It seems that Apple wants you to spend even more of your hard earned money on accessories to that end it has filed a patent for a new kind of charger.  As it stands now, you can share your chargers among your iPhone and sometimes among other devices but that will no longer be true if Apple has its way.

All devices have a circuit in them that recognizes when the charger has been plugged in and begins supplying power to the battery but what if there were a way to prevent unauthorized chargers from charging more than one device.

Apple wants to create such a charger.  Codes embedded within the device you are trying to charge and the charger must match, if they don’t, your device will not charge its battery.  This is mainly bad.  It probably means you won’t be able to share chargers among devices and some of these codes might malfunction which is the point made at the New Scientist.

It suggests that some perfectly legally owned devices and chargers might decide that their codes don’t match and refuse to charge up the battery even though both are perfectly “legal.”  If Apple has methods in place to prevent such a thing from happening, great but you still won’t be able to share one charger among multiple devices.

I say it’s just bad news all around if Apple does make such a system of tying in devices with one and only one charger.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 12:25 pm under Apple.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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