if you've ever lost your phone charger you know that while it can be annoying
it's typically not the end of the world as you can always pop down to the store
grab any cheapo hanging on the rack and it'll do an adequate job of charging
your phone's battery but if you've ever lost your laptop charger you know that
that's an entirely different story replacement laptop chargers not only
tend to be more expensive but it's also a lot harder to find one that's going to
work correctly so what gives i mean tons of people carry around laptops so why
haven't chargers been standardized in the same way one big reason is that
laptops have very different power requirements between them although this
is true to phones to an extent the difference is a lot more pronounced
with laptops you see phones have different size batteries and different
rates of power consumption but at the end of the day they're nearly all built
with battery efficiency in mind as
they're going to be used without being plugged into an outlet the overwhelming
majority of the time and even a relatively power hungry phone like a big
gaming rog phone isn't going to draw a massive amount of current from the wall
when it is plugged in but this is not the case with laptops if you look at the
variety of laptops on the market you'll find lightweight models built with power
sipping processors designed for portability that might only require a 40
watt or so charger however you can also buy a beefy gaming laptop that can't
even get an hour of battery life under load and needs two power bricks that
push a total of almost 500 watts so you can see right away they have different
power needs and in either case it's significantly more power than the vast
majority of phones would draw from an outlet this also means that laptop
manufacturers want to have more control over exactly what charger their
customers are using if you buy a third-party replacement charger for your
phone the worst that would happen is probably that your phone charges more
slowly that is as long as the charger is built to spec and isn't a piece of junk
that's going to start a fire however an underpowered laptop charger
could become easily overloaded meaning that your components could throttle and
hurt your performance or start to drain your battery defeating the point of even
having a charger in the first place so it's not surprising that one company's
chargers usually don't work in another company's laptops and oftentimes they
won't even fit as the laptop maker's lack of incentive to standardize
chargers means that the actual connectors or tips that plug into the
system can vary greatly and of course it doesn't help consumers that
manufacturers can make a healthy profit selling their own replacement chargers
as there often isn't an easily accessible replacement from a third
party that functions correctly so
but despite the usual corporate greed it does appear that the game is changing
a little bit with newer revisions of usb being able to deliver larger amounts of
power typically through a usb-c port we
may see a bit more standardization in the future
at least in the laptop connector if not in the bricks themselves and you can
also make the argument that certain proprietary technologies manufacturers
push are actually helpful such as apple's magsafe connector which allows
the charging cord to stick to your laptop magnetically so if it gets yanked
out the chances anything will get damaged are far lower than they would be
with many other laptop connectors so given all this my advice to you is to
hold on to your laptop charger the good news is those power bricks although
bulky are a little easier to keep track of than tiny phone chargers
or airpods i think one of mine went down the
carburetor big thanks to today's sponsor brilliant
if you're a student a professional or just someone who wants to understand the world better check out brilliant the
website that helps you reach your learning goals by working just a little
bit every day brilliant offers interactive explorations and a mobile
app to help you master concepts in math science and computer science the courses
take complex concepts and break them up into bite-sized chunks over time you'll
be amazed at what you can accomplish we suggest checking out their mathematical
fundamentals course which has been redesigned with interactive features to
help you with the foundational concepts behind algebra number theory and logic
which make it a great resource for stem students the first 200 people who head
to brilliant.org techwiki will get 20
off an annual premium subscription so thanks for watching guys if you like
this video hit thumbs up get subscribed and be sure to hit us up in the comment
section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future