> a barrel connector power supply
What's wrong with this?
What's wrong with this?
Their commoditized nature means people are making smaller and lighter adapters.
Depending on the wattage you can use the same USB-C adapter for multiple devices.
There are many USB-C external batteries available.
Here's some comments I made a few years ago explaining why that voltage:
There are tons of wall warts with barrel jack outputs that are the exact same case size and cable length. A quick search of digikey will confirm that. That's a big part of their flexibility - you can easily get an AC/DC converter spec'd for slightly more power in just about the exact same form factor. If you need a little more power, buy a wall wart with slightly higher rated amperage.
I would also suggest that the Pinebook volumes are nowhere near the scale where they can harness USB-C benefits. They're a small company, not an Apple.
Conversely, I can walk around my apartment and charger my thinkpad from any of about 20 different USBC supplies. I can charge my phone in the car, or my laptop from the USBC output. There's a swathe of batteries on the mantle, all of which can charge my phone or my laptop for days or a week depending which size I pick up.
Are they standardised? Can I use a Dell barrel charger on an HP?
Wikipedia says it's a mess and people aren't following any standards, with the same physical connector having different voltages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_power_connector#Standa....
You need a Dell charger for a Dell laptop. We call this 'proprietary'.
You can, if they didn't add any additional DRM on top of it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304194 ) and the polarity is correct (center-positive is most common.)
The voltage is basically irrelevant --- 18-20V is going to be 90% of all laptops, and the other range is 10-12V.
Right - this is what we mean by proprietary.
The dimensions you use and the voltage you put across it and polarity you use all make the jacks incompatible. You have to use a Dell charger for a Dell laptop.
- the voltage they apply
- how much power they can deliver
- the dimensions of the barrel connector
- the polarity of the connector
- handshake protocols (DRM)
You can find laptop chargers with any one of hundreds of possible combinations of these. Each one may be individually standardised, but the charger is not. That's what makes them proprietary.
Compare this to manufacturers with some sense, like Apple, that use a standard USB connector for power. That's so much simpler and user-friendly.
Barrel connectors are not proprietary just because someone implemented theirs in some specific way to harm consumers.
In fact USB-C connectors are more likely to implement a DRM, given that the connector comes 'batteries-included' with a data channel that won't need to be re-imagined.
Barrel jacks offer no such boot-straps to would-be DRMers. That isn't to say it's impossible (as HP/Dell/Fujitsu have proven), but a 2 prong barrel jack is going to require a bit more effort.
If you are using proprietary to mean 'consumer-hostile', use a better phrase. Proprietary has specific context to IP/copyright/design.
I'm not - I'm using it to mean non-standard and specific to an individual vendor. I can use my Apple USB-C charger to charge anything accepting USB-C, which is most things these days. I can't use my Dell laptop charger to charge anything except a Dell laptop. That's what I mean by proprietary.
And yet I know of exactly zero instances of this happening, probably because it'd be exceptionally silly to do.
USB-C seems superior because it comes with a data link, and negotiates higher power ratings.
The tradeoff is that this comes with complexity. The Pinebook team, sensibly, decided they didn't want to fuck with building and verifying USB-C power negotiation subsystems.
Guarantee that everyone complaining about it here has never had to implement, or be accountable for the BOM cost of, a USB-C power negotiation system.
Actually they did, as you can read in the OP or at https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
Granted I haven’t ever had to implement it, but I think you’re underselling its benefits.
Think about the chronology then reinterpret my question.
When I was 12 I was very active. To only ever have seen USB-C this person might well be a prodigy.
Again, honest question. Calm down with the hate boys and girls, try not to assume everyone is malicious
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wlesieutre. To have joined HN at the age of 3 would be quite the prodigy.
Huh, evidently this hasn't been sufficiently abstracted into hardware/software modules? I find that sort of surprising given the maturity of the problem, though I guess some things just aren't that simple.
It does mean it has an extra port that you might find unnecessary, but at the kind of prices they're selling this at including a usb-c charger would actually add a fair bit to their costs, and you can buy an aftermarket one pretty easily.
The article says the device also support some charging over USB-C... why even bother including a barrel-connector? It feels wrong.
No one seems to complain about their 120/240 mains plugs not being "modern" either...
Those plugs are standardized. I can use them with a Dell laptop, an Apple desktop, and a VIC-20 from 1982, with zero difficulty. If there were exactly one barrel plug (per country) that worked on everything, you'd see a lot less interest in ditching it.
Try one of the hundreds USB-C hubs to see for yourself that they regularly ship USB-C ports that can only be used for charging, and not data.
The actual number of USB data ports is not related to what is used for charging, except maybe on some space-constrained devices.