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Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

It's awesome being able to plop down on the couch and plug my laptop into a Nintendo Switch charger, that I also use to chargey phone. Charging a laptop before USB-C was an ordeal because I only had one specialised charger with a proprietary plug. Now I have half a dozen spread around the house and car.

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Funny that you mention Nintendo Switch, because Nintendo made a non-standard implementation of usb-c there and connecting console to the standard compliant cable and charger can brick or fry the console. Perfect example of USB-Confusion :)

I never had an issue with bricking but it is a bit hard to find power bricks that output 15V, which is what the dock requires.

The rant about "proprietary chargers" for laptops was also untrue, there was uniform 19V brick-type power supply units with uniform 5.5mm barrel connector for at least 15 years.

We live in a different world. I'd like to live in yours! Prior to usb c my Hp Dell and Lenovo, all in their enterprise line favouring practicality over fashion and looks, all used wildly different chargers. Even Lenovo alone, in that 15 year span, had round and rectangle tips with 12 and 20v.

That's simply not true. I had three different laptops from 2010 to 2021: an Acer Inspiron (I think that's what it was called), a Dell Latitude, and a Surface Pro 3. All used different chargers. The Surface used Microsoft's proprietary magsafe connector, and the others used different-sized barrel jacks. I currently have a Dell XPS 13 which charges over USB-C.

Oddly, the Acer charger was the same as for an Acer 27" monitor I had, which came in handy once or twice.

Charger for monitor? Curiouser and curiouser.

You could call it a power supply, because the monitor obviously had no battery.

Between the proprietary plugs and USB-C, we had the dark ages of micro-USB which somehow always came loose after a few weeks of use

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