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My iPad won't even charge right without my macBook. My brother works for Apple and gave me the party line about how "some motherboards are not capable of supply

My iPad won't even charge right without my macBook. My brother works for Apple and gave me the party line about how "some motherboards are not capable of supplying enough power to their usb ports." I started Parallels on my macBook, plugged in the iPad and let it connect to the virtual XP that was running: "Not Charging". Shut down Parallels without even unplugging the iPad, well, boy howdy, its charging now. No OSX/iTunes? Purposely broken.

seabee 16y ago
Windows (may even be the USB specification itself) will not deliver more than X mA to a device unless a driver is installed to request > X mA OS X obviously is aware of iDevices so it charges without you knowing any wiser. Windows needs the driver.
- noonespecial 16y ago
  As this unfolded (the comments) I realized I very well might be talking out of my ass, and I hate when people do that to me so I grabbed my gear to divine the electronic truth. Here are some facts I learned: My MacBook pro gladly puts out more than 1100ma @5v no matter whats connected and no matter what "handshaking" occurred (or didn't). Its a little scary really. My iPad does charge albeit very slowly even when it says "not charging". When it does so, it consumes about 750ma (thus, breaking the spec anyway in a strict sense). It stops charging if you turn it on and just runs from usb power. So its kind of telling the truth, when it says "not charging" on the screen, it actually isn't. The ipad increases charge to around 950ma when it gets the OK from an Apple Approved device. (my MacBook, only when in OSX mode) When connected to my palm pre's "dumb charger" the ipad does the "not charging" thing @750, even though the pre's charger can deliver 1500ma. The official Apple wall charger seems to deliver about 5.5v and nearly 1000ma to the pad. It seems the choice is actually left to the iPad itself whether to sip or slurp and it does this by detecting what its connected to. (or rather, what it isn't connected to) In conclusion, this operational profile is frustrating. "Purposely broken" may have been too strong but they didn't go through any extra effort to make my user experience stellar if I elected not to go the full monty on apple gear. But what does it really mean to me? I can't charge my 'pad on the damn plane on that freakishly long SF to Sydney and watch all the back episodes of "Mad Men", using that nifty USB jack on Qantas' new A380. Bummer.
ryannielsen 16y ago
It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact. To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals. To do that, the hardware was modified to vend more amps over the bus but only when handshaking has occurred between the attached device and the OS drivers. If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine. If you want to argue that Apple should have made their changes public so anyone could re-implement, well, that's a different discussion.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  >It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact. The fact is that 'some motherboards cannot supply the voltage' or is it 'it needs its own driver to charge' ? >To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals >If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine. So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it. What about the USB ports at airports, in car adaptors, heck, even the otherwise useless one on my Comcast DVR? So they couldn't make the iPad detect insufficient voltage and show 'Insufficient voltage detected. You need to install iTunes to charge me!' Or maybe charge at a slower pace and show a message to that effect? It's not as if it's an edge case seen by few, probably ~50% of iPad users might be connecting it to Windows PCs.
  - noonespecial 16y ago
    Check my comment above. It actually does charge at a slower pace as long as its off on standard USB ports. A message to that effect would be fantastic as it took me a long time to figure this out. Its almost like they wanted me to assume the only way to charge my device was with official chargers, computers, or drivers. Hmmm.
  - jackvalentine 16y ago
    > So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it. I'm fairly sure there is no requirement that your device is able to charge from every USB port. It is still 'in spec' because the cable is used to sync data. It only breaks spec when it knows that the hardware can take it (via apple drivers).
mickt 16y ago
"some motherboards are not capable of supplying enough power to their usb ports." That's just lovely. At work someone ordered 2 western digital passports harddrives. They wouldn't work with any Apple laptops that we had (2 15in MBP, a 13in MBP, a Air) and would only work with desktops (2 iMacs). The box, WD's website, Apple's website all said these were compatible with any MacBook ... I suspected the problem was with underpowered USB ports. I even phoned WD's support (who were unprofessional) and couldn't get straight answer out of them, nor any useful info from Apple website. Thanks for confirming my suspicions! I never used a Mac until 1.5 years ago and I've been impressed with the quality and finish of the hardware, the overall smoothness of the UI, suspend & hibernate that work, AND a bash shell. And the ease in which non-Computer literate can use one is impressive (unless they've used other OS's for a long time). But, the way Apple obfuscate information, and Bill Gates ... er I mean Steve Jobs apparent desire to lock users into Apple is disturbing.

