The AC adaptor on my laptop is woeful, from many perspectives. Let’s leave aside the fact that it runs hot enough to fry an egg…even the latest generation of transformers are way too heavy for a device that is supposed to be mobile.
Part of the weight is in the adaptor cable. A fat one runs from wall socket to device and a thin one runs from device to laptop. What determines the relative lengths of these sections? Well, it’s important to have enough total length that one can work without being right up against the wall and enough flexibility at the wall end that the plug can actually get in the socket.
Beyond these factors, there is freedom to reduce the weight of the adaptor system by minimising the fat cable length and maximising the thin one. Today’s invention is to create adaptors with a few cm of input cable and around 2m of thin output wire. Much less to cart about, marginally less wasted resource and significantly less annoying to roll up.
