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Apple may finally fix its flimsy iPhone charger cables:
Every iPhone user likely has had one Lighting cable fray [on] them. It's been an annoying issue, and one that's driven third-party sellers to create braided cables that can withstand more abuse.
It seems that Apple is at the very least researching ways to make its cables more resilient. According to a patent filing first noticed by AppleInsider, Apple has been working on a "cable with variable stiffness" that gets thicker toward the ports.
Lightning cables are known for having thick connector points. It's what Apple internally refers to as the strain relief sleeve. While the ends of Apple cables are meant to keep the cable from fraying, often those areas become pressure and kink points. Apple acknowledged as much in its patent filing.
"In addition to making the cable locally stiffer, the strain relief sleeve also makes the cable thicker at the ends. In some instances, the added thickness may not be desired," the patent filing reads.
To get around this, Apple is essentially designing a cable that has denser material toward the ends that tapers off. [...]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 06 2021, @04:28AM
I've been using laptops since they had black on grey LCD screens, and that was only 27 years ago.
30 laptops, 2 stacked on my desk to my left at the moment both roughly 4 years old, a third downstairs that's 8. My wife is still using a cast-off I bought 10 years ago as a backup to her daily driver. Then I've got a couple in the dresser drawer aged 11 and 13 that still work but are hopelessly outdated. That's 6 on hand at the moment. Oh, and 3 more that I prepped for a production line at work - they're 2016 models, so 9 at the moment.
That 2006 MacBookPro ran (with a power cord replacement after 18 months) until around 2008 before it started having GPU overheat issues, apparently there was a large percentage of that production run where the assembly line wasn't putting the thermal paste on correctly. I limped it along until about 2010 doing various things with it that didn't mind if the screen would go black unexpectedly before giving up on it entirely. It is the absolute shortest lived laptop I have owned in the last 20 years.
Corporate environments tend to cycle the official company imaged laptops every 3 years or so, I've stretched mine at this job to 2 in the last 8 years partly because my boss gave me a non-corporate imaged workstation laptop that we can actually do development work on - while the corporate imaged ones are necessary for various company focused functions they are hopelessly nerfed when trying to install dev environments and particularly alternate OSs.
As for the 20 laptops before that... I remember them going obsolete inside a year through most of the '90s, would typically have two or three at a time in simultaneous use, had one stolen from a supposedly secure lab - that was my all-time favorite one: power brick inside, 110 cord plugged straight into the laptop, really pissed me off. The death of many/most older laptops was when the batteries wouldn't hold a charge anymore, and the cost of a replacement battery was 80% of a new superior laptop... oh, that reminds me: those 2006 MacBookPros, they also had mushrooming battery problems - virtually all of them inside 18 months. The batteries were replaced under warranty - once - and then they did it again, more slowly the 2nd time so I guess they were improving the process, but still toward the end I was running my GPU-defekt MBP with no battery because the 2nd one also blew up until it didn't fit in the case anymore. Sure, all laptop batteries die, I even had one other get scary hot after its management system freaked out, but that was another uniquely fruity experience: to have the mushroom transformation in combination with scary temperatures.
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