My oldest son is visiting my youngest son in Ohio for the remainder of the week. I got a text from him this morning that he forgot to bring his laptop charger for his MacBook Pro. He has one of the latest models that still uses an Intel chip. That means he has pretty good battery life but not as good as the recent models that use the M1 chips. It also means that his laptop uses a USB-C connection to charge the battery.
I am not a fan of Apple constantly changing how to charge their devices. It doesn't matter if it is an iPhone, iPad, or a laptop; the charger used today will be changed on newer releases of the hardware. I did like the change to USB-C for their laptops though as it does offer alternatives to using Apple-specific chargers. Hopefully they stick with it for awhile.
When my son mentioned that he left his laptop charger at home, I suggested he try connecting his phone charger to his computer to see if that will work for the week. I know that USB chargers have some intelligence. They will start charging at the lowest specified power and then negotiate to charge at the highest power possible. The Apple-brand charger for their laptops are rated at 96 watts where a phone charger is rated to only a few watts. My son tried that and an hour later after not using the laptop at all, his battery power increased from 16% to 17%. That wasn't going to work.
Ultimately my son had to run into town and get a charger from Walmart. They had one for $40 instead of the usual Apple price of $70 so he could save himself some money. Having left my laptop charger at home on more than one occasion, I could feel my son's pain. Fortunately he came up with a relatively inexpensive solution.
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