8 ms·
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did
- kken 13y agoFunny how the first comment of that article links to an older HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ThomPete 13y agoApple almost never revolutionize technologies they turn them into businesses which is quite different IMO.
- gibwell 13y agoAnother way of saying this is that they revolutionize businesses by applying technologies.
- chmars 13y agoI have never had the impression that Apple had revolutionized power supplies. Honestly, I am happy if I am not forced to use a three-pin plug and the power supply works reliably.
- MattBearman 13y agoMe either, I didn't realise it was a common misconception.
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoAccording to the Steve Jobs quote, it isn’t: “Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should.”
- tux1968 13y agoJust saw the movie "Jobs" where some time is spent on the features of the power supply. Having not heard of this before, I went searching and found this page. It is older and associated with the release of the original book biography, but still interesting. Figured others might share a curiosity about this facet of the story...
- sidcool 13y agoThis is what I called a well researched article.
- aspensmonster 13y agoDat Reference List. And not just a list of links, but with commentary by the author detailing why he thought it important and where specifically to look! It's almost as much fun reading through the reference list as it is the main article.
- haberman 13y ago> Dat Reference List. What does this figure of speech mean? I've seen this before, where someone puts the word "Dat" before a noun, and I have absolutely no idea what it means. Like I know "dat" can be slang for "that," but "That Reference List" makes no sense to me either.
- generj 13y ago"Dat" not only means "that", but also an admiration (perhaps of the lusty variety) for the item thereafter described. Most infamously, the meme "Dat Ass" is used, but "Dat X" is commonly used on Reddit, Imgur, and other meme sites to express attraction to some object. In this case, "Dat Reference List" just means that the reference list is very impressive.
- thristian 13y agoI believe the intended meaning is that the subject in question is so awe-inspiring that the speaker can only briefly direct their audience's attention before lapsing into wordless reverie. Here's an NSFW discussion of the phrase's origins: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-ass http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-ass
- ralfd 13y agoSpeaking of which, the Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson is not. He is totally technical clueless. And most of the book is just copy-pasting of different other better books about Apples history in the 80s/90s. http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
- confluence 13y agoHere's a little lesson I've learned about claims of theft of revolutionary products: they're always false. Innovation and invention are continuous and gradual processes, with numerous precursors and multiple independent and simultaneous origins. It's basically evolution. There is no such thing as intellectual theft, nor are there revolutionary products, nor are there genius or original inventors. There's just dumb plodding incremental innovation by connecting past ideas together into useful products. Everything is a remix. There are no revolutionaries, only winners writing their own versions of history. Good entrepreneurs copy. Great entrepreneurs steal.
- devx 13y agoIndeed. The Everything Is A Remix series has been great for showing this. The 3rd part actually covers Apple and their "inventions", too, but all are very interesting, and even enlightening: http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/ http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
- Tloewald 13y agoThe idea that everything is a remix is a bit like moral relativism. The fact that things sit somewhere on a spectrum doesn't mean we should ignore the distribution of things on that spectrum.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> The idea that everything is a remix is a bit like moral relativism. The fact that things sit somewhere on a spectrum doesn't mean we should ignore the distribution of things on that spectrum. Tangential to your main point, but that analogy is pretty bad because that's actually nothing like moral relativism, as moral relativism doesn't hold that "everything is on a spectrum". The divide between moral relativism and absolutism isn't between morality being continuous valued and binary valued, but between it being subjective and objective. Anything about morality falling on a spectrum or not is orthogonal to relativism.
- lampington 13y agoDoes anyone know what it that's led to the big improvements in power supplies over the last ten years or so? Wall warts have shrunk tenfold.
- nappy-doo 13y agoWall warts used to work as a step down transformer and a linear regulator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regulator). The step down transformer is the big brick like piece of the wall wart. More modern transformers are switch mode supplies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply). Switch mode supplies (like the OP describes) are smaller, run cooler, and (nowdays) cheaper than linear supplies. The main thing that's happened is IC manufacturers have made switch mode controllers cheap, and reliable. As a result, most wall warts are going away, to be replaced by switched supplies.
- lampington 13y agoAh, right, thanks! So old wall warts were like the power supplies the OP describes right at the start, and the change we've is that newer wall warts are like a scaled down version of the ones he spends the rest of the article describing.
