The Salmon of Doubt

An international power supply is the device that means it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, or even if you know what country you’re in (more of a problem than you might suspect)—you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least Microsoft calls it that because it hasn’t got it yet. In the Mac world we’ve had it for so long we didn’t even think of giving it a name. Nowadays a lot of peripherals come with international power supplies as well—but not all. Which is why I asked. “Yes, it does,” said Scott, the sales assistant.

“You’re sure it has an international power supply?”

“Yes,” repeated Scott. “It has an international power supply.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have an international power supply.

Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms full of little dongly things and don’t want any more. Half the little dongly things I’ve got, I don’t even know what gizmo they’re for. More importantly, half the gizmos I’ve got, I don’t know where their little dongly thing is. Most annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120-volt AC—American voltage, which means I can’t use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit—provided I know which gizmo it is they fit to—to the U.S.A.

What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about?

The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is infested) are the external power adapters that laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1,200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry that exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, none which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo-pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.

Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn’t possibly be that, could it? I mean, could it? It’s hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fueled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven’t at some point thought, “Wouldn’t it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?” Now, I’m not an electrical engineer, so I may be asking for the impossible. Maybe it is a sine qua non of the way in which a given optical drive or CD Walkman works that it has to draw 600 milliamps rather than 500, or have its negative terminal on the tip rather than the sleeve, and that it will either whine or fry itself if presented with anything faintly different. But I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he’d probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I’ve heard such good things about) he’s designing work to a standard DC

low-power supply.

In fact there already is a kind of rough standard, but it’s rather an odd one. Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the dashboard that used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine, or, according to a recent and highly improbable TV commercial, an instant coffee-making gizmo. Because the socket originally had a different purpose, it’s the wrong size and in the wrong place for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it’s time to start adapting it for its new job.