A basic USB Type A one can be had for around €5 and will save hours of frustration.
Why is this so?
Because iThings indicate that they’re charging when they detect the 5V output of a charger being connected REGARDLESS of whether they are drawing any current.
Number 1 cause of this is a failing/failed charger cable or a Lightning Port full of gunk.
In my 20 years experience of testing and often wrecking smartphones (including many iThings) and accessories, chargers usually either work or they’re kaput. The only time you could get intermittent charging is when they’re about to die or when they have a USB port full of crud.
For you fancy folks with USB Type C devices, you can now get power meters for these that are designed to test the much higher power levels involved.
That’s a good idea. I’m pretty well all USB C now apart from the iPhone and Earpod things. I hate to think how many chargers and cables have been consigned to landfill over the years through incompatibility. I’ve a still a ton of them in the garage.
I don’t think I even try to be ruthless. The problem is when you *do* throw something out invariably a use will make itself known within a week or two.
Case in point: I needed a long (~ 5m) extension last week, preferably a multiprise with a switch and I didn’t have time to get Amazon to deliver one, nor go to Casto to see if they had anything suitable.
So, popped to Super U, bought one with a 1.5m extension (all they had), dug out the off-cut cable from the new cellar pump I bought a while back (with a nice moulded plug) and married the two - perfect
SWMBO even grudgingly admitted it was useful that I’d kept the cable.
I just need to find a use for the other 350 things in the “this will be useful one day” pile
story of my life… which is why I am accused of hoarding… both at home and at work.
On the other hand… at work… someone would suddenly ask “have we still got blah blah blah 'cos we need it urgently”…
and the swift reply was always… go and ask “herself” she’s bound to have it stashed somewhere…
My office was large, with capacious cupboards/storage… which was just as well
OMG the useful “stuff”. What a load of tosh, we have tons of what my husband calls useful which might come in handy one day but it never has. Technology surpasses so very much and when we can bodge together all sorts it often ends upon superceded anyway after a little time. We’ve been down the old chargers, old laptops, et al… wish we had thrown it out sooner, been carrying it around four or five countries to no avail
This is the old server motherboard from home - which will be installed in the French server chassis. It’s had a bit of a CPU upgrade (i5-8600T to i7-9700T so gaining two cores) and will have a snazzy heatsink upgrade this week (more strapped together bits of other hardware at the moment).
The result will be that the French server will go from 3rd gen to 9th gen, there’s also a HDD upgrade (as it’s groaning under the weight of ripped DVD’s) so I’ll have 16TB formatted storage available which should last a while.
I’ll probably, shock horror, sell the old motherboard from the French server (an Asus P8H77-I) or maybe one (or even two) of the spare boards that I have lying around as well as the CPU that came out of the board as I don’t have anything that it will plug into - I like to keep spares around in case of hardware failure but there’s a limit even for me
Yeah, old laptops can be repurposed and chargers might be useful BUT you’ve probably got to be a geek to have any chance of doing so (see above). For ordinary users odds are that won’t happen.
However, I’d advocate wiping or removing hard drives - you don’t want personal data winding up in the wrong hands.
A sledge hammer seems to take care of most hard drives and then distributed all over the place. Most of our stuff has all old hard drives cleaned to the nth degree anyway as my husband is a level service 1 engineer. Removing hard drives will work but then what do you with do with them Billy? Besides how do you get to a hard drive on a Mac?
To answer your question I wipe them and keep them around as long as they have a big enough capacity to be useful - though (as you observe) technology marches on and solid state drives are rapidly making all but the largest hard drives redundant.
If I accumulate too many I sell them, assuming that they are worth enough to be worth it (doesn’t have to be all that much, just enough that I won’t actually lose money on the sale). I keep a few with specific interfaces (IDE, SCSI) around in case I need to rescue a very old machine.
Depends on the Mac, but they’re easy enough to open. Since there’s no no upgrade path for most, there’s no need to remove them : either wipe or destroy.
Tell me about it, these days you just can’d get into them and even some older ones unless you have the right tools you can’t get inside on the studio screen ones
Much like how the EU is compelling mobile phone manufacturers to standardise on USB C for chargers, I wish they would stop PC manufacturers from using non-replaceable components. If an SSD drive fails or needs upgrading, I shouldn’t be forced to replace the whole machine. Similarly, having non-upgradeable memory that’s soldered to the motherboard means machines that could easily be given a new lease of life are unnecessarily destined for landfill.
Thing is, and I haven’t ripped open a machine to check, but I don’t think there is a “drive”, just a bunch of chips scattered on the motherboard. Maybe, as was being discussed on the subscription car feature thread, all MacBooks someday could be built with max memory and you could just subscribe to the amount you need. 1GB for browsing during the week and 4GB for when you’re video editing on the weekend.
Well, both of my husband’s big studio screen macs are destined for the sledgehammer this weekend before we go. He doesn’t want to take these two old ones to France when we move and he can’t get into them (despite being a level 1 Mac engineer). He has wiped them as fortunately he kept the original instal discs but best be safe eh?
, amateur 
