I think it would depend where in your gait you picked up the cord.
The problem with long cords is you can get caught in them and not realize it and then walk away. With a short cord your more likely to notice it starting to wrap around your legs before you stand up (if it’s your laptop) or while your still there talking to the person who’s laptop it belongs to.
If you start walking away and the cord is short you’re not going to have had time to pick up any real speed, if the cord is long, you might have.
But it’s going to depend on a lot of circumstances that are pretty unpredictable.
Well, the Surface is more of a convertible tablet than a laptop.
I skimmed the patent and it takes the usual approach of claiming the world (basically any magnetically coupled electrical connector on an electronic device) and then narrowing the claims to something very specific.
The only way to resolve this is in court, so it just depends on whether Apple chooses to sue Microsoft or not. Microsoft (or Google) may feel they’re powerful enough to defend themselves in court; the same may not be true of smaller brands and so they’re not as likely to take a risk even if they think they can win.
I’m going to say planned obsolescence. iPhone cords in particular aren’t meant to last longer than two years. The power cord is the famous flaw of Toshiba laptops.
They just use standard DC power plugs. I haven’t noticed any particular looseness in them. You couldn’t use a signal level plug like the standard 1/4 audio plug mentioned up thread because they short across the connectors as you insert them: not good for a power cord.
That would be really surprising if it happened considering how broad the Apple/Microsoft cross licensing agreements are. Nobody outside the Apple & MS legal teams knows for sure, but I suspect MS could use Apple’s design if they wanted to.
I would say this is very, very unlikely.
Any cross-licensing agreements would have been for software (specifically UI patents), and I seriously doubt hardware was included. Also, I’d be surprised if they were still in effect, having been agreed upon almost 20 years ago.
Planned obsolescence is bullshit. Every design decision requires tradeoffs, and one of the things you can trade off is how long something will last. Every connector has a number of plug/unplug cycles it will support, and you pick (or design) one that will stand up to the usage you expect. No one designs something so that it will break earlier than otherwise as a goal.
I’ve got lots of iPhone cords that have lasted 5+ years. And they semi-recently redesigned the connector to be smaller and sturdier, which means they’ll likely last longer now.
Cite that the cords aren’t “supposed to” last longer than 2 years?
After reading my last post, it came off as way more hostile than I intended. Mea culpa.
I just think that “planned obsolescence” is not a useful way to think about design tradeoffs. Yes, things don’t last as long as they used to. But that’s because people value cheap, small, light things much more than longevity, and it’s hard to design for both.
I think your first post was dead-on.
People who talk about “planned obsolescence” have no idea about product design and manufacturing. I once got into an argument with someone who thought that they should be able to buy a car as safe and reliable as a Volvo for the price of a Yugo. No amount of explanation on my part could convince them that that was never going to happen.
Doesn’t matter, really. The way big corporations avoid going to court is by having a stable of patents to defend themselves with. It’s a form of mutually assured destruction. Apple sues Microsoft over MagSafe; Microsoft sues Apple over some other thing they patented in the WinCE days. No one wants this so they stay out of court unless the violation is really egregious.
The strategy doesn’t always work, but it mostly keeps the peace. The real losers are the smaller players that don’t have a decent portfolio.
Others have summed it up, but yeah, if someone trips over my laptop power cord, I’d rather spend 30 seconds of my time (it’s not that valuable, trust me) plugging it back in than to watch my two thousand dollar laptop get dragged off and dropped onto the floor. Or, possibly even more frustratingly, having the socket get snapped. One of the USB ports in the wife’s computer got busted this way, which actually prevented the computer from booting due to a short circuit in the broken socket (the computer detected the short, and was evidently designed to refuse to boot rather than risk running voltage through a bad circuit). I ended up having to disconnect that port from the USB header entirely.
I’ve heard this sort of issue being used as an argument for why more cell phone manufacturers should adopt wireless charging standards such as Qi (which is what the newer Google Nexus handsets use). Since it only needs physical contact rather than a physical connection, you don’t run the risk of a snagged cable breaking a charging port, rendering your phone unchargeable.
I specifically made myself a laptop “lap board” to deal with this problem. When the laptop is sitting on it I curl the cord around so it’s got some free play. It never gets tugged on because of the free play.
I mean in general. It’s possible that there are a few niches where it exists, but they’re very rare.
Yes, there are products that are designed to last a certain length of time, but that’s because making a product last longer always involves tradeoffs somewhere else.
“Planned obsolescence” is the idea that an otherwise good and long-lasting design would be modified to not last as long in the hopes that a replacement will be purchased. And that idea is bullshit. Making things that wear out or break faster and offer no offsetting features isn’t going to sell more of your widgets. It’s going to make all your customers go to your competitors who make higher quality stuff.
What number of cycles? An iPhone battery will still hold 80% of its charge after 400 cycles. So, it’s hardly used up, and that kind of battery capacity loss over time is just a limitation of the technology. It’s not like there’s a magic battery that they could use that wouldn’t run out of capacity and they choose not to use it.
If the adapter fits too tightly in the laptop and someone kicks the cord, leans the laptop against it on a bed or on their lap etc. it can break the internal connection on the laptop. I’ve seen this happen to 2 laptops. Perhaps this is preventative.
I realize that it’s hard for other manufacturers to use a magnetic design and not infringe on Apple’s patent (because holy fuck Patent law is so BS nowadays,) but why, for the love of God, can’t they at least all switch to a right angle plug?
Back “in the day,” most laptops had the power plug out the back, along with most of their ports (because we needed large ports like parallel, serial, and VGA…and for some reason, we still need VGA despite having HDMI…) So a plug that was straight wasn’t a big deal because it just shot out the back.
But then these ports were no longer needed, and the higher demands of CPUs and the trend of people using laptops as primary computers led to larger batteries that took up the whole backend. So now the power plugs had to be on the side…so the plug has to stick out the right or left side. Just make the damn thing a right angle and it would all be so much better! It would stick out a fraction of an inch, and go straight back for a couple inches for the strain relief, which would even get some structural help from being right next to the laptop itself.
Why isn’t this done? Please don’t tell me that Apple has a patent on 90 degree bend in a laptop power cable. I mean…they patented a “square with rounded corners” as a phone design, so I wouldn’t put it past them/the US Patent Office…