Apple laptop power adapters. ARAGHHHH!

Angry angry angry angry.
ANGRY.

(Looking around on E-bay to find a new power adapter, the FOURTH for my old clamshell, which I otherwise absolutely adore. Replacements cost between 35 bucks (on E-bay) to around 100 (new from real stores, and they aren’t easy to find) and this will be the fourth. Crappy design. The little wire that attaches to the widget that plugs into the computer frays in the middle, shorting out and sparking, which, while in the dusk is very pretty and interesting, like chewing those wintermint lifesavers in the dark, is kind of disturbing) and not working half the time, so one has to fiddle with it more.)

Ok, I feel better now. But really, why couldn’t they have made these better, or at least redesigned them when it became clear that they sucked?

That just happened to mine too. Fortunately, it belongs to my employer so they ponied up the $80 for a new one. At least now I know that it wasn’t due to poor care on my part.

Mother, those damn things suck, and suck HARD. My wife has an old adapter like that, had the same sparking problem, only the power cord that went from the adapter to the wall was the screwed up one! I replaced it with a similarly shaped one from my Thinkpad, worked like a charm. How you can screw up a plain jane powercord like that?

By getting too damn fancy, that’s how.

I feel your pain.

In my case, I had only myself to blame. I put a chair leg down on the extendo part of mine and stripped the insulation down to bare wires in a couple of places. I kicked myself for being so careless, but I thought, oh, well, probalby forty bucks or so to replace it.

Oy! Try twice that!

On the plus side, now I carry the new one around, and I have the old one, minus the extendo part, at my desk at work, so I can plug in all convenient-like. On the minus side, that one seems to be starting to flake out. The wire right about the part that plugs into the computer is getting really touchy. No sparks yet, thank goodness.

Mine came stripped. While I was waiting for a new one, I investigated and repaired the bad one. It’s really a bad design from a robustness point of view. Instead of two separate wires (like lampcord), it seems to be a central core surrounded by the second wire. (Maybe this is to reduce electrical noise, I don’t know.) But any sort of crushing damage to the cord is going to inevitably result in a short. (I also have the feeling that clamping the cord in the hinge while closing the laptop would be a bad idea.)

The wire definitely needs to be a thicker gauge, and more heavily insulated.