Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
righto.com
righto.com
It's a very simple device, relying on current heating a wire to bend it to and from a contact, but it's an engineering marvel of low cost effectiveness.
But it doesn't produce "clean" 5V, there's a jitter to it. Some electronics guys have replaced it with modern circuitry (an op-amp I think) but it turned out there was a problem with clean 5V. The jitter would unstick the the analog dials, so they'd display accurately. The clean 5V didn't do that. So, they had to add more circuitry to add jitter in the supply voltage.
[1] https://www.moparshop.com/en/Online-Store/Ignition-Electrica...
Hopefully this tech finds its way into more devices as it gets cheaper. It would be neat to have GaN based inverters for electric cars.
Plug that into the MacBook charger and you’re good. No problem here, is it not working for you?
* If they are multi-port, make sure you're happy with how they distribute power. Most likely you want the majority of the power going to port 1 where you stick a laptop, but some drop it down to 50W or lower if you just have a cable in one of the other spots, much less any device connected.
I love the monoprice ones. They're small, inexpensive, inconspicuous, and meet the standards I described above. They also charge all my devices reliably, unlike my (larger, I think non-GaN) Nekteck chargers that spend their time in a drawer now. Buy a 5A cable to get the full 100W out of them at 20V.
That being said, TUV like UL is listed as a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL) in the United States (for more information see: https://www.tuv.com/usa/en/ctuvus-certification.html) and thus is just as safe.
The UL logo may be more recognizable in the US, however they too certify for both markets, with UL also having their UL EU certification program.
What I wonder is if TUV in Europe just tests at just 240V if it’s labelled 100v-240v, or across the labelled voltages (though lower voltage should mean fewer problems).
90% of them are in fact just exact copies of Navitas reference design, and are made by just a few factories which sell white label.
(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Charger-Anker-Durable-PowerPort-Inc...)
In fact, the Apple power brick that came with my M1 MacBook Pro is still in its original packaging; I have not used it yet. The 65 Watt RAVPower one seems as if it's about half the size. More than half the mass, though.
(I have never needed to try warranty support for RAVPower things.)
Stall torque == current.
All of those smaller things cost less, so the finished product has lower production costs.
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575994 - Oct 2013 (63 comments)
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047 - Feb 2012 (73 comments)
I've heard the claim they make decent ones.
It really dimishes (and mostly eliminates) its value.
And yes, it so grinds my gears.
Apple's price premium meant they often could introduce the next cutting edge technology that would soon become ubiquitous when the prices came down.
Car radios used mechanical switches to generate the anode voltage for the tubes, and in trains there were voltage converters using a rotating stream of liquid mercury.
Apple didn't invent the personal computer, or the GUI, or Wi-Fi, or MP3 players, or smartphones, or app stores, or tablets, or smartwatches, or ARM processors – but they introduced innovative, and indeed transformative, products in those categories.
The peanut gallery is not to be trusted on how curable his cancer was, and this article says nothing firm about anything.
If someone chooses not to be tortured for their last weeks of life, in order to have those weeks, that doesn't make them unscientific or suicidal.
Yes, if that's the motivation.
But if the reasoning is "I have a better treatment, [insert nonsense here]", it does.
But then, he rhetorically asked, if surviving the concentration camp was success, did that mean the vast majority who didn't were losers?
And I think his father said something to the effect, that it was random, there was no "survival of the fittest", so no, matter of factly, the dead were not ones who failed.
But if that was the point of the article a few paragraphs under the section "History of switching power supplies to 1977" already accomplished that.
The article reads like it was written by a power supply enthusiast (who knew?), and the author did a good job of drawing me into the history, technology. It would have still been an interesting read without the "bookends".
1) 1960s-era tech used in the Apollo Guidance Computer: https://www.righto.com/2019/08/reliable-after-50-years-apoll...
2) Mercury thyratons used in 1930s-era Teletype hardware: https://www.righto.com/2018/09/glowing-mercury-thyratrons-in...
Might be some other candidates as well, but those are a couple of the more interesting ones he's gone over.
So maybe it should be placed at the end as a compromise?
> The new biography Steve Jobs
it was a response to the new biography.
Other posters have already pointed out that this article seeks to clarify the history around Steve Jobs' (not entirely accurate) claims.
I want to focus on the fact that people find a need to protect Apple.
Apple is a 2T+ market cap corporation. It is not a friend, it is not a family member, and it is certainly not beyond reproach. It doesn't care about you -- it just wants you to spend more money on its products and services.
Don't feel bad for Apple when people call it out for bad behavior or historical inaccuracies. People should do this.
While there are people that work at Apple that legitimately care about making good products, in the macro the predominant factor is still money. It drives the whole enterprise. The very shape of Apple's solutions and good will are fit by an optimization function to obtain money.
