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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
- wyager 5y agoWhile obviously Jobs’ claim was false, I will say that Apple is the only company I am aware of that manufacturers power supplies which are reliably completely free of perceptible inductor whine. I have very acute high-frequency hearing and I often have to replace non-Apple USB(-C) switching power supplies with Apple ones so I don’t go crazy from the whining. Teardowns of Apple PSUs typically reveal very favorable electronic and industrial design as well.
- bayindirh 5y agoMy old MacBook Pro's power brick has perceptible inductor whine. It's not screamingly high, but I can hear it when it's near. Probably my ears' sensitivity, and that little thing's age (~13 years) are both contributing factors.
- errantspark 5y agoDon't worry, that problem will solve itself with time. Just let the lowpass in your ears grow a bit. ;) I will say I have been very impressed with Anker's GaN power bricks of late.
- Tade0 5y agoI have one(60W) but its output isn't very smooth. Still great to have just one small device to charge my phone, laptop and headphones.
- Syonyk 5y ago> I have very acute high-frequency hearing... Doesn't take "acute," just takes "not destroyed." I've, at various points in my career, grumbled about various things whining audibly (one particular motion light sensor was defective and right outside my office for a while). The trick to getting other people to believe you ("I can't hear anything... are you sure?") is to wait for a bring-your-kids-to-work day. And ask if they can hear it. Or, perhaps, if it's bad enough, you don't even have to do that, because the kids will ask what that horrid whining noise is. We did eventually get it fixed after that, but I was quite literally the only one in the hall who could hear it. On the topic of power supplies, though - Apple has done some impressive work in their small power supplies. The Chinesium clones are similarly sized, they just skip literally every safety feature intended to keep mains voltage out of your USB cord...
- bayindirh 5y ago> On the topic of power supplies, though - Apple has done some impressive work in their small power supplies. And a nice teardown is done here, by the same guy: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr... > Doesn't take "acute," just takes "not destroyed." It depends. Played in an orchestra, and I've found out that hearing is very different from person to person. Seen people with hearing lower than 20Hz band, or people who can hear a wrong note in a symphony orchestra recording, or people who can perfectly tune their instruments by ear... The list goes on and on. Our ears' equalizers are not always flat and equal. We can damage them yes, but not everyone starts from the same point.
- Maursault 5y ago> Seen people with hearing lower than 20Hz band This is called subsonic hearing, and it is not any blessing. Those who can hear frequencies lower than most often experience pain. It's the low frequencies coming from diesel school busses that are most painful to me, when no one else nearby can even hear the bus at all until it gets close enough. What the GGP is talking about is supersonic hearing, which often also includes that extra detail of pain.
- foobarian 5y agoGotta hand it to the kids. My 9 year old claims he can hear a whine from iPads and iPhones when their battery level is near 0%. And I thought I had good hearing...
- pram 5y agoOh I believe it, when I was young I could tell if CRTs were powered on (even if the screen was black) just due to their whine.
- krono 5y agoThis is so off-topic, but no one ever believes me when I'm complaining about a wall adapter across the room driving me mad. Glad to know I'm really not imagining things hah!
- zsmi 5y agoYou're not imagining it at all. This is an important consideration all electrical engineers should take seriously when designing products for people. It's a shame many don't. https://product.tdk.com/en/techlibrary/solutionguide/acoustic-noise.html https://product.tdk.com/en/techlibrary/solutionguide/acousti... https://www.edn.com/reducing-mlccs-piezoelectric-effects-and-audible-noise/ https://www.edn.com/reducing-mlccs-piezoelectric-effects-and...
- dendrite9 5y agoIt can be an issue even if you think you understand it at the design stage. I've sold services to identify sources so boards or assemblies can be redesigned. In one case two different clocks for two ICs on different boards interfered with each other causing problematic noise. Filtering the power supplies helped, but changing how one IC was used made the single biggest contribution to reducing the noise levels.
