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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."
Here is what I remember:
USB stuff was hard to find and expensive. There were some specialty stores on the internet that sold all USB stuff but at local computer stores USB stuff was here or there. Most people seemed to still use PS2 mice, modems were mostly serial, printers were mostly parallel, and so were most scanners.
Then Apple released the iMac.
Within a few months it became trivial to find USB peripherals. They started to have different price points (low, medium, and high end market segments for things like modems). USB mice were everywhere, USB video cameras showed up, things improved.
It was increasing in use, but it was no where near critical mass until Apple forced the issue. It was like SATA. Motherboards came with both (IDE and SATA) but IDE stuff was available for quite a long time after (especially in optical drives). I'm of the opinion that Apple took what was going to be a normal transition (things slowly speed up, pick up momentum, and eventually take over) and put it in hyper drive (made adoption look more exponential that it would have for probably a year or two, if not more).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
USB connectors should be standard. Problem is what manufacturers do with said connector.
;)
Example: my Motorola cell phone uses the standard mini-USB form factor for both charging and data transfer, but other brands of chargers(except those specifically designated for Motorola) with the same form factor will not work. My phone also cannot "talk to" my computer or even charge from my computer's USB without an extra kit(which is just a usb cable and a driver CD) I would have to buy. Until then, I'm going to hook my cable up to a sampling O-scope and reverse engineer that bitch
The USB connections themselves are only a form factor. As the summary stated, any manufacturer can do whatever the hell they want with it after that. The MBA's who came up with that idea should be shot, but they've still made their company lots of dough.
China has enforced the law to require all new cell phone to use standardized USB power adaptors since last year, to cut down adaptors in landfill. Why is democratic, earth-caring nation dragging its feeds?
The spec does not support 1 amp. If you want to talk about manufacturers going off on their own to extend the spec in a proprietary fashion, I think you lose the usefulness of the standard USB interconnect. A good example is the Macbook Air cdrom, which works with nothing except the usb on the Macbook Air.
No, what that says is that initial device current must be limited to 100mA (USB2) or 500mA (USB3) per port, that the current drain of bus-powered hubs must be limited to ((# of ports)*100mA)+100mA (which is why bus-powered hubs > 4 ports are rare), and that that is the minimum a root hub must be able to supply in order to conform with the specs.
According to the full spec, not just the FAQ version, devices are free to negotiate for up to 1A (USB2; dunno about USB3 but I'd guess it's higher), and it's up to the root hub to say "yay" or "nay".
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?