What a mess. Fortunately, the frequency thing is less of an issue with modern power supplies, like my laptop charger is rated for 100-240V 50-60 Hz, so it Just Works. But I imagine that was more of a pain before these were widespread.
“If we confuse them now, we can get another contract in a few years to fix the naming situation again!”
Some consulting firm surely was paid a few million to come up with these names.
Spaceship Georg, whose body is 5.7×10⁹ miles from Earth, is an outlier and should not be counted.
(A portion of Clyde Tombaugh’s remains are on the New Horizons spacecraft about this far from Earth). Edit: but this of course is useless for place of death statistics.
Those World War 2 movies as well - like, we already had millions die during the war, and now we’re doing it again to make a movie out of it? (/s)
Even USB-C is a nightmare. There’s 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, which were rebranded as “3.2 Gen X” with some stupid stuff there as far as what speed it supports.
Then it can do DisplayPort as well. There used to be an HDMI alt mode too!
An Intel computer might have Thunderbolt over the same cable, and can send PCIe signals over the cable to plug in a graphics card or other devices.
Then there’s USB 4 which works like Thunderbolt but isn’t restricted to Intel devices.
Then there’s the extended power profile which lets you push 240 W through a USB C port.
For a while, the USB-C connector was on graphics cards as Virtualink, which was supposed to be a one-cable standardized solution to plugging in VR headsets. Except that no headsets used it.
Then there’s Nintendo. The Switch has a Type-C port, but does its own stupid thing for video, so it can’t work with a normal dock because it’s a freak.
So you pick up a random USB C cable and have no information on what it may be capable of, plug it into a port where you again don’t know the capabilities. Its speed may be anywhere between 1.5 MBit/s (USB 1.0 low speed) and 80 GBit/s (USB 4 2.0) and it may provide between 5 and 240 W of power.
Every charger has a different power output, and sometimes it leads to a stupid situation like the Dell 130 W laptop charger. In theory, 130 W is way more than what most phones will charge at. But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can’t take. So in practice, your phone will charge at the base 5W over it.
Dell also has a laptop dock for one of their laptops that uses TWO Type-C ports, for more gooderness or something, I don’t know. Meaning it will only fit that laptop with ports exactly that far apart.
The USB chaos does lead to fun discoveries, such as when I plugged a Chromecast with Google TV’s power port into a laptop dock and discovered that it actually supports USB inputs, which is cool.
And Logitech still can’t make a USB-C dongle for their mouse.
At least it’s not a bunch of proprietary barrel chargers. My parents have a whole box of orphaned chargers with oddly specific voltages from random devices.
The scalp bird takes advantage of this by nesting in people’s hair and consuming the fruit. This causes another symbiotic relationship as it spreads the fruit seeds.
For areas where you want to cool or dehumidify the air these help though. So where I live, during the summer these would effectively be “free” - you were going to use that energy to cool the house anyway with your AC, now you’ve just put that heat in water instead.