While trying to clean up some office wiring I grabbed a new spare 4-port Gigabit hub and discovered that it was missing its dongle power brick. That’s not the first time I’ve received an electronic device missing its power supply and figured I might be able to find one as it needs 5v and 0.6A. So I went and dug into my stash of old dongles. Alas I had tons of 5v bricks, but none with the right tip.
In the process of digging it really struck me what a waste the It industry is with regard to power supplies and lack of standards thereof. Yes today we’ve somewhat settled on micro-USB and USB-C, but the photo of my stash shows how bad it’s been over the years and we are only starting to make a dent in that standardization. Although Apple has a point re: government over stepping, I applaud the EU’s recent mandate around standardizing on USB-C; thus, eliminating metric tons of future waste not to mention the consumer frustration and cost associated with constantly paying for new dongles and power supplies.