- krrrh 5y agoIt’s extremely frustrating, and I was always surprised when I returned mid-range USB chargers because of whine only to receive a replacement with the same problem and hundreds of reviews that failed to mention it. I’ve never had an issue with Apple chargers, and the extra cost is money we’ll spent. Buy genuine Apple chargers, if not for you, then for your dog.
- westurner 5y agoAll brands should put USB-A and USB-C ports on the power brick.
- fsckboy 5y ago> Apple is the only company I am aware of that manufacturers power supplies which are reliably completely free of perceptible inductor whine...I often have to replace non-Apple USB(-C) switching power supplies it's a well-studied economic fact that monopolists generally sell higher quality products, and it helps them maintain their monopoly. With their market power and the fat margins they earn, there is plenty of budget to do R&D and have achieve scale benefits. Their optimum-profit product-mix and pricepoints are skewed higher. Nobody complained about IBM mainframe quality, nor Bell Telephone quality. So, it's not testimony to Apple's prowess, it's simply a cookbook outgrowth of their product differentiation strategy.
- socialdemocrat 5y agoBut regardless of reason it still matters to the buyer. If Apple monopoly is giving me better products, then I am not complaining.
- fsckboy 5y agopeople who set policy need to think of all consumers, not just the rich ones such as yourself. More working class people could buy iPhones if they were not artificially high priced. You too would benefit from a competitive iPhone market, there would have been an earlier introduction of large screens, cheaper memory options, perhaps getting choices that included repairability, replaceable batteries, microSD cards, etc. Think of it this way: if Apple was broken into three Apples that compete with each other, the shareholders would not have lost anything that they are entitled to: they'd each still own what they owned before a share of each of the new companies instead of a share in the old. But previously monopoly prices would drop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- justin66 5y ago> Nobody complained about IBM mainframe quality Well, that's completely ahistorical. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was due to conservatism and idiocy on the part of managers and businesspeople, not to mention... you know... IBM's monopoly power and the advantages that went along with that. During the bulk of the minicomputer and mainframe era it had little or nothing to do with the relative quality of IBM's stuff.
- kcb 5y agoMy Macbook Power Supply whines like crazy, especially when under load. The one thing that drives me crazy that I rarely see talked about is PWM fan control. I think different manufactures use different frequencies but it's usually far more annoying than the motor/air movement noise.
- vmception 5y agoI'm guessing this article is from 2011, back when Apple fans were just ending their role as being a niche that believed anything. At this point it is - I think - a pretty common assumption that Apple just puts things together in a decent ecosystem. If Apple devices offers a new frequency range, its because Qualcomm's radio allowed for it, which was dependent on other things further in the stream. This is an interesting trip down memory lane. Apple still says magical sometimes in their keynotes, but nobody is really mystified only occasionally glad they decided to offer something in that way, since its more about the Apple implementation than the Apple innovation.
- gumby 5y agoNot an Apple fanboy but I don’t this is completely correct. As a huge buyer of semiconductors they can, when they want to, exert a lot of pressure on suppliers. Famously they did this with Gorilla glass; they have done so with Intel and qcomm. Sometimes not so successfully (all the expense on the “liquid metal” company, for example). It’s not all sheer pressure; they do a lot of collaborative design. After all they have one of the best semiconductor design teams (both digital and analog) around. And they are on standards bodies; they allegedly (some non-Apple people told me) contributed contributed significantly to USB-C. I emphasized completely because in the modern ecosystem it’s broadly true (RAM, displays etc)
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoApple’s supply chains and how they can apply pressure is massively underrated. People still have this idea that “so and so actually invented it”. Or “Apple just combined X and Y”. But they fail to see how truck loads of money and a customer willing to pay for something and making large pre-payments can change the trajectory of a company. Or even has impact on other players.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoI don't like Apple generally. And it wasn't "their" technology - but thank fuck they brought "better than 1080p" screens to the mainstream. Throughout the 90's screen resolutions were getting better and better. Then LCDs came and 1080p stopped mainstream screen resolution improvements for at least 5 years. Thankfully Apple got the screen resolution race going again.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 5y agoInteresting deep dive on switching power supplies. I didn't see the need to frame it by attacking Apple.
