AC adaptors: standardize, please

I was just cleaning up around my computer and I got annoyed again because of the utter lack of common sense hardware vendors seem to have in their choice of AC adapters (I’m not the only one, Douglas Adams wrote about it before).  I made a list of all the devices in a radius of 3m around me:

Brand Product Plug Volt Ampere Watt
Apple Airport Extreme (proprietary) 12V 1.8A 22W
Apple Mac Mini (proprietary) 18.5V 4.6A 85W
Apple iPhone charger USB + mini USB 5V 1A 5W
Asus EeePC 1000H Coax 12V 3A 36W
Canon Selphy ES1 Photo printer Coax 24V 2.3A 55W
Dell Latitude laptop (old) (proprietary) 20V 2A 40W
Iomega External USB disk Power DIN 12V 1.5A 18W
Jabra Bluetooth Jawbone headphones (proprietary) 5V 550mA 2.8W
Jabra Bluetooth headphones mini USB 5V 180mA 0.9W
Logitech Bluetooth headphones Coax 6.5V 250mA 1.6W
Netgear Cable Router Coax 15V 1.2A 18W
Netgear External network disk Coax 12V 5A 60W
Nintendo Gameboy (proprietary) 5.2V 320mA 1.7W
Nokia GSM Charger N-series Nokia plug small 5V 890mA 4.5W
Nokia GSM Charger pre-N-series Nokia plug big 3.7V 355mA 1.3W
QPS Digital photo frame Coax 12V 3A 36W
Trekstor External USB disk Coax 12V 2A 24W
Tulip Laptop Coax 19V 3.4A 65W

In a sensible world, all ‘small’ things would have a mini USB (5V) power connector, all ‘medium’ things would run on 12V DC with 1 (one) standard coax connector and the rest would be on 220V AC. Let’s see how far we are from that situation:

I know the GSM industry is already talking about it (“The group agreed that by the 1st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector” – GSMworld). Apparently they want to standardize on Micro-USB. It’s a pity I haven’t seen a lot of devices with Micro-USB yet. I hope we’ll have Mini-USB to Micro-USB dongles so that we can keep on using our ‘old’ power cables.

Micro /mini / USB-B / USB-A male / USB-A female
Micro /mini / USB-B / USB-A female / USB-A male
💬 hardware 🏷 power 🏷 USB