Whoever designed the triple circle atrocity needs to be pegged in the backside with a taze unit while being gnawed upon by fire ants and piranha.
Rotate it 225 degrees to the right and see why we call it the “Mickey Mouse” plug.
oooohhhh look! A hidden Mickey!
I also did a quick search on Monoprice and found a nice deal on them.
Plugs stay plugged because of friction, the surface area of the plug parts surrounding the metal just needs a certain amount of force, and it comes free. When you've got something that might be constantly moving, like a laptop computer, you need to increase the surface area of that surrounding material, and you get more resistance to the thing coming unplugged. Also, you get less strain on the metal parts INSIDE the laptop, when you've got a more complex structure on the nonconductive parts of the plug.
I used to fix laptops, and that's the way it looks from my experience...
UL won’t do anything...it’s run by the manufacturers.
Are you sure the one on the right is for 110/120 AC volts?
That is not true. there once was a business ethic that did so, but no more.
No, you are thinking like a liberal ---- oh, I don't like this plug design so I want gov't to standardize all the plugs for me.
Can you point to the part of the Constitution where the gov't should regulate plug design?
I have a simple counter example. When my Kenmore (Sears' house brand) dryer failed, I quickly discovered that the plastic idler pulley had cracked. I called Sears' appliance center with the model number and they told me, come on down, they had the part. I walked in, arrived at the counter and asked for an idler pulley, ready to recite the make and model. The guy behind the counter interrupted me and pointed me to a wall about 10 feet wide and six feet high with nothing but idler pulleys. All identical. Worked fine.
You can probably find after market parts for almost anything mass produced, including lawnmower blades. I actually bought an aftermarket lawn mower blade, that came with different bushings and adapters for various models. Worked fine.
You haven’t been buying much in the way of high-end electronics lately, have you? Video game manufacturers are the worst - they make consoles, then they make their games so they only run on their consoles. You can only play Zelda on Nintendo consoles, Halo on Xbox’s (or PC, since it’s a Microsoft thing), or... well, not much for the PS3. But, now many popular games (The Sims, the EA Sports games, movie-based games, Guitar Hero, etc) are being made for all 3 platforms, because people are more likely to buy your game if they don’t have to buy another $300 console to play it. Then, of course, there’s the Apple vs. Microsoft thing going on - they used to make their software only compatible with their hardware - if you had a Mac and wanted to get office software, you’d have to buy Apple’s office suite. However, two things happened: Open-source appeared, so you didn’t have to buy anyone’s software, and companies started making their software compatible with competitors’ products (think MS Office for Mac, or Safari and iTunes for Windows).
In the end, I think that the benefit of making their products compatible with their competitors will outweigh the possible profit and equally possible losses from making their products compatible only with each other (and therefore losing money from having people not buy their products case it’s incompatible with the rest of the world).
Says who? Are you an electrical engineer? A design engineer? The manufacturer may disagree with you. I may disagree with you. Don't like it? Seriously - don't buy it. Your entire problem from start to finish to is completely solved.
this is done for one reason only and that is to force us customers to buy their part.
First, how do you know that? Seriously? And second, so what? Assuming it is absolutely true, how are they forcing you to buy anything? Really. Please answer how you are forced to buy anything?
I don't need the government to tell me which toaster to buy or why.
Maybe the Mickey Mouse plug has some design benefit over the old kind. Doubtful, but I don't need the government to decide that, either. The market does a lovely job of that, and no one holds a gun to your head to make you buy (or prevent you from buying) products on the market.
the government is supposed to reflect the collective will of the people . theorectically free market economics keeps corporate greed under control. but sometime it needs a little help. which is why we have anti-trust laws, epa, cafe, etc
I was unaware until last week (when John McCain announced it) that it was the job of government to determine that businesses were being "greedy" and that government has an obligation to reign in these filthy capitalist pigs forcing us to buy their wares.
Is there any evidence that this is unsafe? None that you've offered - you simply don't like it.
I was unaware until today, when you announced it, that the job of government is to save us from having to read Consumer Reports before we buy a toaster.
All these years, I've thought it was my job and responsibility to spend my money as I saw fit. Now I see that it's the government's job to tell me how to spend it and what I can buy. What a moron I've been.
Thanks for the head's up.
Business used to be about providing a service, now it’s only about getting sales.