you always have to manage a million different cables for each one, and they all suck. why can’t we just use AAA batteries instead of these shitty lithium ones? it’s so fucking frustrating. where can I find gadgets that work while plugged in, or at least don’t need to be recharged every two fucking days?
I think rechargeable is overall better than needing a thousand batteries that you just throw away to sit in a landfill, but agree they desperately need to 1) Normalize and standardize batteries and 2) Not use shitty ones that need charging every 2 day. We have standardized rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, if anything just encourage using those.
Problem with rechargeable AA and AAA batteries is that they need complicated chargers. Putting a charger for those into a device will make it unnecessarily big. There’s also the issue with the charge cycles they can take. I believe they have a maximum of around 100 charge cycles while lithium ion batteries are more around 1000 cycles.
Xbox360 managed both. You either plugged in the pack with two AAA’s or you could use the one with a rechargeable battery that fit the exact same slot.
Seems a good compromise to me.
Meanwhile, Sony went with an internal battery but had a standard USB connector.
Nowadays, you can get an Xbone controller and still choose a replaceable battery pack or a rechargeable one, and it has a USB-C connector. Standard connector, choose of battery feels like a good way to go for me.
What are you talking about? I literally just bought a charger today for AA and AAA batteries for $15 today so I’d have 2 chargers at home. I’m still using my original AA rechargeable batteries after 6 years now. Are you saying that’s somehow worse than single use batteries? My rechargeables last just as long as alkaline ones and I haven’t had to buy batteries in years.
Check your misinformation.
Man chill, he’s right, single use batteries have a higher energy density than rechargable ones. And somehow everybody is misreading that OP was talking about built-in chargers.
Not an argument not to use rechargable ones though
All the batteries in my house are double A and Triple A rechargeable. Use them for the Xbox and the remotes.
But I agree with OP sick of batteries that last one to two days. And cables today suck. Back in the old days the charger got with my phone lasted for years. Now it seems the cables lucky they last 6 months.
This is how I do it too, we just got a second charger so we could keep more than 4 charged, mostly for remotes and controllers. Agree with cables, I’ve had shit luck with anything from Amazon, it’s about a 50/50 shot if the cable will last more than a month, I’d be happy to hear where people buy quality cables.
WTH do people do with their cables? I haven’t had one fray/fail on me… ever, and I pay zero attention to them.
The “USB C” charger laws in the EU should help with this. As should the “right to repair” laws that are emerging.
Consider all the dinky appliances that end up in the garbage when their non-replaceable battery fails (like electric toothbrushes and razors). This is specially bad when the manufacturer chooses to use a lithium ion battery. Great way to start a fire in the garbage truck.
USB-C makes things kinda worse, in a way.
In the past you could slap together an adapter by chopping up some old cable and slapping it to a new power supply. And things would work, even if voltage or power ratings didn’t match exactly, or even at all (although, things would usually work much worse then).
I’ve jury rigged an adapter for my laptop, which uses a 65w, 20v power brick, to run off a 45w, 16v one, when mine died and I needed to access the files. It worked, as long as I wasn’t using doing anything too computationally intensive on the thing.
If the laptops used USB-C, that is very likely would not have worked at all. Chances are, the manufacturer of the smaller laptop would’ve bundled the cheapest power brick that covers the needs of the machine, so it would’ve most likely been 45w, 15v over power delivery. And mine would’ve been 65w, 20v over power delivery. And since everything in USB-C world has to talk to each other and agree beforehand, chances are, nothing would even try to work, even if it, realistically, can.
Uh no. USB C means you can grab a duck head or cable from any other USB C device and plug it in without having to worry about the correct connector or voltage. It’s part of the design, and it’s why the EU mandates all cell phones switch to it. Some duck heads may charge more slowly than others, but it should still work.
USB-C is an interface that can be used for a variety of different things. There are different “levels” of power delivery, there’s thunderbolt, there’s DisplayPort-over-USB-C, etc. And for things to work, the devices on both ends of the cable and the cable itself must comply with any given standard.
For example, on some laptops you can’t use a USB-C port with thunderbolt for charging the device, nor the port that supports power delivery to connect thunderbolt devices. While using the same physical interface, the ports are not interchangeable. Even if you’re connecting everything right, nothing is going to work if the cable you’re using isn’t specced properly (and trying to figure out the spec of a cable you have, considering they rarely have any labeling, is, definitely, fun).
If anything, USB-C makes everything harder and more convoluted, because instead of using different ports and plugs for different standards, it’s now one port for nigh everything under the sun. If you want things to work, nowadays, you have to hunt down cable and port specs to ensure everything is mutually compatible.
Sad thing is, it’s not entirely true: I have a baby night light that charges with usb-c. But only if you have some old usb-a brick on the other side of the cable. Nut a single usb-c to usb-c cable and charger combination I tried worked neither does the charger ofy ThinkPad work.
Another thing I hate is that those usb-c phone ports always suck up lint, and at some point refuse to work. Which makes cleaning needed and might break your charging port.
And yeah, I still think it’s the best option available.
slightly different but there is a product im debating called tromataz toothbrush. its first iteration had a replaceable head but it has a bunch of its electronics in it. Its obvious it should have some sort of plastic brush snap on for the top but not only have they not improved it. It looks like they are going the other way and you have to change your toothbrush every 3 months or so. its nuts. whats wrong with their engineers!!!