- retrac 5y agoAt the time, "Apple invented the switching power supply" was a notion going around in bad tech/sci reporting circles, so it deserved dismantling along with the power supplies.
- fortran77 5y agoIt's only right to clear up a falsehood promoted by Steve Jobs himself. He's not above scrutiny.
- amelius 5y agoFake it till you make it.
- fortran77 5y agoWell, he’s dead and I’m still here. I don’t think he made it.
- type0 5y agoMaybe he would still be alive if he didn't try to fake his cancer treatments https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medicine-extend-abbreviate-steve-jobs-life/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medic...
- perl4ever 5y agoYou don't have to like Jobs, I never did when he was alive, but shitting on him (as is now a cliche) for his choices of treatment is an awful reason. The peanut gallery is not to be trusted on how curable his cancer was, and this article says nothing firm about anything. If someone chooses not to be tortured for their last weeks of life, in order to have those weeks, that doesn't make them unscientific or suicidal.
- amelius 5y agoAnother article in IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-half-century-ago-better-transistors-and-switching-regulators-revolutionized-the-design-of-computer-power-supplies https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-half-century-ago-better-transist... > A half century ago, better transistors and switching regulators revolutionized the design of computer power supplies > Apple, for one, benefited, though it didn’t spark this revolution, as Steve Jobs claimed
- kens 5y agoThat's the same blog post, rewritten for IEEE Spectrum.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nahuel0x 5y agowell, in some sense Apple didn't invent personal computing, MOS 6502 did.
- kens 5y agoI'm not looking to argue over the meaning of "invent" or "personal computing", but I'll point out that Alan Kay wrote a 1972 paper "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" that pretty much describes the modern laptop or tablet. (He even mentions ad blockers!) Xerox PARC went on to implement a lot of this in the Xerox Alto. It's worth taking a look at the paper to see how many "modern" ideas were described in 1972: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf
- nahuel0x 5y agoTrue, I should have used "massify" instead of "invent".
- comeonseriously 5y agoIt still baffles my mind that Xerox is not a multi-trillion dollar company today.
- bell-cot 5y agoSadly, no business opportunity can be so idiot-proof that management can't prove themselves to be better idiots.
- perl4ever 5y agoWhat would you have done differently than Xerox management? Probably you, and most people on HN haven't been paying attention to them in a long time, but what happened in the last 15 years or so, is that they decided to diversify out from copiers into services. It sounds vaguely plausible, people obviously deal with documents mostly on computers and not paper these days, so why can't they help with that? Eventually they acquired a fairly big, but not a household name, outsourcing company called ACS. I used to wonder why Google couldn't do the same stuff, but they did in fact outsource, probably because it was the data processing equivalent of cleaning toilets. But then a notorious corporate raider, aka Carl Icahn, came in and forced management to break up the company in the name of shareholder value, isolating the copiers in one business, and the document services in another, basically ACS under a new name. Who's right? Diversify or get back to basics? It seems sometimes it's just random. You can come up with platitudes justifying either. This may kind of seem like normal corporate America, but it just seems a bit uncharitable to call the CEO an idiot when you look at how the people running GameStop or whatever have had things a bit easier with billions being thrown at them.
- EastOfTruth 5y agoI never heard that Apple invented switching power supplies... how common is that train of thought? I've been using them since way before this article was written
- FPGAhacker 5y agoThe article is neither making or debunking that claim. It is debunking the claim that apple revolutionized computer power supplies by borrowing the switching power supply design used in oscilloscopes. It’s the second sentence of the post.
- Angostura 5y agoI've never heard the claim that apple revolutionized computer power supplies. I've heard the claim they make decent ones.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoJobs made the claim in his biography. Read the article or the book.