Brand, supply chain, innovation, fierce competition, fostering loyalty, building a moat. These are the things Apple does. It's a machine that makes money selling products.
You might like Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, or many of the other product people and engineers there. That's fine. But don't form a fond bond with the company. And also realize the motivations of the leadership. They're humans -- they can do good, but they can also make mistakes and tell lies to serve their own needs.
If Apple makes products you like and enjoy, buy them, appreciate them, and leave it at that. Don't let Apple create a sense of nostalgia, closeness, or loyalty. This is artificial. The company doesn't care about you at all. It can't.
I do not think they're trying to protect Apple. They are protecting their choice. Same as people "protecting" Python, Rust etc.
"That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was," Jobs later said. "Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod Holt's design."’
And on switching power — did any other computer company think to use it? Apple did. And borrowing that tech did revolutionize computer power supplies.
Not only was it not stolen, several Xerox PARC people moved over to Apple since they wanted to see their ideas actually commercialized and not squandered like Xerox was doing, so a lot of it was even the same people!
Stolen...right. Xerox invited Apple's engineers to tour PARC and then Apple gave them millions of dollars of shares which Xerox later sold for a hefty profit. IIRC they made more off the Apple stock sale then sales of the Alto and Star.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-half-century-ago-better-transist...
> A half century ago, better transistors and switching regulators revolutionized the design of computer power supplies
> Apple, for one, benefited, though it didn’t spark this revolution, as Steve Jobs claimed
Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply
To find this requires a combination of a few keystrokes and button pushes plus an "outlook" (rather than "inlook") attitude.
Instead, as with so many discussions in a so-called "CS" community, we find something like adolescents trying to BS each other by presenting their mere opinions as facts.
Come on! Please!
Long ago my research community put in a lot of work to make it easy to deal with many simple questions, but we didn't reckon with the sheer inwardness of so many end-users. A similar problem is that most people in CS have no idea what Doug Engelbart really did, yet just typing his name into Google will provide great info in just the first few hits.
How can the current community repair itself and start trying to become a real field again?
[0]: https://www.monoprice.com/Search?keyword=APPLE%20MACBOOK%20P...
The run a little hot, but seem to work pretty well.
It's worth taking a look at the paper to see how many "modern" ideas were described in 1972: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf
Probably you, and most people on HN haven't been paying attention to them in a long time, but what happened in the last 15 years or so, is that they decided to diversify out from copiers into services.
It sounds vaguely plausible, people obviously deal with documents mostly on computers and not paper these days, so why can't they help with that?
Eventually they acquired a fairly big, but not a household name, outsourcing company called ACS. I used to wonder why Google couldn't do the same stuff, but they did in fact outsource, probably because it was the data processing equivalent of cleaning toilets.
But then a notorious corporate raider, aka Carl Icahn, came in and forced management to break up the company in the name of shareholder value, isolating the copiers in one business, and the document services in another, basically ACS under a new name.
Who's right? Diversify or get back to basics? It seems sometimes it's just random. You can come up with platitudes justifying either.
This may kind of seem like normal corporate America, but it just seems a bit uncharitable to call the CEO an idiot when you look at how the people running GameStop or whatever have had things a bit easier with billions being thrown at them.
Also, it's the exact same generic story people tell about, say, Kodak.
It was an amazing thing to watch unfold.
To this day, I can't for the life of me find that video and really wish I could.
As I was reading through that paper, it reminded me of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0
Whoa.
That's a great read, thanks!
Just look up "Apple PowerSupply Recall" and you will see they are just repeating their cost saving success/failure.
A product isn’t merely checking some boxes. Checking the “has hard drive” box doesn’t make any it an iPod.
Having many gigabytes of audio was a big step.
The first "box" I used to check when buying things like that is that PC sees it as a hard drive to which I can copy files. That horror they called iTunes would not be let anywhere close to my computers.
But I remember that ipod was awesome (comparing with the other players with shitty controls and sticky buttons). I hated apple products at the time (religion) but I was amazed by the quality and UI of ipod and the quality of ipad (took me and my kids many attempts and years to actually kill it).
I don't think any other product amazed me that much since then.
When iPhone came out, the responsive UI was something I'd wanted for the past several years worth of Palm and HTC phones. But I couldn't get one because I'd have to give up things I used daily - like 3rd party apps, 3G data, turn-by-turn navigation, MMS (which was still a big deal before the prevalence of IP-based mobile IM platforms), multitasking, live streaming radio, and even "crazy" features like copy/paste and custom wallpapers/alert sounds.
iPhone did a few things very well, but it took a while to catch up on a lot of the common functionality of those older smartphones. Thankfully Apple did add those features over time. And other smartphones gained more responsive UI. Now we have more options than ever, with even the cheapest bargain device performing better than anything available in 2007.
