In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Ken Shirriff, a software engineer at Google and writer of a fascinating series of electronics teardowns. His posts on power supplies, like Apple’s MacBook and iPad chargers, offer detailed looks at how the real things differ from counterfeits. And his writeup of Apple’s remarkably complex Magsafe connector is illuminating.

Ken Shirriff on the Hidden Complexity of Power Supplies

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Ken Shirriff on the Hidden Complexity of Power Supplies

O'Reilly Radar