- booi 5y agoTo be fair, he (and many other people) consider significant quality and design improvements as “revolutionary”. I tend to agree especially when the entire industry makes garbage. For example the touchpad. It’s still one of the top reasons not to switch to anything else for me. Nothing else comes close to being as accurate and natural.
- kragen 5y agoAs the article explained, the Apple ][ SMPS didn't have significant quality or design improvements. It did have some novel design features, but they weren't good enough to be widely adopted by others, and Apple eventually dropped them too.
- FpUser 5y agoSame story as with hard drive based audio players. I've been using one (if I remember correctly) from Creative long before iPod materialized. All was quiet but suddenly as iPod came it was of course called revolution.
- socialdemocrat 5y agoSeriously, those MP3 players were nothing like the iPod. This is a bit like people going on about smart phones before iPhone. I had a couple of those and the iPhone was just so far ahead, that we are not really talking about the same category of products. A product isn’t merely checking some boxes. Checking the “has hard drive” box doesn’t make any it an iPod.
- pram 5y agoArchos Jukebox was acceptable design back then. Just Google it, provides enough context about the state of portable music players in the year 2000 lol
- keyringlight 5y agoIn the context of the time, those mp3 players were following in the footsteps of portable CD players or walkmen, which were themselves bulky and about 70-90 minutes of music before changing media. There were also a few low capacity compact flash based players borrowing media from the growing digital camera market, and later on some CD players that would play yellow book CDs with mp3 files Having many gigabytes of audio was a big step.
- FpUser 5y ago>"A product isn’t merely checking some boxes." The first "box" I used to check when buying things like that is that PC sees it as a hard drive to which I can copy files. That horror they called iTunes would not be let anywhere close to my computers.
- democracy 5y agoYeah I also didn't know that "hard drive based audio players" was a thing :) But I remember that ipod was awesome (comparing with the other players with shitty controls and sticky buttons). I hated apple products at the time (religion) but I was amazed by the quality and UI of ipod and the quality of ipad (took me and my kids many attempts and years to actually kill it). I don't think any other product amazed me that much since then.
- hedgehog 5y agoI know someone who was an exec at Astec in the 90s and Apple was notable for being willing to pay a premium for their power supplies (I think for better efficiency and miniaturization).
- ForOldHack 5y agoThen... how did they wind up with such utter garbage? The Astec in the Mac IIcx/ci was prone to failures. The power supply in the mirror door Mac.
- hedgehog 5y agoI don't remember any notable problems but Apple has a long history of doing interesting things for form factor rather than prioritizing reliability going at least as far back as the 128k.
- tim333 5y agoAnd now power supplies are getting another step smaller and more efficient by switching from silicon transistors to GaN. (https://www.cui.com/blog/how-gallium-nitride-gan-enables-smaller-more-efficient-power-supplies https://www.cui.com/blog/how-gallium-nitride-gan-enables-sma...)
- alexose 5y agoI've been using a GaN-based power supply for my MacBook Pro and it's just as good as advertised. Slightly bigger than a deck of cards, yet it runs cooler than the stock unit. Hopefully this tech finds its way into more devices as it gets cheaper. It would be neat to have GaN based inverters for electric cars.
- nimish 5y agoTesla use silicon carbide which has favorable temp and reliability over Gan for higher voltage operation.
- R0b0t1 5y agoFor highest end stuff you use both. They have different properties. SiC matters for reverse recovery of the inverter.
- phasetransition 5y agoIs there some sort of third quadrant effect, like might be seen for a triac?
- codeisawesome 5y agoI thought this was a new "ML powered" charger of some type until I googled... interesting find.
- KarlKemp 5y agoThose are NaN chargers.
- dang 5y agoPast threads: Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575994 - Oct 2013 (63 comments) Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047 - Feb 2012 (73 comments)
- ForOldHack 5y agoApple did revolutionize power supplies, but not in the way that is claimed: They made it a marketing stratjey to ship utter garbage, like the Appple III, and the "Hindenbook" along with the most inexpensive, cost cutting, garbage known in the industry, until Dell and eMachines decided to use the same model: Just look up "Apple PowerSupply Recall" and you will see they are just repeating their cost saving success/failure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- esturk 5y agoDoes anyone know of a hack or instructions that can convert a magsafe charger for old macbooks into a USB-C charger for new macbooks?
