I once saw someone find a seemingly lost thumb drive on a table and look around, then pick it up and pocket it. A few minutes later there was a lot of commotion in the other room about twenty feet away. The guy had plugged it into a laptop, which was now billowing grey smoke out of the side vent port. I surmised it was a USB killer.
Older laptops sometimes had very poor USB implementations that could die if they were shorted out, especially if the short was between 5V and the data pins (which are 3.3V maximum).
I think the spec says that all pins should be 5V tolerant and the supply limited to 500mA, but of course back in the USB 2.0 era a lot of crappy hardware didn't bother. I've seen machines that had no current limit on the 5V line at all, so a short would dump a few amps into the controller chip.
My boss had the opposite experience. He was into weird ergonomic keyboards (the company was a bit related to text entry, so it was both personal and professional interest), so he had some interesting ~$200 devices, IIRC his favourite one did not have any labels on the keys, so you HAD to touch type. He was also a big Apple fan and had bought the new Mac Mini of the time (~10 years ago). One day, his fancy keyboard stopped working. He tried another fancy keyboard, nothing, then a third and a fourth, which was all he had there. That's when he involved other people, we tried the keyboards on a windows machine and they were dead. Obviously the USB was killing them, which was quite unusual for a 6-month old Mac Mini, and he was out of luck I guess about the expensive keyboards. He went to the Apple store (NYC), they told him they would replace the board and he would have it in 2 weeks. In two weeks he went back and they told him they had invalidated the warranty because they found "dust inside". This was a new Mac from a non-smoking, no cat etc office, where we've been using computers for years. They told him they were willing to get him 10% off a new device. So he just buys a new MacBook Pro. He comes back and tells me what happened, my jaw drops as I try to explain it's impossible for them to invalidate the warranty for dust - especially when they are the ones deciding whether to install dust filters or not, which is why it's not in their TOS, but he tells me the Apple genius said so, so that's how it must be. The next day I see him with a new Apple Cinema display, I ask him what happened to his 6 month old nice Dell monitor? Apparently the new Mac could not connect to it (I've forgotten why, but it was some matter of dual link dvi or something?), so he went to the Apple store and they told him it won't work with that monitor, he had to buy a Cinema Display.... So, yeah, I call it the "capitalist USB". Cost lots of money, made some great sales for Apple.
I'm pretty sure the Mac Mini of that time used Mini Displayport. Easy to adapt to HDMI or DVI. Not quite sure, but the $5 adapter was probably for sale for $50 right there in the Apple store.
He was connecting his Mac Mini to a DELL monitor and when he switched to a Macbook he could no longer do that with the adaptors he had, so he went into the Apple store and instead of getting him an adaptor, they told him it doesn't work with that monitor and he should get an Apple Cinema display instead. I didn't really look into it as he just told me after the fact, but I think it had something to do with it needing a non standard/active adaptor or something? I think the DELL was a 32" dual DVI, too long ag
I had a Mac Mini, and I can confirm that it didn't work with any of the four DVI-D monitors I had. The problem was that Apple didn't clock the video port to the right spec, and you needed a 3rd-pary under-clocking utility to get it to work with non-Apple monitors. I only used it for testing Java compatibility on the Mac (which was awful), so for as long as I used the machine, I just used a VGA adapter and ran it off an old CRT. The power cord wouldn't stay in, either, because there was no friction or tab
I had a similar experience with a USB drive, but this one came from the most reputable of places. I got a free USB drive from the Free Software Foundation after getting a membership. It came with some cool GNU stickers. I think the thumb drive was supposed to have a bootable GNU*Linux distro or something on it.
I got the drive and decided to plug it into my brand new work laptop, a 17" Macbook Pro with all the bells and whistles. Well, as soon as I plugged it in the screen went black and something didn't sme
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become better people as a result of practicing it.
- Joe Mullally, computer salesman
USB Killer (Score:3)
Re:USB Killer (Score:4, Interesting)
Older laptops sometimes had very poor USB implementations that could die if they were shorted out, especially if the short was between 5V and the data pins (which are 3.3V maximum).
I think the spec says that all pins should be 5V tolerant and the supply limited to 500mA, but of course back in the USB 2.0 era a lot of crappy hardware didn't bother. I've seen machines that had no current limit on the 5V line at all, so a short would dump a few amps into the controller chip.
The opposite... (Score:5, Interesting)
My boss had the opposite experience. He was into weird ergonomic keyboards (the company was a bit related to text entry, so it was both personal and professional interest), so he had some interesting ~$200 devices, IIRC his favourite one did not have any labels on the keys, so you HAD to touch type. He was also a big Apple fan and had bought the new Mac Mini of the time (~10 years ago). One day, his fancy keyboard stopped working. He tried another fancy keyboard, nothing, then a third and a fourth, which was all he had there. That's when he involved other people, we tried the keyboards on a windows machine and they were dead. Obviously the USB was killing them, which was quite unusual for a 6-month old Mac Mini, and he was out of luck I guess about the expensive keyboards.
He went to the Apple store (NYC), they told him they would replace the board and he would have it in 2 weeks. In two weeks he went back and they told him they had invalidated the warranty because they found "dust inside". This was a new Mac from a non-smoking, no cat etc office, where we've been using computers for years. They told him they were willing to get him 10% off a new device. So he just buys a new MacBook Pro. He comes back and tells me what happened, my jaw drops as I try to explain it's impossible for them to invalidate the warranty for dust - especially when they are the ones deciding whether to install dust filters or not, which is why it's not in their TOS, but he tells me the Apple genius said so, so that's how it must be. The next day I see him with a new Apple Cinema display, I ask him what happened to his 6 month old nice Dell monitor? Apparently the new Mac could not connect to it (I've forgotten why, but it was some matter of dual link dvi or something?), so he went to the Apple store and they told him it won't work with that monitor, he had to buy a Cinema Display....
So, yeah, I call it the "capitalist USB". Cost lots of money, made some great sales for Apple.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the Mac Mini of that time used Mini Displayport. Easy to adapt to HDMI or DVI. Not quite sure, but the $5 adapter was probably for sale for $50 right there in the Apple store.
Re: (Score:2)
He was connecting his Mac Mini to a DELL monitor and when he switched to a Macbook he could no longer do that with the adaptors he had, so he went into the Apple store and instead of getting him an adaptor, they told him it doesn't work with that monitor and he should get an Apple Cinema display instead.
I didn't really look into it as he just told me after the fact, but I think it had something to do with it needing a non standard/active adaptor or something? I think the DELL was a 32" dual DVI, too long ag
Re: (Score:2)
Apple didn't follow the DVI clocking spec, so adapters didn't work. I had to use an analog VGA adapter to get anything to work with my Mini.
Re: (Score:2)
I had a Mac Mini, and I can confirm that it didn't work with any of the four DVI-D monitors I had. The problem was that Apple didn't clock the video port to the right spec, and you needed a 3rd-pary under-clocking utility to get it to work with non-Apple monitors. I only used it for testing Java compatibility on the Mac (which was awful), so for as long as I used the machine, I just used a VGA adapter and ran it off an old CRT. The power cord wouldn't stay in, either, because there was no friction or tab
Re: (Score:2)
I had a similar experience with a USB drive, but this one came from the most reputable of places. I got a free USB drive from the Free Software Foundation after getting a membership. It came with some cool GNU stickers. I think the thumb drive was supposed to have a bootable GNU*Linux distro or something on it.
I got the drive and decided to plug it into my brand new work laptop, a 17" Macbook Pro with all the bells and whistles. Well, as soon as I plugged it in the screen went black and something didn't sme