- diydsp 13y agoAnd I would add that switching power supply tech has been around for decades (hello, desktop PC tower cases!). It just wasn't used as often in consumer devices because they were more complex (more parts, trickier to design) and there simply weren't many consumer devices around that required so much power _and_ portability. I would argue laptops were the killer app as far as switchers are concerned. Once they showed up and got popular, designers newly had reasons to design switchers more often.
- crb3 13y agoA lot of the old wall warts are "Type 2", which means transformer, rectifier, reservoir capacitor -- no regulation there at all. With light or no load, the output voltage can soar (such as, 18v DC no-load from a nominal 12v DC @ 300 mA wart). The switchers are regulated, so you get what it says on the tin.
- Someone 13y agoDevil's advocate: Jobs: "Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one _like_those_used_in_oscilloscopes_." TFA: "It turns out that Apple's power supply was not revolutionary" Indeed. If we believe Jobs, it was used in oscilloscopes before. Jobs probably exaggerated/boasted/lied when he spoke of "ripping off", but this article isn't 100% honest with the facts, either.
- r0h1n 13y agoYou quote selectively from Jobs. Here's the part that's actually his claim: >> "That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was," Jobs later said. "Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod Holt's design." Jobs wasn't just claiming Holt's power supplies were built like those in oscilloscopes, but that it was practically the ancestor of all modern PC PSUs. The article conclusively dismantles that claim. P.S. The oscilloscope reference seems to be a Red Herring. From the article: >> One puzzling aspect of power supply discussion in the book Steve Jobs[1] is the statement that the Apple II's power supply is "like those used in oscilloscopes", since oscilloscopes are just one small use for switching power supplies. This statement apparently arose because Holt had previously designed a switching power supply for oscilloscopes,[82] but there's no other connection between Apple's power supply and oscilloscope power supplies.
- merraksh 13y agoIt could also be that Steve Jobs had incomplete information. Holt told him he designed such and such (maybe he should have just said implemented), without giving him references for who did it before. Jobs did not bother to find out and the false idea that Holt invented it stuck to his mind. Maybe just an honest mistake, but then due to lack of rigor.
- raverbashing 13y agoI think the "revolutionary" part doesn't mean revolutionary alone, but in the context of computers. There are also several possible structures of switching power supplies, so it may involve a new structure, or a new way of regulating the output, or just saving on components. Revolutionary may be an hyperbole, but it probably had some novelty factor as well. Edit: ok the article explains the patent awarded to the power supply, nothing too fancy. Oh and a TO-3 transistor, brings memories.
- kens 13y agoIt's a pleasant surprise to see my old power supply article on the front page of HN today. I'd never given much thought to power supplies before researching that article and there's a lot more to their history than I expected. In particular, Robert Boschert seems like he should be a HN hero for running a startup from his kitchen table that had a huge (disruptive?) impact on the power supply industry. There are a bunch of comments below about wall chargers. I investigated wall chargers too - see http://righto.com/charger http://righto.com/charger - and there's a lot more inside them than you'd expect. Let me know if you have any questions.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoWhat? Research? Facts? References? Are you sure you know how to blog properly? This is not generally how it's done. Seriously though, good work.
- voltagex_ 13y agoIs there any way for me, without destruction or an oscilloscope, to work out how reliable my ~$15 USB chargers are? What about portable USB batteries? (3.7V LiPo + converter = large amounts of money apparently) Edits after going through the article and comments: * Weight - hard without a reference weight, but I'm going to guess that cheaper chargers are going to be lighter * UL mark search at http://database.ul.com/cgi-bin/XYV/template/LISEXT/1FRAME/index.html?utm_source=ulcom&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=database http://database.ul.com/cgi-bin/XYV/template/LISEXT/1FRAME/in... * Heat & noise? It seems like the chargers will also react to the quality of the power coming out of your socket - a comment in the USB charger article references 110V power on Indian trains being a bit hit and miss. I'd say this is the same for power on BC ferries too. Would quality (noise levels?) of mains power be why my Lenovo laptop got a hell of a lot hotter on a Qantas A380 aeroplane? (which supplies 110V at 60Hz). It's normally plugged into Aussie 230V (240V) at 50hz. Sidenote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country is a really good article.