- wtallis 5y agoI doubt that the old MagSafe chargers are capable of outputting the variety of voltages necessary to be usefully compliant with USB-C charging. IIRC, the old MagSafe chargers put a fairly small voltage on their output pins, and when a load was detected they turned on the full voltage and power—but there was no real data communication between the computer and the brick (just between the computer and the connector at the end of the charging cable). USB-PD however is a complicated protocol.
- intsunny 5y agoThere are "magsafe to usb c" dongles on Amazon and other retailers. The run a little hot, but seem to work pretty well.
- karlkloss 5y agoIn fact, switching power supplies were used long before the transistor, they were using mechanical switches. Car radios used mechanical switches to generate the anode voltage for the tubes, and in trains there were voltage converters using a rotating stream of liquid mercury.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoAny suggestions on a good Macbook pro charger? I try to find a GaN-based one, with all the necessary certifications, but my search hasn't been successful so far. e.g. [0] [0]: https://www.monoprice.com/Search?keyword=APPLE%20MACBOOK%20POWER%20ADAPTER https://www.monoprice.com/Search?keyword=APPLE%20MACBOOK%20P...
- alan-kay 5y agoThis is an old original post, but it still worries me. Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply To find this requires a combination of a few keystrokes and button pushes plus an "outlook" (rather than "inlook") attitude. Instead, as with so many discussions in a so-called "CS" community, we find something like adolescents trying to BS each other by presenting their mere opinions as facts. Come on! Please! Long ago my research community put in a lot of work to make it easy to deal with many simple questions, but we didn't reckon with the sheer inwardness of so many end-users. A similar problem is that most people in CS have no idea what Doug Engelbart really did, yet just typing his name into Google will provide great info in just the first few hits. How can the current community repair itself and start trying to become a real field again?
- foxhill 5y agoit is the paradox of the information era: society has never had such easy and immediate access to the limits of human knowledge, and at the same time, society can’t agree on whether the earth is spherical, vaccines work, or if demonstrably corrupt politicians are really that bad.
- WalterBright 5y agoI didn't realize it, but my '72 Dodge has a switching power supply to convert the 12 volt system voltage to 5V for the dashboard instruments. It's a very simple device, relying on current heating a wire to bend it to and from a contact, but it's an engineering marvel of low cost effectiveness. But it doesn't produce "clean" 5V, there's a jitter to it. Some electronics guys have replaced it with modern circuitry (an op-amp I think) but it turned out there was a problem with clean 5V. The jitter would unstick the the analog dials, so they'd display accurately. The clean 5V didn't do that. So, they had to add more circuitry to add jitter in the supply voltage.
- dotancohen 5y agoI had no idea how these work, nor about the jitter, thanks. It's now over $60 [1], these used to cost about a dollar! [1] https://www.moparshop.com/en/Online-Store/Ignition-Electrical/1833/Voltage-Regulator-Instrument-Cluster-5Volt https://www.moparshop.com/en/Online-Store/Ignition-Electrica...
- WalterBright 5y agoThe price rise may be because nobody makes them anymore.
- ladyattis 5y agoIf only they'd invest more work into CMC and LC filters for such power supplies in wall warts. As someone who listens to shortwave and AM radio DX it's sometimes impossible to pick up even strong stations due to the swampy noise of SMPS devices.
- musicale 5y agoWhenever Apple is discussed, there often seems to be a conflation of invention (coming up with something new) with innovation (applying an invention in a way that changes things.) Apple didn't invent the personal computer, or the GUI, or Wi-Fi, or MP3 players, or smartphones, or app stores, or tablets, or smartwatches, or ARM processors – but they introduced innovative, and indeed transformative, products in those categories.