Apple is very good at maximizing "consumer satisfaction". This means giving consumer the best deal for their money considering as many of the consumer needs as feasible. Other brands ignore a lot of these needs and then they wonder why people don't buy their products when, on some details, they are much better than Apple at a lower price.
Probably my ears' sensitivity, and that little thing's age (~13 years) are both contributing factors.
I will say I have been very impressed with Anker's GaN power bricks of late.
Doesn't take "acute," just takes "not destroyed."
I've, at various points in my career, grumbled about various things whining audibly (one particular motion light sensor was defective and right outside my office for a while). The trick to getting other people to believe you ("I can't hear anything... are you sure?") is to wait for a bring-your-kids-to-work day. And ask if they can hear it.
Or, perhaps, if it's bad enough, you don't even have to do that, because the kids will ask what that horrid whining noise is. We did eventually get it fixed after that, but I was quite literally the only one in the hall who could hear it.
On the topic of power supplies, though - Apple has done some impressive work in their small power supplies. The Chinesium clones are similarly sized, they just skip literally every safety feature intended to keep mains voltage out of your USB cord...
And a nice teardown is done here, by the same guy: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr...
> Doesn't take "acute," just takes "not destroyed."
It depends. Played in an orchestra, and I've found out that hearing is very different from person to person. Seen people with hearing lower than 20Hz band, or people who can hear a wrong note in a symphony orchestra recording, or people who can perfectly tune their instruments by ear... The list goes on and on.
Our ears' equalizers are not always flat and equal. We can damage them yes, but not everyone starts from the same point.
This is called subsonic hearing, and it is not any blessing. Those who can hear frequencies lower than most often experience pain. It's the low frequencies coming from diesel school busses that are most painful to me, when no one else nearby can even hear the bus at all until it gets close enough. What the GGP is talking about is supersonic hearing, which often also includes that extra detail of pain.
This is an important consideration all electrical engineers should take seriously when designing products for people. It's a shame many don't.
https://product.tdk.com/en/techlibrary/solutionguide/acousti...
https://www.edn.com/reducing-mlccs-piezoelectric-effects-and...
Buy genuine Apple chargers, if not for you, then for your dog.
it's a well-studied economic fact that monopolists generally sell higher quality products, and it helps them maintain their monopoly. With their market power and the fat margins they earn, there is plenty of budget to do R&D and have achieve scale benefits. Their optimum-profit product-mix and pricepoints are skewed higher. Nobody complained about IBM mainframe quality, nor Bell Telephone quality.
So, it's not testimony to Apple's prowess, it's simply a cookbook outgrowth of their product differentiation strategy.
You too would benefit from a competitive iPhone market, there would have been an earlier introduction of large screens, cheaper memory options, perhaps getting choices that included repairability, replaceable batteries, microSD cards, etc.
Think of it this way: if Apple was broken into three Apples that compete with each other, the shareholders would not have lost anything that they are entitled to: they'd each still own what they owned before a share of each of the new companies instead of a share in the old. But previously monopoly prices would drop.
Well, that's completely ahistorical. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was due to conservatism and idiocy on the part of managers and businesspeople, not to mention... you know... IBM's monopoly power and the advantages that went along with that. During the bulk of the minicomputer and mainframe era it had little or nothing to do with the relative quality of IBM's stuff.
What does this have to do with Apple, which has neither the completely captive market that AT&T did nor the overwhelming market control that IBM did?
At this point it is - I think - a pretty common assumption that Apple just puts things together in a decent ecosystem. If Apple devices offers a new frequency range, its because Qualcomm's radio allowed for it, which was dependent on other things further in the stream.
This is an interesting trip down memory lane. Apple still says magical sometimes in their keynotes, but nobody is really mystified only occasionally glad they decided to offer something in that way, since its more about the Apple implementation than the Apple innovation.
It’s not all sheer pressure; they do a lot of collaborative design. After all they have one of the best semiconductor design teams (both digital and analog) around. And they are on standards bodies; they allegedly (some non-Apple people told me) contributed contributed significantly to USB-C.
I emphasized completely because in the modern ecosystem it’s broadly true (RAM, displays etc)
People still have this idea that “so and so actually invented it”. Or “Apple just combined X and Y”.
But they fail to see how truck loads of money and a customer willing to pay for something and making large pre-payments can change the trajectory of a company. Or even has impact on other players.
Throughout the 90's screen resolutions were getting better and better. Then LCDs came and 1080p stopped mainstream screen resolution improvements for at least 5 years.
Thankfully Apple got the screen resolution race going again.
And I primarily remember pre-Retina Apple for only offering laptops with very low screen resolutions.
The consumer MacBooks and iBooks before them definitely had frustratingly low resolutions.