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Comment by javawizard | Hacker News Reader

I gotta say, I love my macbooks. Every Apple laptop I've owned that has USB-C ports will happily charge itself from a 5V/1.5A wall charger (albeit extremely slowly).

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That hasn’t been my experience. I once tried to charge an M3 MBP via a lower powered wall plug. It was left off over night and the following morning the battery was still at 1%.

What did it start at?

Note:

Some devices expect USB-A on the charger side instead of C

USB-A pump out 1A5V(5W) regardless of what's connected to it, then it negotiate higher power if available.

USB C-C does not give any power if the receiving device is not able to negotiate it

This was a decent USB plug from Anker. I regularly use it to charge things like iPhones and tablets. I knew it wouldn’t supply enough power to run the MBP but thought it should trickle charge the device over night. But it didn’t.

I can’t recall which cable I used though. The cable might have been garbage but I’m pretty sure I threw out all the older USB cables so they wouldn’t get mixed with more modern supporting cables.

My work has a little power strip with a usb-c and usb-a jack on it at every desk. I can charge my phone and iPad just fine with a USB-C cable into the USB-C port, but when I plugged my MacBook Air into it, it says “not charging.” Going into the system information tool I can see it’s only running at 10W. So apparently 10W is not enough to charge, but it’s still at least keeping the battery from draining.

A 20w charger will definitely charge the MacBook, just slowly.

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