Slashdot Mirror
Standardized Laptop Charger Approved By IEC
Sockatume writes "The IEC, the standards body which wrote the phone charger specification used in the EU, has approved a standardised laptop charger. While the 'DC Power Supply for Portable Personal Computer' doesn't have a legal mandate behind it, the IEC is still optimistic that it will lead to a reduction in electronics waste and make it easier to find a replacement charger. Unfortunately the technical documentation does not seem to be available yet, but previous comments indicate that it will be a barrel plug of some kind." I wish they'd push a yank-resistant and positive-connecting plug along the lines of Apple's MagSafe.
On a magnetic yank resistant plug
You can't use MagSafe because it's an Apple innovation. It took a major stroke of genius to put a fryer plug on a laptop.
Hopefully the source article won't be quietly edited after-the-fact so that I look like a raging moron, as happened with my last submission. :/
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"I wish they'd push a yank-resistant and positive-connecting plug along the lines of Apple's MagSafe."
So would Apple since they have a patent on the MagSafe design. I suspect it would be quite the patent windfall.
Dell, HP, Alienware and other company will do anything in their power to not comply with this standard. This means less chance to get money out of customers pockets. Most companies, and I point DELL this time, uses a very much different exagonal type of connection which makes universal adapters a pain in the ass to find while others like HP and other old Dell laptops are usually easy to find and replace at a very cheap price. When it's not possible, you have to call the company to get a remplacement charger for a high enough price. But I would love to see a standard in this as it would make my job much easier
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Just in time for laptop obsolescence.
Well, let's see.
USB can deliver 2.5W. My big old luggable W510 has an adapter rated for (checks) holy crap 135W. To keep things standard we could charge it with 54 parallel USB cables, since things seem to be standardising on USB these days and multiple plugs where necessary.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Everyone here chides Apple for putting a deep fryer plug on a laptop and get a patent for it. Truth is, if they don't, someone else will and sue the heck out of them for it. If it was so obvious, why haven't anyone thought about it before Apple?
It's better if they can convince Apple to put up the MagSafe patent as FRAND. It'll be a bad joke if Apple has to include a MagSafe-to-whatever adapter with their MacBooks
One problem with this is that some laptops take much more juice to run than others. So will the standard charger have to be powerful enough to feed the biggest laptop or will we get a range of, say, 3 -- which would be a good advance on what we have today if the same plug was used, so the most powerful PSU could be used with a light laptop, as long as a light PSU had a cutout to protect it from overload?
The specifications are protected from download by a password, so I can't check :-(
I doubt that the likes of Apple would adopt this.
The minute you standardize, the standards organization then tries to make or suggests it should be compulsory.
That often restricts innovation in many ways. It is one thing to have standards for connection and interface whether electronic or mechanical, but to try to standardize a whole "charger" ignores what is going on now with resonance charging, even lower power circuits, solar boosting, etc.
They could cut down the number of leads by a factor of six if they used some sort of heavy-duty twisted-pair conductor. Then you'd have a Cat-5 of Nine Tails.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Be warned: The hardware in the Retinas is somewhat dubiously EFI and ACPI complient. You can get it running linux, but it takes a fair amount of hackery to deal with the weirdness.
Why is the Micro-USB turned one way on my Samsung and another on my Nexus units? Fix that first.
It is raging piles of BS that laptop makers get away with the random charger and random voltage BS they have been pulling over the past 20 years. I really hope they swing a hard hammer with this one and demand that no laptop can be sold in the EU without this connector and using a standard power supply (I.E. 85 watts 17.31624 volts)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, laptops won't be as cable intensive, but I see these things multiplying over the years.
We could hope that, if such a standard is adopted, the universal laptop bricks would be sold separately, and you'd only buy one if you didn't already have one.
And yeah, it's high time we started doing that with the PC/monitor power cables as well. Almost every computer owner has at least an extra half dozen of them. There's no reason for manufacturers to include something that's been standard forever. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done for the cost savings.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Electrocution = Electro + execution = dead! There's nothing mild about dead!
When a musical artist wants to perform a cover of a copyrighted song (which means pretty much *any* song), there is a fixed, comparatively small charge paid to a clearing house. Why is the licensing for a patent like MagSafe so variable and expensive by negotiation with each licensee? We pay the USB and SD and Microsoft and all kinds of other consortia taxes for their standards, whether buried in the connector cost or explicitly in other ways, and in exchange we get the benefits of interoperability. Plus if this is a safety standard on all portable equipment (presumably to be expanded for power+comm at some point), pennies per connector would still make lots of money for Apple without burdening anyone else.
My company issues Dell laptops, and in the years I've been here I've been issued three as the old ones go out of service. As a result, and because I like to have chargers at home and at work, I've ended up with a fair number of chargers. I've noticed, though, that my most recent laptop won't charge when connected to the previous two model's chargers, despite being the same voltage and current. It'll pop up an error something like "this is not a Dell charger. The laptop will operate but the battery will not charge". I'm guessing some kind of DRM mechanism in the charger itself.
Assuming that for the sake of argument, specifying a common connector, voltage and current isn't going to do a whole lot of good if the charger and laptop have circuitry that must validly handshake before charging occurs. Unless they're going to tackle that issue also.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, we can do 25.5W on 802.at-2009 NOW. Some vendors are doing 51W by using all 4 pairs.
Yes, I know many of you have laptops that draw almost 200 watts, but most of us don't need over 50W most of the time. If properly designed, the laptop can just "tread water" by slowing or stopping battery drain while drawing 51W during a work session, and then recharge while you're eating lunch or surfing Slashdot.
Imagine hooking your laptop up to power and ethernet at the same time! Single connection, less real estate used up on the exterior.
Just configure the laptop to draw power over the ethernet port, and not only do you not have to worry about a AC to DC brick, but you can travel the world and not have to worry about all the forms of AC power.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Now I want a moose-safe power connector!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Having stepped on a 3-prong British plug it's damn near impossible to make something resistant to the buggers. Worse than Legos, I swear.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Apple's MagSafe connector is the opposite of yank-resistant. It can be yanked out more easily than any other connector I've ever seen.
That's the point. By "yank resistant" the poster means "you can yank on it and it won't pull the laptop off the table so it smashes on the floor".
"I wish they'd push a yank-resistant and positive-connecting plug along the lines of Apple's MagSafe. "
Why? I've already seen one of my less-than-graceful friends step on the power plug, it not come loose, and instead of snapping off the jack it snaps the motherboard. What *MIGHT* have been a simple solder job now becomes an entire logic board replacement.
Dumbest idea ever. Should have been two flush pieces, with spring-loaded extensible prongs in the cord end, using a couple of powerful neodymuim rings around the port and end of the cord. Eliminate almost every stress point at the power connection, and make it safer, and reduce the potential for damage even further, almost completely eliminating it in fact.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So it resists a yank by immediately giving out? That's like a water resistant watch that simply allows water to flow directly through it. Or a fire resistant blanket that instantly turns to ash. Or a superconducting resistor.
Make no mistake, I think the MagSafe connector is fucking awesome, and I can't wait until the patent expires so that I and the rest of the impoverished masses can benefit from such a convenient feature. I'm just nitpicking the language used. A tamper resistant lock doesn't just pop open when you touch it.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.