (as far as I know) so you had to come up with your own. You have to pay money for the name (Apple owns it) or use a different one (IEEE.1394 is free, Sony made up iLink as their name for it).
Secondly (and less importantly), FireWire isn't designed for everything. It's not designed for small things like keyboards and mice (which USB was designed for), only high bandwidth applications like digital video, audio, scanning, and storage. Basically even if FW had won for high-bandwidth devices, everyone would still have USB for their mice, keyboards, and probably things like printers.
The install base is really killer. There are SO MANY computers with USB that people could sell USB hard drives easily, where as with FireWire everyone (except for many Mac users) had to buy a FireWire card. This drove USB 2 to be more high bandwidth to work well with things like hard drives (even though the CPU is still used too much).
As recently as a year or two ago Intel wasn't including FireWire on it's chipsets, so it was a extra cost and took extra engineering (since you'd have to hang a chip off the bus). I don't know if they have it built in yet.
In short: USB was everywhere and cheap and had pre-made customers. FireWire was superior (in speed/CPU usage) but cost more and had to added by the end user in most cases.
I love FW though. FW400 is about twice as fast with hard drives I've tried compared to USB 2 (same drive with extra ports) and my FW800 drive is even faster yet.
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Windows 98 is not hardware. USB is hardware. iMac is hardware.
The person you are responding to is exactly correct. The iMac came without traditional ports, and companies actually started making products for it.
Just because Windows 98 supported USB didn't mean that PCs actually came with USB ports at that time. Even after USB exploded, USB ports were still unlikely to be found on PC until 2000 or so. (Or they'd be on motherboards, but not actually hooked up to anything, or relegated to a slot in the back, etc.)
That is the story of USB. There was a period where no one had ever heard of USB, and then a period where products showed up all over the place that were supposedly supported by Mac and Windows 98, but no PC owner actually was able to use them because none of them actually had USB ports, or they didn't work right, or they were on NT or 95. Whereas iMac owners were forced to use them. (And the iMac was insanely popular, BTW.) And then, bang, suddenly PC owners were using USB too.
If you weren't there, don't comment. Those of us who were remember it fairly clearly. And everyone knew it at the time.
Of course, USB probably would have caught on anyway, eventually.
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Now, here's a thought: if solid state disks and netbooks becomes the most popular portable hardware, what do you think are the chances of having a 5V-only defacto netbook/laptop standard that allows almost all appliances to be powered by USB?
Yes, I was in an airport recently, and there were power outlets with both AC and USB. The future is here.
Yes, but how do you know it only provides power? It might also read or write whatever is plugged into it, install malware, steal your info, or whatever. Microsoft OSs are all too willing to do things a USB port tells them to do.