There are so many electric toothbrushes on the market. A mid-tier Braun or Philips one will last you years. I had one for well over a decade before the battery was sufficiently used up to not really last a full session.
I had a Philips Sonicare with an embedded battery that I had to replace through warranty service because it failed within a year. They did not want the old one back so I had to take it to electronics recycling. I’m sure a lot of people would have just thrown away the defective one. And if you check YouTube, you’ll see a lot of videos on how to repair these, because they have a high failure rate.
To be fair, I’ve only ever used Braun (OralB) brushes. Philips is generally a pretty decent brand so I’m surprised their brushes suck.
That said, I’d not recommend the base-line OralB brushes. I had a OralB Vitality 100 a couple of years ago, which only cost me like $25 when I bought it. At some point decided to upgrade to a Oral-B Pro 3, which cost around $60 and the difference is night and day. Motor is much better, the pressure warning was helpful (I had no idea I pressed way too hard) and the battery lasts longer.
I seriously doubt that the ultra-expensive 3D imagery app-control AI bullshit that cost in the $2-300 is as big of an upgrade.
I’ve gone through at least 5 or so Philips sonicare brushes, and it’s almost universally the linkage to the brush head that fails. Seems like they can’t handle the vibration for more than a couple years.
The buttons aren’t terribly insulated from water/other crap too, but honestly I’ve never had them fail, so it’s certainly not that huge of a concern
Sounds like the engineers listened to their bosses who told them to make it a subscription without making it a subscription.
Yep. As an engineer you have a sense of good design, but if you’re getting paid to make a stupid design, you make a stupid design so long it complies with code.
Buying shit tier stuff is gonna give your a shit tier experience. Have more discretion in your shopping, which could mean holding out for quite awhile, and you’ll eventually find a USB-C option.
It has been my experience that electronics are the only thing where “you get what you pay for” actually applies. If you’re getting tired of your cheap shit falling apart, spend more money to get not cheap shit.
I’m of much the same opinion, and I refuse to buy certain categories of gadget if the battery is not replaceable with a commodity type. This is becoming increasingly difficult.
Note that this doesn’t have to be AAA/AA batteries, either. The reason so many little gizmos use lithium-whatever rechargeable batteries is because the energy density of lithium is way better than consumer alkaline batteries (with some exceptions that I’ll get to; keep your shirt on) and because they’re available in a lot of form factors – particularly flat ones – that are easy to jam into the product.
For instance, I have quite a few flashlights that take rechargeable lithium chemistry 18650 cells. Some of these allow for charging the battery in the light with a USB cable or whatever, but the important point is if the battery takes a shit I can just take it out and replace it with another one easily and cheaply. I cringe every time I see the backpacking dudebros recommending “slim” USB-rechargeable-only lights to each other like they’re all the best thing ever, but which will inevitably be landfill in a year or two when their little nonreplaceable batteries give up the ghost. Hikers look at me like I have a fish for a head when I mention I use an 18650 light. “But it’s so heavy!” Sure, and it gets 4 times the battery life of your little stupid light, and it will last forever. I also still have a digital camera that runs off of AA’s, and several other oldschool odds and ends of that ilk.
If you are using a gadget that takes consumer AA or AAA cells, by the way, you can now get lithium rechargeable versions of these which are in most cases superior to both disposable alkalines and rechargeable NiMH cells. Whatever you do, don’t run everything you own off of disposable alkalines. That’s just stupid.
I’ve got a black diamond headlamp that I’ve been using for 20 years. Cost me less than $40, runs in triples, has seen some serious shit, been banged, stomped, and submerged. It’s still going strong (I assume. It’s been in a box for a year, but the last time I left it in a box for two years, it just needed new batteries).
I used to. I had a Black Diamond ReVolt that mysteriously took a shit one day after almost precisely 1 year of ownership. I replaced it with another one, the new “updated” model, and it did the same thing. So I gave up, and now I have a Shenzen Express no-brand 18650 headlamp that’s been serving me well for about three years. It also cost like a quarter as much. I give up on Black Diamond lights. (I also hope my Black Diamond ATC doesn’t have a hidden built in expiration date, either…)
My 18650 light has just under 4 times the available battery capacity as my old ReVolt. I run a 3600 mAh cell in it, versus the 950 mAh or so AAA’s I could put in the old Black Diamond. And if push comes to shove I can always just pop the cell out of it and swap in another while the first one is charging.
I will point out for any existing ReVolt owners, as well, that the batteries Black Diamond include with the thing are absolute trash. Mine came with 750 mAh cells in it which were far behind state of the art even back when I bought my first one. If you want to put higher capacity cells in it, note that Black Diamond saved a nickel by not including any chemistry sensing hardware in the headlamp; it “detects” their NiMH cells by way of a set of contacts in the battery compartment that touch an unwrapped section of their cells. If contact is made it assumes you have rechargeables in there and if it isn’t it assumes you loaded disposable cells and won’t charge them. If you want to use aftermarket batteries with it and allow them to charge in the headlamp, you’ll have to either peel some of the wrapping off of your cells or apply some foil tape or something. (This is surely to prevent imbeciles from putting alkalines in there and plugging it in, causing them to go off bang.)
