Microsoft's 'Replacement' Surface Pro Charger Cable Is an Off-Brand, and Short (theinquirer.net) 74
Carly Page writes with a story from The Inquirer, where: As part of its Surface Pro charger recall, Microsoft has chosen to replace the sleek, shapely matt[e] plastic original with a cable approximately half the length and ordered from an off-brand manufacturer, in our case China's I-Sheng Electric Wire and Cable Company. Writer Peter Gothard points out a plausible reason for the length, though: "The extraordinarily short length of the cord is presumably to discourage behaviour that resulted in the "tightly wrapped" or "repeatedly bent" cables catching fire in at least 56 separate incidents."
And, it cheaper (Score:2, Insightful)
It's cheaper than providing a high-quality cable which isn't as affected by wrapping, or providing a built in wrapping mechanism, or some other inventive technical fix.
It's not like this is for some super-premium flagship device that they're...oh, whoops.
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It's cheaper than providing a high-quality cable which isn't as affected by wrapping
You mean like Apple does with it's silicone-rubber cables that resist cracking...
or providing a built in wrapping mechanism
You mean like Apple does on many chargers.
Now cue all the people who yank their charger cables out "by the roots" repeatedly, then complain that the cables eventually fail at the junction of the connector and cable.
Everything has a breaking-point; but obviously Microsoft paid absolutely ZERO attention to both the problem, and what's worse, to the supposed "solution".
Re:And, it cheaper (Score:4, Informative)
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and UK has weird 50 cps power at double the sensible voltage. You have to go cheap when you have cheap power to handle.
Your power is 50 Candle-Power/Seconds?
1959 called, and wanted its abbreviation back.
It has been Hertz (Hz) for a LONG, LONG time (since 1960 [wikipedia.org], in fact). At 59 yrs. old, I'm old enough to remember cps; but only as a small kid.
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It seems that which replacement you get largely depends on the outlet type [winbeta.org], which of course depends on your location. Plenty of people are saying their replacement cord looks identical or nearly identical while having different part numbers.
Re:And, it cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
The person who invented the wall wart should be taken out and shot. I can only use two of the six outlets on the power strip. Some are so heavy they fall out of the wall socket. "cable--brick--cable" eliminates that problem. Flexing the cable when you're packing the thing two or three times a day, every day, is going to break it pretty quick, no matter how well it is made.
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Flexing the cable when you're packing the thing two or three times a day, every day, is going to break it pretty quick, no matter how well it is made.
This. And, since the cables in question can be had for $2/dozen, give or take, it makes sense to leave one plugged in wherever you're likely to need it and just unplug it from the charger.
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No, the person who decided to use a "cable-brick-cable" instead should be taken out and shot. First of all, nothing stops you from simply adding an extension cord to the wall wart if necessary, but doing the opposite is not possible. Second, there's no reason the transformer can't be the same size as the outlet in the X and Y directions, and as long or short as it needs to be in the Z direction. Third, if plugs are falling out of your wall sockets, then your wall sockets are worn out and need to be replaced
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Yo dawg! I got a cable for your cable! Only a dollah! Buy three and I guarantee at least two of them will work. Such a deal!
Sorry, I shouldn't have to buy and carry an extra extension cable... The damn charger is already one too many.
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Which is why the apple power supply is perfect. it comes as a wall wart that you can plug in a cable to to make it a cable-brick-cable. It's the best of all worlds.
I really like the 500ma charge port on my surface pro's power brick, it is handy!
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You forgot to include the obligatory "/s". The rubber shielding on Apple's power cables is anything but crack-resistant.
(Not that I'm suggesting Microsoft's choices don't suck, but don't hold up Apple as an example to aspire to in this instance.)
I think the design goal was to look and feel expensive and trendy. How it wears is a different discussion.
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You forgot to include the obligatory "/s". The rubber shielding on Apple's power cables is anything but crack-resistant.
(Not that I'm suggesting Microsoft's choices don't suck, but don't hold up Apple as an example to aspire to in this instance.)
