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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

The battery pack does charge though a USB-C port.

However, given that this is a device you use while standing and walking about, it would be dangerous to have it suddenly turn into a high tech blindfold just because you snagged the cable on something.

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The locking connector on the battery pack cable is really nice.

It not only holds the cord safely, it rotates into an orientation guiding it the right direction for the cord.

It would be better to have no cord, but the design is worth a close look.

There are lockable USB C connectors designed to prevent that from happening:

https://www.neutrik.com/en/product/nmc-c-hr

It's hard to tell given the lack of appropriate pictures, but it seems like that "solution" is basically recessing the USB-C port so deeply that only their cable can reach it.

I doubt that using a different proprietary locking connector fixes the "why didn't they use standard USB-C" complaint.

That one does look like a proprietary design, but USB IF has a locking connector standard too! Makes it look like VGA.

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/documents/usb_type-c...

Looking at that elegant design, I can’t imagine why Apple didn’t use that. /s

Lol! I can't tell if that design is a parody. That's seriously the best they came up with?

USB always had it, this isn't just what they came up with for USB-C. Panasonic Toughbooks have that single screw versions and matching gasket countersinking for USBs.

I guess I'm not really surprised, if this came from the same group who gave us USB 3.2.78 Fast Version Gen Z Type S.

It just works. Proper screws just work. Latches has its own pros and cons, button-less latches like USB are technically even worse. It's just collective memory of cheapest parodies of these for VGAs never working that you have internalized.

I don't know about that. They were pretty bad for not just VGA but serial ports, parallel ports, SCSI and ZIP drives, etc. The screws would never fit all the way in, the holes would be misaligned, cheap plastic would get in the way, they'd often be stripped, etc. They were nightmarish enough for desktops that rarely moved or got unplugged. I would never want something like that in a mobile form factor. Apple was right to go proprietary here. The screw locks sucked.

Apple would be free to work on "more elegant" common standards instead of trying to force people into their ecosystem by using proprietary garbage, which then has to be forbidden by the EU yet again.

I love how they actually defined two mutually incompatible locking connectors in one document.

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