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Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

Even I have this problem. I bbought an amp reader and throw out anything reporting below 0.4ma/h. So many devices come bundles with poor cables my house is riddled with cables that I just never want to use for charging.

I'm actually TERRIFIED of pluggin anything in to my kids Switch other than Nintendo's official cable, incase I brick i t.

Does anyone know if they've patched this? I have some Dell laptop charger USB-Cs which I use alot, and I've had to caution everything in the family to never plug the Switch into it despite it fitting and despite every room in the house having such a charger...

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The Switch cable situation is always going to be a bit finicky, because their port is on the extreme edge of the spec's tolerances - it gets shorted because it's actually possible to cross the power into the wrong terminal, IIRC, with some wiggling. Safest to go with the official stuff, which people haven't reported issues with.

The Switches USB-C implementation is genuinely broken, so this isn't the fault of the connector. A spec-compliant charger, cable and connector will never brick anything (or catch on fire, for that matter)

I think I've used:

- a pixel charger - macbook charger - HP charger

and the Switch works fine with all of them.

OTOH, if you try to use one of those for the docking station, the docking station will refuse to work

I heard that it's because it supports only a lower amount of Watts than what the Macbook charger can provide, for example... (60W or 85W) While other chargers, like the pixelbook's (45W) work just fine

But I agree that it's unnerving: I connected a disposable switch to the cables that I didn't trust, before trusting to use my main Switch with them

I understand that simply charging is fine, while video output is the riskier action because of unofficial docks that use a Switch-incompatible voltage for signalling. The wrong voltage can burn out a specific chip and require resoldering.

For what it's worth I sold the official charger/dock that came with my Switch more than a year ago and have been using only third-party chargers/cables plus a Covert Dock since then. No issues :)

I bricked my switch on a multi-device charging station. Had to mail it into nintendo and they replaced the whole motherboard. Surprisingly the entire repair process cost less than a replacement switch motherboard on ifixit.

I use an HP laptop USB C charger with my switch sometimes, if that anecdote helps.

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