seabee 16y ago

Windows (may even be the USB specification itself) will not deliver more than X mA to a device unless a driver is installed to request > X mA OS X obviously is aware of iDevices so it charges without you knowing any wiser. Windows needs the driver.

noonespecial 16y ago
As this unfolded (the comments) I realized I very well might be talking out of my ass, and I hate when people do that to me so I grabbed my gear to divine the electronic truth. Here are some facts I learned: My MacBook pro gladly puts out more than 1100ma @5v no matter whats connected and no matter what "handshaking" occurred (or didn't). Its a little scary really. My iPad does charge albeit very slowly even when it says "not charging". When it does so, it consumes about 750ma (thus, breaking the spec anyway in a strict sense). It stops charging if you turn it on and just runs from usb power. So its kind of telling the truth, when it says "not charging" on the screen, it actually isn't. The ipad increases charge to around 950ma when it gets the OK from an Apple Approved device. (my MacBook, only when in OSX mode) When connected to my palm pre's "dumb charger" the ipad does the "not charging" thing @750, even though the pre's charger can deliver 1500ma. The official Apple wall charger seems to deliver about 5.5v and nearly 1000ma to the pad. It seems the choice is actually left to the iPad itself whether to sip or slurp and it does this by detecting what its connected to. (or rather, what it isn't connected to) In conclusion, this operational profile is frustrating. "Purposely broken" may have been too strong but they didn't go through any extra effort to make my user experience stellar if I elected not to go the full monty on apple gear. But what does it really mean to me? I can't charge my 'pad on the damn plane on that freakishly long SF to Sydney and watch all the back episodes of "Mad Men", using that nifty USB jack on Qantas' new A380. Bummer.

ryannielsen 16y ago

It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact. To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals. To do that, the hardware was modified to vend more amps over the bus but only when handshaking has occurred between the attached device and the OS drivers. If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine. If you want to argue that Apple should have made their changes public so anyone could re-implement, well, that's a different discussion.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
>It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact. The fact is that 'some motherboards cannot supply the voltage' or is it 'it needs its own driver to charge' ? >To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals >If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine. So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it. What about the USB ports at airports, in car adaptors, heck, even the otherwise useless one on my Comcast DVR? So they couldn't make the iPad detect insufficient voltage and show 'Insufficient voltage detected. You need to install iTunes to charge me!' Or maybe charge at a slower pace and show a message to that effect? It's not as if it's an edge case seen by few, probably ~50% of iPad users might be connecting it to Windows PCs.
- noonespecial 16y ago
  Check my comment above. It actually does charge at a slower pace as long as its off on standard USB ports. A message to that effect would be fantastic as it took me a long time to figure this out. Its almost like they wanted me to assume the only way to charge my device was with official chargers, computers, or drivers. Hmmm.
- jackvalentine 16y ago
  > So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it. I'm fairly sure there is no requirement that your device is able to charge from every USB port. It is still 'in spec' because the cable is used to sync data. It only breaks spec when it knows that the hardware can take it (via apple drivers).

mickt 16y ago

"some motherboards are not capable of supplying enough power to their usb ports." That's just lovely. At work someone ordered 2 western digital passports harddrives. They wouldn't work with any Apple laptops that we had (2 15in MBP, a 13in MBP, a Air) and would only work with desktops (2 iMacs). The box, WD's website, Apple's website all said these were compatible with any MacBook ... I suspected the problem was with underpowered USB ports. I even phoned WD's support (who were unprofessional) and couldn't get straight answer out of them, nor any useful info from Apple website. Thanks for confirming my suspicions! I never used a Mac until 1.5 years ago and I've been impressed with the quality and finish of the hardware, the overall smoothness of the UI, suspend & hibernate that work, AND a bash shell. And the ease in which non-Computer literate can use one is impressive (unless they've used other OS's for a long time). But, the way Apple obfuscate information, and Bill Gates ... er I mean Steve Jobs apparent desire to lock users into Apple is disturbing.