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> Ever since the very first model, sub-par, underrated power supplies have been responsible for a good slice of tech support issues with the Pi. It wouldn't be a real Pi launch without power issues.

Except this time the issue is not with the power supplies by the Pi itself.

I think the problem is that people see a USB Type-C port and expect everything with a USB Type-C connector to work in it, which has and never will be the case with USB Type-C connectors.

If you think this is bad, go ask PlanetCom what the heck "Pump Express" is and why USB Type-C PD power supplies wont charge their phone ;)

Nintendo also interpreted the USB Type-C standard interestingly.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking. IIRC the Switch will brick if you use the wrong dock / charger to this day. If Nintendo can get away with it, surely Raspi foundation can, lol.

Not true. I charge my Switch with USB-C Macbook chargers all the time without issue. Have also used external USB-C batteries with it too.

Anecdotal evidence does not make a counterexample. After a quick internet search, you will find several USB-C chargers and docks which have reportedly bricked Nintendo Switch devices.

No you won't. Only a single dock has ever bricked the Switch, and the vendor of that dock (Nyko) replaced switches that were bricked.

There is no shortage of people who spout off about old news as if it is still current who say that there are still docks that brick a Switch, and I've tried them all, trying to prove them right, and all I get is proof that they're wrong.

I've tried hundreds of chargers and probably a dozen docks on my three Switches, and all three of them are still working just fine.

I believe the Switch works fine if you plug a macbook charger directly into it (I do this frequently with no problem), but it may break if you plug a macbook charger into the Switch's dock and power the Switch through that.

While I totally understand the dream of “use the same power supply for everything” I really can’t emphasise just how much impact “use the flippin’ official power supply” has in support burden.

The rash of people digging out their dusty old 500mA microUSB chargers for their early Pi’s made “have you tried a good power supply” almost a meme.

The Switch not truly embracing USB Type-C makes me grumpy. I wonder if the - possibly dockless and portable only - Switch 2 will rectify that. Ah- to just use a regular HDMI alt mode cable!

> The Switch not truly embracing USB Type-C makes me grumpy.

In the end, it just shows how little standards actually matter to anyone. Are you going to play Smash Bros. on your Playstation? Nope? Then it doesn't matter if they get USB Type-C right or not. Is your school district going to buy a TotallyLegitPi from AliExpress instead of Raspberry Pis? Nope? Then in the end, it doesn't matter. Marketing wins over technical excellence.

The other problem is how incomprehensibly complex the Type C standard is. Another comment thread says it's 300 pages. Nobody is ever going to get that right unless you ship someone a conformance kit and it flashes green to show 100% compliance. That is the fault of the USB consortium, not the individual implementers that couldn't get every detail in 300 pages of technical documentation right. You can't throw Postel's Law away and expect your standard to work. A lesson for us all!

The problem is if my son or daughter want to play on the switch while the rest of the family is using the TV, they can't plug in for power, so they've got about 2-3 hours before it takes around the same time to charge (I don't really know how long it takes to charge, because they'll keep unplugging it to check the charge level). If it actually was USB-C compliant, I could hand them a cable and charger they could use from the couch, but nope. I'm not going to replace the Switch if the kids break it, and likewise don't plan on replacing if I break it, and if using a non Nintendo charger purportedly voids the warranty on a standard USB-C spec, not going to chance it. Also, not going to funnel Nintendo extra money for a blessed charger.

Why does no one do any research?!

Using a third party USB Type-C charger on the switch has NEVER caused damage to a Switch and does not void the warranty.

The Switch supports the Type-C Power Delivery spec as well as Qualcomm's QuickCharge spec -- any type-C charger will work, and some will charge faster than others.

The USB type C spec IS FOLLOWED on the Switch! Nintendo chose to use (or was forced to use due to the Tegra chipset) a little-used mode called MyDP or "Mobility DP" which is a Display Port mode meant for mobile devices.

That Nintendo chose to deviate from the Type-C spec here is another piece of misinformation with an insanely good staying power. People WANT to believe it, so they never check for themselves and they distrust anyone saying otherwise, just as you are distrusting me right now.

I bet more people will go do research to see if I'm right about this than do research to see if they themselves are ever right about anything.

I suspect if they'd chosen a regular DisplayPort or HDMI alt-mode they wouldn't have had to shoulder the burden of claims they deviated from the spec. Granted, engineering constraints may have made that impossible but it's clear that people are seeing a "USB Type-C" port on the Switch and making the assumption that it should work with HDMI or DisplayPort alt modes. Just as people see the "USB Type-C" port on the Pi and make the assumption that any USB Type-C power supply will work. I guess the sooner people unlearn that a USB Type-C port indicates any sort of compatibility with a corresponding USB Type-C connector the better.

MyDP appears to be woefully obscure to the point that this misinformation might just as well be the truth for all the difference it makes.

Dell and Lenovo, and probably some other manufacturers besides, are already playing this confusion to their advantage by releasing first-party docks that are guaranteed to work with their laptops.

> IIRC the Switch will brick if you use the wrong dock / charger to this day.

No. Only one dock ever provably bricked the Switch, and no charger ever has.

The bricking in question actually fried the PMIC due to a software bug on the dock side that was triggered when new functionality/behavior was added to the Switch with a firmware update.

No known dock or charger will damage a Switch today. I've tried hundreds of chargers and even the cheapest $15 docks I find on AliExpress, like this one: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32832952544.html

It is amazing how long people will keep repeating bad information, and just assume it's true without ever checking to verify that what they are about to say is true. I see it a lot, especially when people complain about Microsoft Windows.

