
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did - pmarin
http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html
======
drats
The record of vastly overstated and false claims of innovation around Apple
has become ridiculous. Nobody doubts they have innovated in many areas, but
largely they are excellent at integration and polish (which is worthy of
praise in its own right). And being a full-stack company they often match
their sails to the wind before anyone else, but it doesn't mean they made the
wind. It's not all Apple themselves doing this, much of it is bad journalism
and fans saying things that the company has no reason to correct. But it's
gotten so bad now that I approach any new claim of innovation from Apple or
their cheer squads as probably false.

I can't see why Apple enthusiasts can't be like luxury car enthusiasts. Most
of the time new luxury cars don't have much innovation in them, but it's the
fit and finish, attention to detail and integration which make them great. You
don't need to claim some divine spark of innovation to say that something is
better, or that you prefer it. To make another analogy a well done dish at a
nice restaurant isn't usually innovative, it just takes the best of breed
components and presents them well in a good atmosphere with good service.
Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides in
chemistry or forget that the chef is drawing on tons of home cooking going
back a long time which some people have had in their homes well before it
appeared on your menu. It's pretty sad that as I click "add comment" I expect
this to get vigorously downvoted (even on HN).

~~~
mrich
I fully agree with you. It seems the louder somebody shouts "Apple is the
best, they invented x" the more you can be sure that

\- the person has not much background in computing \- often hated/never could
get PCs to do what they wanted/is scared of computers

But they don't realize that Apple's great computers are standing on the
shoulders of decades of PC innovation (partly done by Apple, but also many
others).

Downvoters: Try to read the comment and understand that this is not attacking
people who like Apple, but fanboys who shout "Apple is the best because..."
Don't turn voting into a popularity contest based on the products YOU like.

~~~
cooldeal
An example of such a user, right here on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3510806>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3510342>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512102>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512126>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262181>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3535333>

There's much more, but I guess you get the point. When there are similar
people in most Apple, Gruber, Google and Android threads, there are obviously
flamebait conversations.The smug superiority and abject hate of of other
companies/platforms from Gruber, Marco, 37 Signals, Roughly Drafted, MG
Siegler etc. can sometimes be really overwhelming and the labeling of anyone
that doesn't share in the worship beaing called a hater causes even worse
discourse.

Many fans are not below sending death threats if they feel Apple has been
wronged or it's image can be damaged.

<http://www.overclockers.com/how-i-pcd-an-apple-g5/>

Apple seems to tending to attract such a crowd because of it's cult type of
branding, ads and secrecy.and anyone questioning their or their fans
outlandish claims seem to be vilified as haters.

------
ChuckMcM
That has got to be one of the most complete treatises on the development of
the Switch-mode power supply unit (SMPSU) that I have ever read. Excellent
work Ken.

That being said, I don't really resonate with the hating on Steve Jobs because
he believed something that wasn't true. C'mon there are a lot of things people
believe that aren't true. I expect Holt (or maybe Holt's manager) was selling
his work as really really excellent and Jobs, who was not an EE by training,
really didn't have a way to know if it was true or not. He chose to believe
it, and apparently believed it up until the day the biographer wrote it down.

I've noticed the sometimes person A will do something for person B because
they believe something about A that isn't true. That makes them at least
partially invested in that thing that isn't true being true, and so convincing
them that it isn't true is made quite difficult. The recent article posted
here about how Teller tricks people into believing something validated my
intuition about people sometimes really want to believe something.

So Steve believed Holt was God's Gift to power supply design, and it turns out
he was just another capable engineer who could build a switching power supply.
The world isn't changed.

Life goes on, but now you know a bit more about how complex building power
supplies has become, so its a win.

~~~
buster
The problem is when others start to believe the "untrue" believes of others,
especially such charismatic persons as Steve Jobs. You see this very often,
people don't getting their facts right and taking believes for facts.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I'd like to know more about your thoughts on this. In this case the error was
simply reputational, which is to say Steve had a high opinion of Holt which
was in part based on something that wasn't true.

Now if you were a co-worker's of Holt and passed over for promotion I could
see how this would bug you.

If you were an engineer (like Ken the author of this point) you might say "I
don't think that is true" and quickly discover that the 'boss' was wrong on
this particular point. Depending on how much you cared you might share it with
your boss you might not.

If this mistaken belief got out of hand and Steve had directed Apple to sue
say Delta Electronics for patent infringement. It wouldn't because the lawyers
would have done their diligence and they would have realized the outcome would
be the invalidation of Holt's patent.

People who are mislead by the charismatic person become disillusioned when
they discover the truth is not as it was told to them. That is 'bad' for the
charismatic person and potentially embarrassing for the person who didn't
check their facts. But I'm still not getting the source of wrath.

Disclaimer I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit clueless when it comes to
these sorts of emotional battles, they don't make a lot of sense to me.

------
ajays
Tangential: when I saw the iPhone power supply, I was blown away. Here was
this little white box, about 1-inch cube, able to convert 120V AC into low-
voltage DC. No tranformer; no big capacitors; nothing. Just some solid-state
electronics, and bam! Out comes some sweet DC juice.

I wish all DC equipment came with such power supplies. Heck, while I'm at it:
here's a great idea. Establish 2-way communication with the solid-state power
supply, so that the equipment can tell the power supply what it wants, and the
solid-state supply can then give it out. Then you won't need a separate power
supply for every piece of equipment!

