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Comment by devonkim | Hacker News Reader

And despite all that engineering their reliability was terrible due to various plug design problems with the predecessor to MagSafe or the cords getting damaged from point stress. Meanwhile, Dell and HP make mediocre stuff that somehow hardly has such a problem by using much thicker gauge wiring and tougher rubber / plastics.

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I'll take a skinny MagSafe plug over a Dell or HP plug any day. A power brick costs ~$80 to replace, a laptop costs much more.

The main issue with Apple's power brick is that people wind the cord too tightly and don't leave slack. HP/Dell's main problem is that the female power adapter inside the laptop takes a lot of stress. In college, I had two roommates that broke their laptops due to the power connector.

Its pretty amazing that its ok to design $2 worth of hardware badly so you have to replace it and charge $80 for it.

Yeah but you could kill a bear with the Dell power brick.

Now, maybe that bear needed killin. Who am I to judge? But maybe there are better tools for the job.

Dell power supplies, cables, receptacles and batteries fail all the time and I've seen the docking station connectors burn from shorts.

Yea, clearly these people have never supported dell laptops in an office environment. I have more dead bricks than i can mail back, especially from older machines. Fail in the exact same way as the apple ones

Apple has the best liability in the business.

Dell's three year failure rate is almost 20%. Apple's is 10.

fwiw, I use Dell XPS boxes.

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