[incognito_limey]

Thanks for the info. I recently discovered this by running folding at home on my 16inch pro overnight, and waking up to my battery being at 5%. I suspect running the CPU full bore over night was too much for the charger to keep up with.

[joncrane]

Isn't this bad design? Surely if plugged in, you should be able to use everything on your laptop at 100% utilization (screen, CPU, disks, fans, etc) without having to worry about it.

Otherwise, what's the point of having those things?

[steelframe]

I suspect this is due to USB-C providing a maximum power of 100 watts. This was a classic design trade off. “We can support an industry standard and thus allow ubiquitously available chargers to be used with the device, with the trade off being that the chargers can’t keep up when the device is run continuously at full throttle.”

Then it’s a question of how many are impacted and how often, how support for USB-C factors in to the decision to purchase, etc., etc.

[Shish2k]

> Isn't this bad design?

It’s a trade-off - they COULD build a laptop which can run everything at 100% 24/7 indefinitely, but it’d be heavier and more expensive, with zero benefits to their target audience of "people who only run at 100% for a few hours per day"

[411111111111111]

No, He is talking about the laptop not getting enough power while plugged in.

If there was any added weight it would be with the charger, not the laptop so... Incredibly unlikely.

It's way more likely that Apple just didn't design the connector to be able to deliver that amount of power. So they'd have to add a second one or switch connectors/design a new one.

Both would be suboptimal as well.

[Shish2k]

> No, He is talking about the laptop not getting enough power while plugged in.

That’s what I’m talking about too

> If there was any added weight it would be with the charger, not the laptop so…

Whether it’s charger or laptop, that’s still more weight that the end-user needs to carry around in their backpack, which 99.9% of them won’t need

[q92z8oeif]

Everything that does not expose to the user what is happening, and ideally give the user control over what can happen and when, is as bad design as clippy was on Microsoft Word.

Only too-clever-for-their-own-good-designers like automagic things. No user does.

[dangus]

Is your car designed to be used with the pedal to the floor at all times?

I don't understand why this would be a design assumption, especially for a portable device.

This isn't even an assumption for running applications on servers, especially the kind that serve up things like web requests. If you have pegged the CPU, your application will already be unstable.

Sure, the server can handle being pegged 24/7 from a power and cooling perspective, but in practical use no sysadmin will allow that to happen for very long.

[masonic]

  Isn't this bad design?

Speaking of which, can some electrician please explain why Apple chargers (for USA) use ungrounded plugs while every computer I've ever owned uses grounded plugs?

[vinay427]

This is the case in many places outside of the US as well, as far as I can tell. The included extension cord (C5?) was grounded at least for my last MacBook years ago, but they provide a non-grounded connector probably because it's less bulky (easier to design as a folding mechanism) and more universal (especially in continental Europe where the two-prong is nearly universal and the third prong is far from that).

It's also not just Apple. Lower wattage Lenovo chargers (including ThinkPad) have two-prong adapters and plugs.

[gullyfur]

This makes sense. My USB C portable charger also cannot keep up with charging my laptop while I have the screen on full brightness + normal activities.