~~~
moe
Gladly the industry seems to be (slowly) standardizing on micro-USB plugs,
except for laptops. That means nowadays I only have to carry two bricks with
me (MicroUSB + Macbook charger).

Personally I'd really love if everyone moved to a common MicroUSB MagSafe
form-factor. But apparently there are some patents in the way...

~~~
vidarh
> Gladly the industry seems to be (slowly) standardizing on micro-USB plugs,
> except for laptops

Largely because the EU pretty much threatened the cell phone manufacturers
with heavy regulation unless they came up with some sort of standard. Since
they "have" to do micro-USB for the EU, they might as well do it everywhere.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
China required this in 2007. EU didn't move on this until 2009.

------
seltzered_
Figure I'd chime in since I currently work in this industry. We make power
supplies that have many thousands of lines of custom-written flashed firmware
on a microcontroller that's a switching buck regulator. With it you can do all
sorts of crazy tricks with the control loop to reduce the number of components
and increase efficiency. I'd say most of the design meetings are about testing
ideas about the control loop.

There have been a bunch of startups in this space over the past 10 years,
although most eventually get acquired by a bigger IC vendor to deal with
foundry sourcing.

Many computing companies have slowly been getting rid of power supply design
engineers, and shouldering the burden onto the IC vendor's application's
engineer to help with the design. Dealing with a giant company (like apple,
dell, etc.) requires a lot of effort, as they'll negotiate down your margins
heavily, have a backup design with your competitor, and require your field
apps engineer to be waiting at your service if something goes wrong. It's not
uncommon to have apps engineers dedicated to a really big customer and stay at
their offices.

~~~
chipsy
I really appreciate the work that power supply makers do to improve
efficiency. Besides the direct costs of energy usage, the PSU is a major
source of heat and noise in desktops, so better efficiency can also directly
benefit the user experience.

~~~
seltzered_
Yeah, something stuck in my mind when I read "Fundamentals of Power
Electronics" - I don't have the exact quote, but it basically mentions most
efficency gains are primarily done to add features, not as part of any
conservation effort.

As a power/software guy, i'm mostly looking forward the development of more
non-backlit/outdoor readable screens, along with direly needed revolutions in
hvac design.

------
oconnore
Jobs was an idea person, not an engineer. You have to imagine the engineer
getting excited about the ideas going into building something. Later, Jobs
sees that same idea popping up everywhere, and his natural response is to
claim that it was "ripped off".

I think the same thing happened with the iPhone/Android controversy. Many of
the similarities are emergent from the technology that became available at
that time (larger screens, accurate multitouch panels, faster processors), but
all Jobs saw is the idea.

~~~
gnaffle
Well, it's hard to say that other companies didn't rip off the "idea" of the
iPhone. After all, all the hardware had been available for a number of years,
including displays, CPUs, GPUs, capacitive touchscreens, batteries etc.
Someone else could easily have come along with a multitouch phone two years
earlier, but nobody did. Of course, the "idea" of the iPhone wasn't new
either, but Apple was the first to make the idea into a working, usable
product.

~~~
gst
There's a simple reason why Apple was often the first one to put something
into a product: They could afford to sell high-end products for a high price
and know that they still have lots of users who buy their stuff.

Most of the other companies had prototypes using those technologies available,
but they didn't build products out of them because (at this point) they would
have been too expensive for their target audience.

And even if those other companies built a product before Apple, Apple would
still claim that it was first: Two examples: (1) LG Prada
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada>) was there before the iPhone, yet
(AFAIK) Apple claims that basically all the touchscreen phones are a copy of
the iPhone. And (2) Netbooks and Subnotebooks have been on the market for
nearly a decade now - I've used Thinkpad X-series laptops for years now (which
weight about as much as a Macbook Air). Still, as soon as a company announes a
new Subnotebook now someone will claim that it is a copy of the Macbook Air.

~~~
gnaffle
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Most other computer or consumer electronics
companies have high-end lines with prices comparable to Apples products.
Companies like RIM and Nokia had pretty nice margins on their high-end phones.

The main problem was simply that they had no incentive to innovate in that
direction until competition showed up in the form of the iPhone. (And I'm not
saying Apple is special here, I think they would probably have been in the
same position if they had continued selling the Newton and tried making an
iNewtonPhone out of it).

AFAIK, Apple claims various touch-related inventions through their patents
(some of which are quite stupid, which is another story). I've never heard
them saying "we invented touchscreen phones".

Apple never claimed to have invented subnotebooks either. But you would be
right if you looked at many of the new "ultrabooks" and claimed that they have
borrowed many design details from the Air (as opposed to, say, copying the
form factor of the X-series or netbooks).

------
ricardobeat
Steve Jobs didn't say others were stealing "Apple's revolutionary design", he
said _they all rip off Rod Holt's design_.

All the machines he mentions were either not consumer products neither
compact, or still had lots of fans for cooling (HP 21MX, TI 960B, HP 9825,
etc), so I assume there is some measure of truth in that the one designed by
Rod Holt was something new.

~~~
kens
I wondered why you were ignoring the switching power supplies in consumer
televisions in 1976, but then I discovered that I'd posted an older version of
my article without that section. Oops. It's there now.

------
mcescalante
I'm honestly not sure why there was even a discussion along these lines. If
you understand hardware, you'd get that it would be hard for Apple to
revolutionize hardware before the hardware existed.

