Charging My MacBook Air M1 with a Standard Mobile Phone USB Charger | Hacker News Reader

Charging My MacBook Air M1 with a Standard Mobile Phone USB Charger

magnetseven.substack.com

1 pointwslh7 comments

I guess you'll have to deep in the apple cult to be amazed by other phone chargers. Power Delivery have been around for over 10 years, follow standards and have enough power and it charges.

Beyond the Apple cult, could you charge your Lenovo, Dell, etc notebooks with a standard mobile phone charger? Last time I tried with a 2022 Lenovo via USB-C it didn't work.

A 3 amp USB charger is going to be somewhere in the range of 15 watts, right?

That's awfully powerful for a phone charger, is it not? I think my kids' Chromebook chargers have that kind of output.

In our household, we use all the USB-C stuff interchangeably. My wife has a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and another slightly older Thinkpad. Both seem to charge fine with whatever we throw at them.

But truth be told, my wife uses an extra Apple 65W charger we bought when on the go. They are just plain better built, and disconnect into 3 pieces making them way easier to pack up in a bag.

Are you sure about the Thinkpad X1 Carbon? [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/xht880/most_usbc_...

She’s got a gen 7.

It definitely works. We don’t even have the Lenovo charger anymore. It broke.

To be clear, you aren’t going to be able to use a phone/tablet charger when you’ve got the lid open and are actively using the computer. But with the lid closed and the laptop asleep, it absolutely will trickle charge to 100% overnight.

Again, 7th gen X1 Carbon and another even older Thinkpad. No idea about the newer stuff.

> That's awfully powerful for a phone charger, is it not?

15W? No. A charger needs to be 18W to even be basic fast charging. Many are 20W

My Lenovo Yoga slim from 2023 charges fine with my pixel 4a charger. Though it's barely enough power to break even while watching YouTube on Firefox. Though the Samsung charger from a 2023 Samsung A series phone can't charge it.

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