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Uneven USB power output

T

thelookingglass

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Apr 27, 2005
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Seems my left USB port outputs more power than my right. Certain devices charge fine on the left but not on the right. Do you guys have the same issue?
 
T

thelookingglass

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Apr 27, 2005
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No one has this issue except me?
 
deedas

deedas

macrumors regular
Dec 2, 2003
139
0
Baltimore, Maryland
I have an issue with the USB ports on my air but it's not what you have. I do remember a while back Apple shipped laptops which had one high power usb port, and one or two other low power ones. With the Airs, it wasn't until this gen that we got more than one USB port. Before there was only one and it was high power to be able to send enough juice to the external dvd burner. It could be that we only have one high power one as well today. I'm just speculating. I have no evidence to back this up right now.
 
T

thelookingglass

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Apr 27, 2005
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deedas said:
I have an issue with the USB ports on my air but it's not what you have. I do remember a while back Apple shipped laptops which had one high power usb port, and one or two other low power ones. With the Airs, it wasn't until this gen that we got more than one USB port. Before there was only one and it was high power to be able to send enough juice to the external dvd burner. It could be that we only have one high power one as well today. I'm just speculating. I have no evidence to back this up right now.
Click to expand...

Thanks, interesting. That's actually what I'm trying to figure out - is this intentional or do I have a faulty UBS port? Seems like from what you mentioned this unequal power output may have been intentional in the past (although I can't figure out why they'd do that - the gains from saving power don't seem to be significant enough to warrant crippling one port)
 
C

Cerano

macrumors 6502
Oct 28, 2010
268
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thelookingglass said:
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Thanks, interesting. That's actually what I'm trying to figure out - is this intentional or do I have a faulty UBS port? Seems like from what you mentioned this unequal power output may have been intentional in the past (although I can't figure out why they'd do that - the gains from saving power don't seem to be significant enough to warrant crippling one port)
Click to expand...

its designed. only one port is "powered"
 
T

thelookingglass

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 27, 2005
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thanks, that's helpful to know. The next question, naturally, is why does Apple do this? And is this the case for all notebooks or just Apple's?
 
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