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by nameless912 2969 days ago
> most older Macbooks have current limiting ICs on the USB ports.

And thank goodness for this, early in engineering school I was doing a project on an arduino and because I was young and stupid I kept accidentally shorting power to ground. Killed at least 5 or 6 ATMega328's but the MacBook just helpfully chirped that I was drawing too much power and it was shutting off the port. Saved my ass at least a dozen times over.
2 comments
elsonrodriguez 2969 days ago
This feature has been on motherboards going back to the 90s. I remember that some DSL modem was notorious for requiring a reboot of the computer because the USB ports stopped working.

The reality was that the modem was drawing too much power and the motherboard just disabled every port on the bus.

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nielsole 2968 days ago
I accidentally shortened my USB port on a PC in a long chain of USB peripherals and only realized when I almost burned my finger on the most remote (wrongly connected) peripheral. I am really happy my mainboard didn't throw in the towel then.
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