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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.
"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
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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.
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.
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?
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If it was so obvious, why haven't anyone thought about it before Apple?
Two things come to mind: 1) The bottom line. Many companies don't always do the little things because it takes time and money to do things. I'm pretty sure an engineer from another company came up with great ideas but they were cut in planning/development. Apple will spend years on a product before releasing it and they will charge enough to make this strategy work. 2) Featuritis. Many companies focus on too many features. This is related to #1. Following the history of Apple, their products never have the most features. Apple seems to focus only on a handful of them and get them right before adding new ones. Geeks here don't appreciate that as Apple will never win the bullet point count, but for the average consumer they are less impressed with numbers of features than working features.
Take for example, the original iPod that synced automatically when you plugged in the cable. I think it was at Jobs' insistence that this be a 1-step process. Now doing so isn't technically difficult, but it takes coordination between hardware and software. It also required a philosophical change away from file/directory based transfer to one based on metadata. For example, most people don't care which directory/subdirectory their favorite songs where located but what they were (songs by The Rolling Stones, blue-grass songs, etc.). Now other companies might have been focused on other features like playing every format from Ogg to WMA or an equalizer with 11 bars, etc. Apple concentrated on making the UI simpler for the average consumer.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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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.
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.
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