Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of how Dell was (still?) used different PSU/motherboard power connections, and at one point the physically matching connectors with different pinouts meant Dell PSUs would fry regular motherboards or vice-versa.

This sounds like more of the same, a kind of uncaring that shades into hostility.

View on HN

and at one point the physically matching connectors with different pinouts meant Dell PSUs would fry regular motherboards or vice-versa.

I think it's more than "uncaring" - since they just shifted the pinout 3 pins over from standard ATX, got rid of the 3.3V and added another 2 5V lines: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59959

I think dropping the 3.3v and -12v connections is a valid choice, but they probably should have found a different connector to use so the incompatability was obvious.

> I think dropping the 3.3v and -12v connections is a valid choice,

More than just a valid choice, in the long run even 5V is going to be dropped. Intel's ATX12VO standard has only 12V coming from the power supply, all other voltages are generated on the motherboard when necessary.

They could have also dropped those rails by just dropping them, and leaving the connector the same. It’s pretty unlikely they needed the extra current on the 5V rail.

A lot of Dell design is slightly more proprietary. At their scale the slight cost or efficiency gains they pick up are probably worth the extra design changes. At work we use all Dells and generally speaking the changes generally lead to a nicer technician experience. And sometimes standards suck: Dell E-series docks were drastically more reliable and less fragile than USB-C and I miss them terribly.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure the consumer is hurt too bad either: Because of their sheer scale, aftermarket Dell parts and clone parts are extremely cheap. Any Dell part number turns ip tons off off-brand replacements on Amazon and eBay.

The biggest downside to Dell's approach is e-waste. When they change a design, otherwise serviceable hardware isn't useful when working with newer models. Speaking of those wonderful old E-series docks, we had to replace them all simply because they don't sell laptops with the connector anymore.

Compaq was always worse in this regard, making almost PC but not quite PCs.

DOS ain’t done ‘til Lotus won’t run.

That’s a myth, it was never Microsoft’s policy.

I cooked a hard drive recently because the HP board used the same connector with different pin-outs to another standard SATA power cable.

I got very lucky because it was possible to desolder the flash RAM from that HDD board to another one and get the drive working again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com