Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software.
It turns out newer ThinkPads will begin communicating detected hardware damage that can then be parsed by the OS. A new patch to Lenovo’s ThinkPad ACPI open-source driver explains:
“Thinkpads are adding the ability to detect and report hardware damage status. Add new sysfs interface to identify whether hardware damage is detected or not.”
What is the scam? A thing no one asked for that breaks out new component level monitoring… I smell a ‘protect the children’ type malevolence.
USB-C is hot garbage for high power applications though. That pin pitch (tiny copper trace size) and the trace routing with inversion is awful for hardware design. It is like placing a fuse or power resistor between the PCB and connector. It gets hot in those 3mm of a tiny wisp of a wire, and power is super close to the other pins. So it cooks every bit of oily hand grime shoved in with the plug over time. The pin pitch is so terrible, you can’t even order the spec required from the base price level of any board house like PCB way. You have to pay a lot more for a higher precision etching process.
Random but informative side tangent
Usb-c really sucks for anything but data and small devices
Tangent you say?
I like usb-c as a docking cable for productivity laptops. I don’t really have ports die for users at work amazingly, and the cables somehow rarely need replacement.
We’re talking close to a thousand users for five years now with few issues. I see the support guys give people chargers constantl. Replacing the cable used to dock the laptops with an MST enabled display is very rare, maybe a couple a year. Not at all how I expected.
