Linked by David Adams on Mon 26th Oct 2009 19:32 UTC
The "wall wart" is one of humanity's worst inventions (not counting all of the inventions that are actually intended to kill and maim each other, I'll admit). AC-plug power supplies are a cheap workaround to various engineering, economic, and regulatory problems that manufacturers face, and they solve those problems by pushing them off onto end users. So what can we do about it? OSNews takes a look at an ingenious workaround to the Wall Wart problem, and some hopeful trends that might make them a thing of the past.
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Member since:
2005-07-17
I do think Apple has a third option to your mentioned two; include a micro USB in addition to their proprietary connector for a couple of generations - it's small enough for this to be feasible, would add little in the way of cost or weight, and would allow them to march forward with USB while retaining compatibility with devices featuring their proprietary connector (why Apple insists on supporting oddball connectors forever is beyond me - die Firewire!).
Also note that the USB 3.0 standard increases the maximum power draw possible, especially for "configured" devices. From the (possibly wrong) Wikipedia article:
"The bus power spec has been increased so that a unit load is 150 mA (+50% over minimum using USB 2.0). An unconfigured device can still draw only 1 unit load, but a configured device can draw up to 6 unit loads (900 mA, an 80% increase over USB 2.0 at a registered maximum of 500 mA). Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4 V to 4 V."
I don't understand why there has to be a difference between configured and unconfigured devices - using Ubuntu makes it impossible for me to charge my BlackBerry for example, as I can't get it "configured" (without painful workarounds) - that's just silly. I also can't plug it in to a friend's laptop without installing a bunch of drivers, so I have to travel with the USB wall wart all the time.
EDIT: Installing "barry" from Synaptic now allows me to charge my BlackBerry from within Ubuntu, so that's progress! Autodetection would have been nice though...
The issue is that if the device is "dumb" and can't manage it's own power draw, then your computer has to protect it's chips from overdrawn current. Most cheap computers are designed at the lower end of the power requirements and may support one high powered device but typically share the power wiring with all the devices.
On the flip side the trouble I have is that many DEVICES won't charge from "dumb" powered hubs.. that's the big flaw in the plan. I have several phone devices (from companies beginning with A or M) that won't charge except with THEIR USB charger even though the charger has a standard USB or mini-USB port available.
The idea of USB power is great because then we can buy one or two highly efficient chargers for our home or office for all our devices. Custom cords don't really bother me because they're small and standard at one end. Chargers would be optimized for our local power grid, and to output the standard USB so we wouldn't need to carry them with us. They could also have advanced switching that detects when ports are not being used and turns off circuitry and even power off the whole unit to save "vampire" power.