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Comment on xkcd #3186: Truly Universal Outlet

We can’t agree which one is best. When Tom Scott proclaimed his home plug to be the best I scoffed. I thought my own home plug is better. But in reality I think they all suck in their own way, every single one of them.

I think a new more research driven approach like the USB-C design would be better, something that protects your fingers, is easier to locate when behind furniture or in the dark, works in more than a single position, is not going to stab you if you leave it on the floor, does not get stuck in the socket, I think it might even be possible to add a fuse without making it larger than a typical phone charger, but to be honest, the smaller the better. One can only dream.

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pelya@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Randall himself already solved this problem

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- 2910000@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  For up to 580W of fun!
  
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tiramichu@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The trouble is of course the huge legacy of all the existing sockets you’d have to replace, never mind the pure unpopularity with the public of switching standards.

Possibly the most successful attempt at convergence so far has been the Europlug, but only because it’s a weird compromise. Did you know the europlug prongs aren’t actually parallel? They angle slightly and have a little flex, so they can be accepted in multiple European countries’ sockets that actually have slightly different dimensions! It’s a cool design, but you wouldn’t intentionally design it that way if you had the opportunity to standardise the world from scratch.

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- SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The Schuko plug/socket are the ones that are both grounded and reversible. And are used in most of Europe.
  
  Oddly Poland, Czechia and Slovakia went with the French standard, which isn’t reversible. But helpfully the CEE 7/7 plug is compatible with both that one and Schuko.
  
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quinkin@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Now there are fifteen standards…

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- Allero@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  There’s always an XKCD for discussing other XKCD’s, isn’t there?
  
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dublet@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

We can’t agree which one is best. When Tom Scott proclaimed his home plug to be the best I scoffed. I thought my own home plug is better.

The UK G type is the only one which is insulated, fused, grounded and polarized by default:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#…

This is great for electrical safety, though it’s a very bulky plug.

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- Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Exactly. It’s best technically but worst for the end user. I am an end user and I would hate to be stuck with that monster of a uniderectional plug. I don’t care that it washes my dishes for me if it doesn’t fit in my bag and kills me in the night when I step on it.
  
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- SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Why the hell would I want the plugs to be polarized? Brits really stockholmed themselves into thinking that being unable to turn the plug around is a good feature. This is fine and dandy by Brits’ standards.
  
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  - dublet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Quite a lot of plugs are polarized, as you would see if you followed the link in my post. This includes plugs in the USA, Canada, Japan, China, Argentina, Switzerland, Denmark.
    
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    SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    What’s that to me? It’s still dumb and inconvenient.
    
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  - Tanoh@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Same country that convinced itself that you should have one hot and one cold tap, and if you want to get proper temperatured water just fill the basin… instead of just combining them like the rest of the civilized world.
    
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    dublet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Mixer taps exist in the UK and are widely used.
    
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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s generally the thing with decisions that don’t matter much. If one option is much better, there is no discussion.

But if the benefits of either option are marginal at best, you get tons of discussion and no decision.

For example, the EU decided almost a decade ago that they would get rid of daylight saving time, and everyone quickly agreed that DST sucks, mostly because changing the clocks sucks.

Since then, the whole EU has been arguing about whether to keep summer time or winter time, even though that matters so little that we have been using both of them for decades. A week after switching DST, nobody even notices the time shift.

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ranzispa@mander.xyz ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Don’t know where all that research driven approach led us… USB-A worked perfectly, nobody ever had a problem with it; except having to turn it around a couple times to figure out how to plug it (which could be solved with a coloured dot on plug and cable). USB-C had the advantage of being a little bit smaller, but it sucks in any other aspect. While I might have broken a couple USB-A cables and plugs in my life, I do not expect an USB-C cable to last much longer than one year.

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- Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Usb-c has already proven itself to be reliable, it was designed to be reversible, it is easy to insert and remove with good tactile feedback and is compact while having lots of versatility. All traits I would love to see in an universal power plug.
  
  To me USB-A was what schuko is today. It works and is mostly fine but I’m sure we could do better if we put our minds to it. The problem with todays plugs and sockets is they all work just about, enough that no one with any authority is going to bother with the topic. Any improvement needs to be by an unrealistically huge margin to be worth the investment required.
  
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- Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The problem with USB-A is that well, it has to have no problems.
  
  ::: Ramblings What I mean by that is, for USB to be a ‘universal’ serial bus it has to keep legacy support while still allowing the standard as a whole to keep up with new tech, and there’s just no sane way to do that on one plug type.
  
  As for why type C is the way it is:
  
  The USB Implementers Forum decided that adding more pins to the original format (type A) was a dead end (no way to keep backwards compatibility after a point), and the only way foward was to make type A a ‘legacy’ port while a new connector would take over as the main/modern one.
  
  The forum decided that to make that happen type C has to be more decoupled from type A then previous connectors.
  
  Since the most profitable market for electronics is the mobile one, that’s what they aim for with type C. (And because all the previous mobile USB types sucked, especially the micro).
  
  Also probably atleast some if not most of the forum members wanted planned obsolescence, it’s goverened by tech companies after all.
  
  Still, type C and the 4.0 standard in general is pretty good at doing what it was meant to do. :::
  
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- Deebster@infosec.pub ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  USB A doesn’t support at the fancy high-power PD/PPS features.
  
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  - InFerNo@lemmy.ml ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Pretty sure I can solder something together using a USB-PD decoy 😄 Made a bunch of barrel jack adapters the same way.
    
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