4 ms·

Did you read the article? They said they had major problems last year, but now things are getting much better. See chart: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/

• peterwwillis 10y ago
  That article doesn't really mean anything. It's just a test of some laptops and their adapters, which is a small subset of the world of charged/charging devices. There are at least 10 different official USB power specs, the latest being from last year, called "USB Power Delivery revision 2.0 version 1.2". Each spec may have multiple revisions, and versions of revisions, and each revision version may have up to 6 power profiles. There are more unofficial specs that are hacked by vendors. Fast charging has even more variations and incompatibilities. And then some ports get some other standard tacked onto it, which may have their own incompatible power spec. We keep getting new specs and new devices with new uses. Laptop vendors can only push out new hardware supporting new specs after a lot of R&D, and at considerable new cost. Because of this, in order to support some new feature without as much time and money spent making it compatible, it is vendor locked so it doesn't catch on fire. We saw the same thing with wifi. So are things getting better? Yes, we finally have support for enough of the baseline standard so at least most new things will charge now. But will they all continue to work compatibly in the future? Probably not as long as vendors continue to make their own power adapters.