A lot of the problems with the original that were blamed on bad power supplies were probably issues with the Pi itself, to be fair. For example, as originally released connecting any USB keyboard or mouse would cause the onboard USB hub to fall over after a while due to a spec violation. There was a long list of supported and broken devices on the wiki, with the non-working ones being accused of drawing too much power, but in reality the problem affected every USB keyboard and mouse. When someone's Pi fell over despite using supposedly tested and working devices, guess what was blamed next? That's right, the power supply they were using. Inadequate power supplies became a handy scapegoat for every single Pi reliablility issue.

(Eventually, some outside engineer with a USB analyzer got fed up enough to track down that issue. The Pi Foundation didn't spot it. They almost never do.)

The problem actually affected any USB 1.1 device, not just keyboards and mice (which are almost exclusively USB 1.1). Video streams from cheap webcams were getting corrupted as well, for instance (that's how I got introduced to this bug).

Yup. For 3b+ it was generally a good idea to feed it via the gpio pins anyway if you want stability with devices attached.

So not at all surprised that they moved away from the old usb

After all the pi power problems I faced over the years, I was hoping for a simple 12v barrel jack.

In my experience, phones break more often than chargers, so you end up having several chargers laying around. Using the Pi for DIY projects, computing experiments (e.g. clusters) or learning, it makes sense to recycle those chargers (specially if you are in a budget). Being in a third world country I can assure you that getting a simple Pi-branded charger can get difficult and/or expensive.

I don’t disagree that they should be recycled (albeit I’d expect a phone to last 3-5 years), but historically all but the best phone chargers have proven to be wholly unsuitable for powering Pi’s. I’m not convinced USB C is poised to change that since charging doesn’t require a continuous, stable supply whereas running a power-hungry CPU does. Ironically most cheap, captive cable phone chargers are exactly the sort of thing that will work in the Pi 4. For varying values of “work.”

> My advice to anyone buying a Pi 4 would be “Just buy a Pi-branded power-supply.”

I agree in theory but not in practice. I use RPi largely with students and tend to prefer inexpensive USB batteries over fighting facilities to provide enough AC access for 35 students (or carrying a bag of power strips with me to every lab).

I’m going to be doing some testing, but it seems like I’ll probably be sticking with the 3B+ until the situation improves.

Funnily enough my trusty Pi2 which has been running continuously for several years now stopped working last night. At first I thought it must be the SD card, as those are known to fail. Nope. So I thought it must be the Pi itself. I suppose they weren't really designed to be left on for several years? I was sure it couldn't be the power supply, but somehow it was. It will now power up a Pi1, but not a 2 or 3. I've no idea why but it's gone in the bin and the Pi2 works again on a new one.

People really should consider a refurbished Dell Optiplex FX160 instead of a Pi if it's going to be in a headless server role, though. You can get one for about half the price of a new Pi4 on eBay and it comes with a proper power supply unit, high quality case, and of course an Atom CPU which I'm sure compares favourably even to the new Pi4. There was an article about them on HN a while back. Mine has been running happily for almost two years now.

Atom CPUs are core-for-core comparable to the A72 cores in the RPi4. ICP isn't really comparable since the instruction set is different, but performance is similar. The RPi has 4 of them, only the most modern Atoms have that.

'Atom' is pretty vague. There are several different micro-architectures under that name, with different performance characteristics.

Yeah, well I don't think you'd get a 4-core Atom for the same price, so maybe not so good compared to the Pi4 then.

I'm not seeing USB 3 on that particular Optiplex, either. Gigabit ethernet, yes. No HDMI. DVI, VGA. Maybe displayport? Hard to tell. Do have PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, which is kinda nice.

No USB3. I don't think it's any good as a thin client any more, it's only good as a low power server. Before the Pi4 it was much more attractive, especially because of GigE and because the Atom chip in it is pretty good compared to the ARM in the Pi3. But after reading the replies here I'm thinking it's not as good a choice as it once was.

I wouldn't be sure sure that a decade old Intel ATOM CPU would compare favorably to a modern ARM CPU.

Also, the optiplex would use more power, which might eventually negate the savings from buying a power supply and case for the pi.

http://www.toughdev.com/content/2018/01/dell-optiplex-fx160-... suggests 15-20 watts.

I think that Dell Optiplex FX160 CPU (single core in-order narrow Atom 230 @1.6 GHz) is going to be ~10-20x slower than RPi4 (4 core out-of-order wide Cortex A72 @1.5 GHz).

Much slower graphics. No USB 3, 802.11ac WiFi nor GPIO.

Power supplies are notoriously failure prone across all possible uses.

1. By definition, they're the device with the most current running through it, and typically generating the most heat. Switched mode power supplies have efficiencies up to around 80%, linear mode power supplies closer to 50%. They need to be cooled, but typically aren't or have insufficient cooling. 2. They're typically chock-full of electrolytic capacitors. 3. Power supplies have been engaged in a race to the bottom for decades. You're almost always getting the cheapest part from the cheapest factory.

The power supply should always be the part you troubleshoot first, even if you see something else smoking. Chances are pretty good the reason the other thing is smoking is because the power supply is putting out too much voltage.

The power supply in this case was just a wall-wart plug and I always thought they were just transformers which are too simple to fail. But thinking about it now, there must also be a rectifier in there at least. Maybe there's much more than that...

At a previous job the most exchanged part was powersupplies for routers and fiberconverters. For some shipments we had more than 50% failure.

Transformers often fail after a given 'long time', they are usually made out of many laminated plates glued together, and over time the glue will fail, plus they tend to vibrate at the mains frequency, which can shift things around over time and cause failure too.