Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmunsell | Hacker News Reader

Explaining to my aunt or uncle or grandparents that, no, the cable and charger they bought isn't the right one for their phone/laptop/whatever even though it fits isn't ideal. Sure, it might just charge slowly (cue family tech support call), but it could also just show "not charging" on OS X for example, which is just confusing for most people.

It's a real problem, even if tech savvy people are fine with lower charge speeds because we know that the charger/cable/device combo only supports PD profile whatever.

View on HN

Even I have this problem. I bbought an amp reader and throw out anything reporting below 0.4ma/h. So many devices come bundles with poor cables my house is riddled with cables that I just never want to use for charging.

I'm actually TERRIFIED of pluggin anything in to my kids Switch other than Nintendo's official cable, incase I brick i t.

Does anyone know if they've patched this? I have some Dell laptop charger USB-Cs which I use alot, and I've had to caution everything in the family to never plug the Switch into it despite it fitting and despite every room in the house having such a charger...

I use an HP laptop USB C charger with my switch sometimes, if that anecdote helps.

The Switches USB-C implementation is genuinely broken, so this isn't the fault of the connector. A spec-compliant charger, cable and connector will never brick anything (or catch on fire, for that matter)

The Switch cable situation is always going to be a bit finicky, because their port is on the extreme edge of the spec's tolerances - it gets shorted because it's actually possible to cross the power into the wrong terminal, IIRC, with some wiggling. Safest to go with the official stuff, which people haven't reported issues with.

I think I've used:

- a pixel charger - macbook charger - HP charger

and the Switch works fine with all of them.

OTOH, if you try to use one of those for the docking station, the docking station will refuse to work

I heard that it's because it supports only a lower amount of Watts than what the Macbook charger can provide, for example... (60W or 85W) While other chargers, like the pixelbook's (45W) work just fine

But I agree that it's unnerving: I connected a disposable switch to the cables that I didn't trust, before trusting to use my main Switch with them

I understand that simply charging is fine, while video output is the riskier action because of unofficial docks that use a Switch-incompatible voltage for signalling. The wrong voltage can burn out a specific chip and require resoldering.

For what it's worth I sold the official charger/dock that came with my Switch more than a year ago and have been using only third-party chargers/cables plus a Covert Dock since then. No issues :)

I bricked my switch on a multi-device charging station. Had to mail it into nintendo and they replaced the whole motherboard. Surprisingly the entire repair process cost less than a replacement switch motherboard on ifixit.

I spend years explaining to my family that its not a catastrophe if they can't find their phone charger, it's micro USB, see, just take this one from the drawer, it doesn't matter if it says Samsung or Sony, if it fits it will work.

They were right being mistrusting apparently.

How is this any different than buying the wrong cable in the past? You used to have to choose USB2, USB3, USB3.x, micro USB, mini USB, DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, mini HDMI, VGA, DVI, thunderbolt, and more.

I think people are either too young to remember this disaster, or have just outright forgotten.

The issue is more the ubiquity-- when everything from my phone, to Nintendo Switch, to headphones, to flashlight, to laptop use the same cord for power and data, it's a bigger problem than the low spec HDMI cable you plug in once.

Allow me to say it's slightly different, because you could basically tell the difference by just looking at the connector carefully. The knowledge that if it connects, it'll 99.9% work is too ingrained in all of us. Usb-c breaks that norm.

Now you have to carefully see what the packaging says, which can range from inadvertently unclear to downright misleading. And to add to that, you don't know what to look for in the first place if you don't have prior experience with thunderbolt/usb-c. Example, I didn't know that a cable must explicitly mention DP in order to connect to an external monitor. Because it was the first time I had an external monitor that can use usb-c.

Not really complaining, usb-c is very very nice. Just pointing the minor annoyance of learning its warts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com