Edit: see comments for clarifications.
I am probably late on this one, but god damn this is one nasty trick by Philips.
Context; I recently decided to upgrade my shaver, from a Philips One Blade to Philips an all-in-one-trimmer-7000. As you can see on the pictures below, they changed the charger for the adapter by maybe 1–2 millimetres, just so the old charger could not be used by the old charger. Now, this normally isn’t a big deal, but with the new trimmer, the charger is USB-A only. Where’s the previous one had the plug on it instead. To me this is mildly infuriating as I know need to get an extra adapter just to charge my shaver in the bathroom. They had the exact same design for the chargers, yet changed it just slightly so they wouldn’t be able to be reused? Why… Philips… why?
Edit: many good points in the comments! I don’t know how to manually check the voltage, but seems like folks figured it out in the comments too. Should have just been USB-C!
The only issue I have with USB power solutions is that it’s also capable of data transfer, which is bad. Imagine a dystopian future of being tracked by companies and governments by the places you plugged your shaver in at, of all the stupid things that could happen.
If the only thing keeping a battery from exploding or corroding is a 4cm^3 box with a prong on one side and hole on the other then the people making the devices just need to incorporate power regulators into their designs.
It’s capable of data transfer…but to a power brick in the wall? Are there people who plug their shavers into their PC?
I mean… If it has a USB socket and I can plug it into my PC… Surely it was intended for that. After all the USB ports on a PC are just as capable of delivering power.
Sure may be an unusual solution to charge a shaver but you could do that.
Exactly. It’s going to be the most uncommon thing though. Convenient in an emergency if somehow you have a spare PC for charging and not a USB-C power brick…somehow…
But there’s not enough people doing it to justify what this guy is suggesting.
It’s also completely unnecessary since there are better devices for tracking and shenanigans available. Why bother with a shaver that has neither a camera or a microphone or is tracking location for anything when you can use a device that has all of that. Like pretty much every modern phone on the market, more so smartphones.
Regarding that other thing… In practice it could be that you are staying in a hotel room for any reason really but you forgot your power brick, still need to shave, but have a PC for one reason or another and a spare cable to use. However unlikely that is, but it’s not unheard of to forget the phone charger when going on a trip.
Are you going to remove outlets and strip walls every hotel you ever visit to check for data? Because that somehow sounds both sane and also unhinged, good luck with that.
Why would I need to? 110v outlets aren’t regularly equipped with Data transfer capability. And last I checked, there weren’t any USB-C -> 110v data transfer dongles available…highly doubt a hotel is gonna retrofit them for collecting your shaving habits.
You’re projecting a bit much.
Powerline communication is a thing.
You’re right, it totally is. Almost nobody uses it. For good reason; it’s prone to noise, slow speeds, circuit division, and licensing costs. It’s an argument of practicality here…it’s not practical, it’s not profitable, so it’s not gonna happen.
Your ignorance of the potential for harm due to it’s unlikelihood makes me think electrical engineering might be the wrong discipline for you.
I think you may have a horrible misunderstanding about how the real world works. As well as the specifics of USB-PD, and other such things; like paranoia, and schizophrenia.
Nothing you just said has any basis in reality or reasonability. Most people charge devices off of USB-PD power bricks, which are not going to be converted to transfer data across 110v lines for the purposes of collecting the data from your shaver. The amount of infrastructure and added cost that would bring is absolutely moronic at scale, and much more easily done through wifi or bluetooth, without even bothering with data-over-power.
Amazon has the “Sidewalk” network, and you wouldn’t even need to do anything fancy other than put a $2 ESP32 or NRF into the shaver to communicate and transmit data…forget trying to hijack it over USB…
So you flat out do not believe that USBs have data capabilities as a blanket statement?
Bro usb has data transfer capabilities. But if you connect to a power brick, which basically converts AC to lower volt DC and delivet power. It might be a problem only if you directly connect usb to wall withouth the power brick
Ah my apologies, when you said “power brick” you meant a converter for a wall outlet. That term isn’t standard in my region so I assumed you meant an outlet with USB capability, which is what I was discussing. They’re actually becoming very common, so I was expressing my distrust in making them a new standard.
Making communication over barrel jack is not hard either.
I’m discussing how it connects to the wall. You would be the second person to somehow misconstrue that. Wall outlets should not become USB.
I don’t understand you. Barrel jack is not usb.
I was never at any point talking about barreljack or any other intermediary power supply adapters for the devices. You are the one talking about that. Go talk to somebody else about it. I am talking about the potential of USB becoming so commonplace as a means of power supply that wall outlets start using it as a standard, which would be bad.
Correct, you was talking about how it is scary for you that USB can be used not only to charge device, but also to transfer data. To which I replied even barrel jack can be used for transfering data.
Even more: you can use USB PD 2.0(but not 3.1, at least not out of box) over barrel jack.
I’ve never seen a barreljack wall port so I fail to see any relevance. If it exists then I guess I’m against that, too.
USB is capable of data transfer but only if there’s compatible hardware in the device. The shave it doesn’t have any capacity to transmit data so what’s it going to do there’s nothing to track all they get is “someone has plugged something that requires some power into this port, but I don’t know what cuz it doesn’t have any brains”
It is important to be wary of ways that you could leak data but at the same time it’s also important not to go all paranoid tinfoil hat
It could have something like a unique identifier with some extremely simple and cheap components, and if the wall outlets of the future become USB then the business could have the ability to log it and sell that usage data to advertisers, as well as identify guests beyond just the information given during check-in.
Which sounds really stupid until you remember Google was found out to be counting people’s steps taken.
But they’d actually have to put hardware into a razor to enable that and to what end? It’s not useful info to know when you are shaving, and you already carrying a phone around in your pocket surely that’s the biggest point of data leakage. Fix that first before you start worrying about all these conspiracy theories.
This dude doesn’t believe in the “conspiracy” that companies invest in devices purely to track them and their habits. They just woke up from a coma since the 90s.
We should all use public chargers. I heard they’re safe
I think the bluetooth/wifi functionality on most modern electronics is much more worrisome than that.
There can be many problematic things independent of each other.