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if you've ever lost your phone charger you know that while it can be annoying

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it's typically not the end of the world as you can always pop down to the store

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grab any cheapo hanging on the rack and it'll do an adequate job of charging

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your phone's battery but if you've ever lost your laptop charger you know that

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that's an entirely different story replacement laptop chargers not only

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tend to be more expensive but it's also a lot harder to find one that's going to

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work correctly so what gives i mean tons of people carry around laptops so why

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haven't chargers been standardized in the same way one big reason is that

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laptops have very different power requirements between them although this

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is true to phones to an extent the difference is a lot more pronounced

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with laptops you see phones have different size batteries and different

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rates of power consumption but at the end of the day they're nearly all built

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with battery efficiency in mind as

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they're going to be used without being plugged into an outlet the overwhelming

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majority of the time and even a relatively power hungry phone like a big

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gaming rog phone isn't going to draw a massive amount of current from the wall

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when it is plugged in but this is not the case with laptops if you look at the

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variety of laptops on the market you'll find lightweight models built with power

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sipping processors designed for portability that might only require a 40

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watt or so charger however you can also buy a beefy gaming laptop that can't

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even get an hour of battery life under load and needs two power bricks that

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push a total of almost 500 watts so you can see right away they have different

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power needs and in either case it's significantly more power than the vast

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majority of phones would draw from an outlet this also means that laptop

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manufacturers want to have more control over exactly what charger their

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customers are using if you buy a third-party replacement charger for your

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phone the worst that would happen is probably that your phone charges more

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slowly that is as long as the charger is built to spec and isn't a piece of junk

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that's going to start a fire however an underpowered laptop charger

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could become easily overloaded meaning that your components could throttle and

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hurt your performance or start to drain your battery defeating the point of even

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having a charger in the first place so it's not surprising that one company's

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chargers usually don't work in another company's laptops and oftentimes they

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won't even fit as the laptop maker's lack of incentive to standardize

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chargers means that the actual connectors or tips that plug into the

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system can vary greatly and of course it doesn't help consumers that

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manufacturers can make a healthy profit selling their own replacement chargers

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as there often isn't an easily accessible replacement from a third

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party that functions correctly so

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but despite the usual corporate greed it does appear that the game is changing

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a little bit with newer revisions of usb being able to deliver larger amounts of

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power typically through a usb-c port we

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may see a bit more standardization in the future

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at least in the laptop connector if not in the bricks themselves and you can

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also make the argument that certain proprietary technologies manufacturers

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push are actually helpful such as apple's magsafe connector which allows

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the charging cord to stick to your laptop magnetically so if it gets yanked

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out the chances anything will get damaged are far lower than they would be

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with many other laptop connectors so given all this my advice to you is to

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hold on to your laptop charger the good news is those power bricks although

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bulky are a little easier to keep track of than tiny phone chargers

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or airpods i think one of mine went down the

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carburetor big thanks to today's sponsor brilliant

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this video hit thumbs up get subscribed and be sure to hit us up in the comment

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section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future