I think the design goal was to look and feel expensive and trendy. How it wears is a different discussion.
No, the Design Goal was to provide increased flexibility over the typical PVC-jacketed cables, under more environmental conditions (particularly cold).
It was likely inspired by the cables on the soldering stations in the engineering labs at Apple. The base-to-pen cable is often silicone rubber-jacketed, and in my personal experience, they are unusually flexible and supple, tend not to kink nor tangle, and stay that way over time. The exact same characteristics that are exhibited by my MacBook Pro's silico
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And yet, every single damn apple cable I have is cracked, but I have very few cracked micro-usb cables. Replacement cables are one of the approaches Apple takes to tax you for refusing to buy a new upgrade every year. To quote Ratchet from Robots "Upgrades, people, upgrades!" Fuck apple and their deliberately flawed proprietary cables.
I only have one cracked Apple cable: An absolutely ancient 30 pin iPod charging/syncing cable that was pretty beat up when I came by it in a box of stuff.
YMMV; but seriously, in my experience, Apple cables are at least as good, if not better, than my other, PVC-jacketed, cables.
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I actually don't know. I've owned Apple desktop machines but never a laptop, (I consider them overpriced, and I hate machines that prevent me from working on them) so don't have experience either way. Attempting to make a joke on Apple's expense, and apparently it wasn't funny enough.
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When something sets the trend, how is it trendy?
If they set the previous trend, is it not trendy when they follow it? If they set a standard that has characteristics considered trendy, is that not trendy?
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This is why we have sugru! [sugru.com]
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I've had the charging cable for my Macbook Pro replaced twice by Apple because it frays and fails.
Not sure if you were intending to be sarcastic when you said it resisted cracking.
Luckily, Apple replaced them both times without charge. I was particularly disappointed in how quickly the first replacement failed.
They only "fray" if the jacket is pulled out of the connector-body.
The jacket only gets pulled out of the connector-body if you yank the cable out like a weed, or if you repeatedly twist the connector instead of figuring out which way it "wants" to plug in.
Unfortunately, the people that think they keep getting defective cables are the same people that don't realize they are abusing them in the first place. The charging cable for my 2013 MacBook Pro is pristine. That's because I know how to treat cables
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Rubbish.
My cable yellowed and the length of the jacket started to crack and crumble within two years. This had nothing to do with the failure mode you mentioned, and it was not uncommon in my Ph.D. program, where MacBooks were used heavily for statistical analysis and other number crunching. I suspect that the heat of actually being used for long periods of intensive computing was enough to degrade the cable jacket. This is a failure, and probably a calculated trade-off based on the (arguably reasonable) as
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... probably a calculated trade-off based on the (arguably reasonable) assumption that most Apple users don't actually do real computing.>
See? There you go again. Macs, like in your experience, are actually quite often used in very compute-intensive applications.
Apple replaced them quietly, except for mine because I was too lazy and didn't bring it in until the cable shielding was frayed. This set off the (totally arbitrary) biases of the Genius Bar, and they refused to replace it.
So, you admit that you let the damage go on to the point that it probably crossed a "go/no-go" warranty replacement threshold (which you simply assumed was "arbitrary"). Every company that does this sort of "depot replacement" type of service trains their personnel on what the company considers "normal wear and tear", and what is considered "customer negligence". IMHO, you simply cro
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resist cracking?
look, do you know why there exists an entire product category of plastic connector protectors? BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE iphone 4/5/6 cable breaks at the stem in a year of normal use!
(seriously, apples cables are just as bad as any other, nokia used to make decent microusb cables but then they started ordering from the same places everyone else does and it's apple style copy shit)
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resist cracking?
look, do you know why there exists an entire product category of plastic connector protectors? BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE iphone 4/5/6 cable breaks at the stem in a year of normal use!
(seriously, apples cables are just as bad as any other, nokia used to make decent microusb cables but then they started ordering from the same places everyone else does and it's apple style copy shit)
EVERY SINGLE ONE?!?
Tell that to my pristine 4 year old iPhone 4s Cable, and my pristine 1.25 year old iPhone 6+ Cable.
