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Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

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Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#261

Post by cout »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #146
jewel wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using this magnetic USB-C adapter on my laptop to reduce the wear and tear on the port: https://a.co/d/4JCadfi . I've been using it since March with no complaints. It'd be great if manufacturers could standardize on something like this so that the port could be flush.

They can't; Apple has a patent on Magsafe.

Looks like the magsafe patent will expire in 3 years: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7311526B2/en

Also lightning (the connector used in iphones starting in 2012) is different from magsafe (the connector used in macbooks starting in 2006).

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#262

Post by justin66 »

guerby wrote: post #115
deathanatos wrote: post #87

It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could ha…

Same experience here. That's why my current laptop is a https://frame.work - USB-C to USB-C adapters means that the part that will fail is changeable - All four USB-C are able to charge the laptop. And the power brick also has detachable USB-C AND power cord cable. (And just for fun I ordered an upgrade to the motherboard, will use the old motherboard as always on PC in my home)

The (detachable) cord on mine started to fray on the computer end almost immediately. Progress, sort of.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#263

Post by glowingly »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #237
copperx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra credit for being able to charge your laptop easily in the car. Before this, you needed either a power inverter or a special DC connector.

Are cars starting to have USB-C PD connectors? The most "advanced" I've seen are wireless chargers. My dad's 2021 Toyota only has USB-A.

My Thinkpad, depending on BIOS revision, will trickle charge from a 5V1A charger. Not great, but not horrible.

I know Vaio used to advertise that as a feature.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#264

Post by akelly »

hanche wrote: post #187
catmanjan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience all usb c chargers are less reliable than barrel connectors, probably because of the microprocessors required for the handshake

I have a food thermometer with a builtin rechargeable battery. It charges via usb-c, but so far I have not managed to charge it from a usb-c charger. It will only charge with the supplied usb-a to usb-c cable. I would love to understand why. But at least, they had the good sense to not supply their own charger.

USB-A ports output 5V as long as the device is on. But with most USB-C ports, to save power no power is supplied until the device requests what voltage it wants. Requesting 5V is very simple, just two resistors which cost fractions of a cent, but somehow a lot of cheap devices forget to include them.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#265

Post by wodenokoto »

deathanatos wrote: post #87

It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could ha…

I’ve read that LED light bulbs have the same problem. The LED will easily last 25 years, as written on the box, but the electronics that power the LED won’t.

I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#266

Post by wccrawford »

yetanotherloser wrote: post #205
fzzt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so. I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.

I'm surprised so many people's experience of LED bulbs is short lifetime. Most of the LED bulbs I ever bought have lasted many, many years. I only had one type ever fail and those looked clearly inferior in build to all the other types. ("free" with some light fittings, not my choice). Took one of those apart, no capacitors in the design any more but dodgy wire connections that creep with the hot-cold on-off cycle in…

I've got a lot of different brands of LED light bulbs and I think maybe one has "burned out" over the years. I have to wonder if maybe the power in their house is less "clean" than it should be, or if their area has a lot of power spikes or brownouts and they just don't realize it.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#267

Post by sokoloff »

wodenokoto wrote: post #265
deathanatos wrote: post #87

It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could ha…

I’ve read that LED light bulbs have the same problem. The LED will easily last 25 years, as written on the box, but the electronics that power the LED won’t. I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

Most of my LED failures (moderately early adopter) have been power supply failures.

Some bulbs (estimated 20%, mostly higher output ones) have lost SMD LEDs, in some cases having reductions in brightness as a portion of the bulb is then INOP.

I’ve stopped taking them apart and looking into the failures once they got to be cheap enough to not care.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#268

Post by glowingly »

ornornor wrote: post #259
scarface74 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can “manually tweak” an x86 laptop to have 20+ hours of battery life and not to get hot and loud under load?

You can tweak a laptop’s energy settings so that it has comparable battery life whether it’s running windows or Linux. But no, a laptop that has 8h of runtime in windows won’t magically get 20h in Linux.

I would be lucky if my Thinkpad X1C6 would get the same battery life in Linux as it did in Windows. It usually does well, if I don't open the web browser.

As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I have a version of ffmpeg that actually supports the codecs I want to decode.

I'm still following an ever deeper series of guides on how to enable ASIC decoding for videos.

This is across a few distros (Pop_OS, Fedora Silverblue [using both the bundled FF and the flatpak variant from flathub - not just the Fedora flatpak], Tumbleweed), and it has long been the same story.

On my desktop, I have simply regressed to letting FF/MPV/VLC take an extra 15W of power to render a video. On my laptop, I still am trying to find a solution, since it can hardly spare that extra power consumption.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#269

Post by josteink »

wodenokoto wrote: post #265
deathanatos wrote: post #87

It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could ha…

I’ve read that LED light bulbs have the same problem. The LED will easily last 25 years, as written on the box, but the electronics that power the LED won’t. I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

> I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve had lots of different kinds of LED lighting, including LED bulbs and this is honestly the only reason I’ve had to replace them.

The electronics powering the LED overheat and over time starts to fail.

Some brands are worse than others, particularly cheap Chinese ones. They will break faster than you can replace them. Avoid at all cost.

Other mid-range bulbs are better (like IKEA Trådfri) but still without what I’d call industrial reliability. Philips Hue are more reliable, but again at a higher price.

In short, you get what you pay for. That said you can still have bad luck. For instance in my house we have semi-expensive Junostar LEDs (from the pro-market) for ceiling lights, but we received a bad batch with lot of flickering and had to have them all replaced. It was on warranty though ;)

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