- dfox 13y agoMost people have some idea of how heavy piece of electronics of certain size should be, many fake chargers/supplies are surprisingly lighter than that (sadly, even some known original Nokia and Samsung chargers seem too light to me, so this is not valid test) Good thing to look for is presence of some name of manufacturer. Absutely no name => unsafe, Obscure or semi obscure Chinese manufacturer => probably OK, Well known global brand => depends (and depends on what the charger is for, nobody is going to manufacture fake Delta-branded charger for iPhone, but fake Delta-branded power bricks for various networking equipment are fairly common). Power quality on input is certainly an issue, but only for totally out of spec inputs. Small wide input SMPS (like these for laptops) just run hotter on lower voltages because of their internal construction (lower voltage => higher current => higher losses).
- gibwell 13y agoThis is like saying 'Apple didn't revolutionize tablets - Microsoft did'. It's pretty ignorant to keep attacking Apple for not 'inventing' every aspect of every technology they use. That simply is not how the industry works for any company. When Apple 'revolutionizes' something they do so by understanding how a particular technology can be applied to deliver value to users. Period. This same logic applies to Google. It's hard to dispute that they 'revolutionized' search, and yet they did not invent crawlers, minimal search interfaces, or even using backlinks to rank pages. What they did was to combine these things into a brilliantly engineered solution. This is yet another linkbait semantic argument that gains attention only because it attacks Apple.
- haberman 13y agoDid you even read the article? The fact that you are speaking in generalizations strongly suggests that you did not. Steve Jobs made some very specific claims, the article debunks them in great detail.
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoHave you ever worked with C-level executives before? They frequently speak in soundbites like this because they have to have a 30,000 ft. view over their company while at the same time picking out highlights that can be used in interviews like this. What's really notable is how much shit Steve Jobs gets for completely off-the-cuff comments like this (I mean, we're talking about oscilloscopes here), yet no one bothers to mention the fact that here we have a CEO giving credit to one of his employees by name. Does the CEO of your company even know your name? When's the last time a CEO has given anyone else recognition in an interview?
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago"I readily admit that there are some things that I don't have the faintest idea what i'm talking about." - Steve Jobs, 1997 He was a human being and made mistakes; can we please let this shit go already?
- shawn-furyan 13y agoSo because Jobs once admitted to being a bullshitter, his claims are beyond scrutiny? Even when those claims are repeated as fact by secondary sources? This article isn't grinding an ax. Rather, it's an interesting investigation of a little examined aspect of computer history that happened to be kicked off by skepticism of a claim that actually turned out to be false.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago> So because Jobs once admitted to being a bullshitter, his claims are beyond scrutiny? Yes. In the real world, we call this "taking it with a grain of salt." Think about how many other interviews with other celebrities you've been concerned about fact-checking. > Even when those claims are repeated as fact by secondary sources? This is not and should never be Jobs' problem. > This article isn't grinding an ax. Rather, it's an interesting investigation of a little examined aspect of computer history that happened to be kicked off by skepticism of a claim that actually turned out to be false. It's concern trolling. It's pseudo-intellectualism analogous to people who bring up Ben Franklin's mistresses whenever someone brings up his inventions. And it's ridiculous that someone would write a fully-researched analysis of an off-handed comment whose clear intention was to praise an employee for his contributions.
- gibwell 13y agoHis claims aren't beyond scrutiny, but they get far more than they deserve compared to other tech CEOs. Almost anything positive about him or even apple, is shouted down, whereas anything negative is held up as 'scrutiny'.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoLet what shit go? Factual inaccuracies? Fabrication of history? No, we can't let that go. So long as these erroneous facts still get circulated then they deserve to be debunked, forcefully. That doesn't mean there is any malice intended towards Jobs or his legacy, but facts are facts. If you think that debunking Jobs' bullshit claims will inevitably have a deleterious effect on the historical perception of Jobs as a person, well that's on Jobs for being a bullshitter, not on anyone trying to ensure that people don't have a false view of history.
- OldSchool 13y agoThe claim "...and they all rip off Rod Holt's design" is classic "reality distortion field" salesmanship. Lesson learned: don't be humble when you're the pitch man. Even the claim that every other computer maker used switching power supplies certainly wasn't true at the time of the Apple II; its direct 6502-based contemporary the Commodore PET 2001 had a standard heavy transformer bolted to its thick metal chassis and large capacitors under the hood.