Sorry. You're full of shit, and obviously don't know how to not abuse a cable. Note that you have had problems with other cables, too. So perhaps it is time to place the blame where it REALLY lies: You.
No one can make an abuse-proof cable. Ask the people of Western Electric, who tried their level best for DECADES to make pay telephone handset cables that vandals couldn't destroy. How m
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TFA is bullshit anyway. This cable is probably fine, they are just snobs about things with Chinese names on them. The original was probably made in China too, it's just got different branding on it.
There are issues, like the length, but complaining that it's a Chinese "off-brand" (meaning not American) is just racist.
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There are issues, like the length, but complaining that it's a Chinese "off-brand" (meaning not American) is just racist.
That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?
I mean, I generally love generally high quality and extremely low cost made in China stuff, but the fact of the matter is there is there is some really crappy, off-brand Chinese made stuff, like the dual port 2.1A USB car adapters I bought that are undersized by several mm and won't make contact well enough to even work.
How exactly does it disparage the race of the makers if I describe it as off-brand Chinese parts? It indicates where it came from and that it is not even a
Picture is misleading, so is affected system desc (Score:3, Interesting)
For the few of you that actually bothered to click on the article link, the picture shows some kind of really short cord with a plug at the end...
I don't know what the hell that is but it cannot be the cord the article is about, because the cord MS is sending is just the cord that goes between the power brick and Surface Pro, so it doesn't have a plug.
Also worth noting that the article summary might lad you to believe this was about the current Surface Pro, but it's not - Surface Pro 3 and older. Even then it does not apply to a Surface Pro 3 you'd buy new from Microsoft now, they ship with fixed cables already. It doesn't affect the Surface Pro 4 at all.
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For the few of you that actually bothered to click on the article link, the picture shows some kind of really short cord with a plug at the end...
I don't know what the hell that is but it cannot be the cord the article is about, because the cord MS is sending is just the cord that goes between the power brick and Surface Pro, so it doesn't have a plug.
Also worth noting that the article summary might lad you to believe this was about the current Surface Pro, but it's not - Surface Pro 3 and older. Even then it does not apply to a Surface Pro 3 you'd buy new from Microsoft now, they ship with fixed cables already. It doesn't affect the Surface Pro 4 at all.
?? the cord that goes from the Sp3 to the brick is permanently attached. That can only be replaced by swapping out the brick itself. The *other* cord is the one being replaced, as shown in the pic.
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Intersting, that goes against what the article was saying and what other link I read said.
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Your article also goes against what has been common use for a decade-plus.
Every portable computer I've had comes with wall-cord-brick-cord-portable device charging scheme. Desktops still follow this convention once you decouple the idea of internal vs external.
Only my phones have wallwart-cord-device charging.
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Only my phones have wallwart-cord-device charging.
Sorry, wrong!
Although this 65W Apple Wall-wart charger [jumia.co.ke] (yes, that's an ad for a generic rip-off, but it has the best pictures) for my 2013 MacBook Pro comes with a cable that snaps in, in place of the built-in plug (which also has retractable "blades"), it does indeed function in "Wall-wart" configuration, too.
And yes, it's nice to have the flexibility. At home, I can just plug it into the power strip on my desk, but sometimes it is nice to have the extra 6 ft. of cord that the AC cable provides. Yes, I
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"Sorry, wrong!"
Apparently your dumb ass forgot to read the *MY* part.
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"Sorry, wrong!"
Apparently your dumb ass forgot to read the *MY* part.
No I didn't. But apparently YOUR dumb ass forgot to parse the sentence correctly. The subject of your sentence was "phones", not "my". Meaning that only "phones" had Wall-wart chargers.
I was saying that my LAPTOP had a Wall-wart charger.
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Interesting, SuperKendall spouted off about some shit he knew nothing about and got caught, yet again.
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> I don't know what the hell that is but it cannot be the cord the article is about, because the cord MS is sending is just the cord that goes between the power brick and Surface Pro, so it doesn't have a plug.
