2 hours ago
The Apple II power supply was the first switching PS I had ever seen. And I still saw a lot of linear ones post-Apple II… From the article, perhaps the IBM switching PS, four years after the Apple II, then more or less cemented the switching PS for consumer electronics.
5 hours ago
Previously:
(2012, 246 points, 74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047
(2013, 170 points, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6575994
(2021, 208 points, 158 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700554
3 hours ago
Is this one of those cases where Apple didn’t invented, but they did crash the price per unit?
3 hours ago
No. There was no "unit". This was before the days of modular PC PSUs and switching wall warts (which started proliferating only later). So it was just a custom circuit that used commodity components. For these components, the volume of orders from Apple would have been tiny compared to overall market demand.
5 hours ago
What an excellent example of Brandolini's law: “ The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
6 hours ago
Missing (2012) in the title.
4 hours ago
Apple 2 power supply worked until it failed after a couple years.