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 gonna work correctly.
So what gives? I mean, tons of people carrying their own 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 sized 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 speckiness and 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. But despite the usual corporate greed, it does appear
that the game is changing a little bit, with new 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
garbator. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked 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.