Probably a stock photo. I bet if we use Google Images to search for it, we'd find it in some stock collection.
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When I got my recall notice (via Amazon, where I bought it), my first thought was "good thing I don't keep mine plugged in all the time" (it sees very light usage, and the battery holds up nicely for weeks on end while powered down)
Then I clicked on the actual notice and was puzzled for a bit. The charger pictured in the notice didn't look anything like the one that came with my Surface. Mine was a compact wall wart with folding prongs. More searching led me to a listing for a Surface 24 [amazon.com]
Cables aren't made for bending and wrapping! (Score:5, Funny)
It'd be nice if customers would figure this out. They're supposed to be kept flat and straight, or left in the packaging they shipped in. jeez.
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For uninformed, article title is disingenuous (Score:5, Interesting)
The AC cable for the Surface Pro series is two pieces like most laptop cables. There's a simple AC cable without ground that goes from the wall to the transformer block, and then the transformer has a fixed DC wire that goes to the tablet itself.
This recall *only* affected the AC cable, and that cable was already pretty short (like two feet tops). The bulk of the cable length comes from the DC cable itself, and that did not shorten (because it wasn't replaced). Don't get me wrong, the DC cable has issues and needs a reinforced boot, but we're talking of a total cable length loss of maybe six inches.
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I just received 15 of them.
The new ones are exactly the same length as the cable they replaced.
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"There's a simple AC cable without ground"
In many, if not most USA electrical panels, neutral and ground are tied together at the bus. A separate ground is run (or tied to pre-existing metal plumbing going into earth) for the third prong. Even without the third prong, the general protection remains the same.
Still the same effect. This is essentially irrelevant unless some idiot wired hot/neutral backwards, and even then, the additional ground won't help much.
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Yeah, I'm not an electrical guy, I should've just said "two prong", heh.
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The ground line gives you a true ground, isolated from any shit that bad devices (or bad utility power) might shit out onto the neutral line, making it NOT a neutral line. And anyone who's ever dealt with audio equipment knows what hell it can be when you can't get a real ground. Do you like audible 60 Hz sine waves? Because improperly grounding shit is how you get them.
There are plenty of reasons we added the third prong, and it's not because Khyber is smarter than the dumb scientists, engineers, and el
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"making it NOT a neutral line."
Until some dumbass (Like I've seen in Texas) puts tied neutral/grounds too close to separated grounds, and wet ground conditions cause problems when lighting hits.
But hey, I've actually bothered with having to install full-building electrical systems. You keep talking.
Not the same in my case (Score:1)
Not sure if it is because I'm in the US, but my replacement cable for my Surface Pro 3 is pretty much identical to my original cable, same looks and the same length.
http://i.imgur.com/SWYoudk.jpg
Actual Image (Score:2)
This [xboxlive.com] is the actual image of the cord being replaced by Microsoft.
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Hmmm ... (Score:2)
Hmmm ... You're holding it wrong?
Sorry, but people wind cables, it's a use case. This sounds like a bit of bullshit to me.
There must be peace in the middle east... (Score:2)
Seriously, this is what is considered news around here? A company sends out a free replacement power cord that prevents fires, and people bitch about the fact that it isn't four miles long and encrusted with diamonds? I got mine, swapped it, thought "one less thing to burn my house down" and moved on with life. I urge you all to do the same.
At least they didn't link to Forbes again, so they've got that going for them, which is nice.
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So go wail about mid-east in a forum dedicated to it. This is /. where the subject is on topic and you are not.
Errr short? (Score:2)
My replacement cable is the same length as the original. I ordered a European replacement for an Australian original.
My partner's replacement cable is also the same length as the original. She ordered an Australian replacement for an Australian original. That was we have both basis covered.
I don't give a crap what brand the cable is. It looks fine, well built, has stress relief in the proper places, and if it doesn't burn my house down then that's a bonus. It also comes with proper markings, certifications
A better question is (Score:3)
What exactly is an on-brand power to converter cable manufacturer?
Short cables suck (Score:2)
Which brings up the question, Why are all crockpot po