this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Asshole Design and Crappy Design

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This community covers both asshole designs and crappy designs.

Discuss manifestations of asshole designs whereby the design is deliberately anti-consumer. Manifestations of crappy designs are also welcome in this forum, which reflect poor designs that are not borne out of deliberate contempt for the consumer.

Use of these prefixes is encouraged:

[a/d] ← you are confident that the design is an Asshole Design

[c/d] ← you are confident that the design is a Crappy Design

[ObD]Obsolescence by Design (a specific variety of a/d).

Unprefixed titles are useful if you’re uncertain whether the design is deliberate.

Rules:

  1. Please avoid posting web-related designs. Instead, post those in:

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Existence Rationale:

There are other communities for Asshole Designs and Crappy Designs, but all of the communities at the time of our founding exist only on centralized instances. We are currently the sole decentralized community of this kind. (update: another crappy design forum was recently found in the free-world-- see related communities above)

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I have a 3-pin Dell PSU spec’d as 19.5v 3.34A and DMM measures at 20v unloaded. The power reqs on the HP laptop are 19.5v 3.33A. AFAICT, that’s a match. Even the 3-pin barrel connector geometry matches. So what’s the problem?

The center pin is a “smart pin” aka “data pin”, as I came to learn. According to @over_clox@lemmy.world, this PIN basically passes brand info so HP can reject non-HP PSUs. But according to this article, the data pin is used to “regulate” the voltage -- which I take to mean it negotiates the voltage for transmission as USB-PD does.

It’s possible both are correct.. perhaps HP has its own proprietary way of negotiating voltage and Dell has theirs.

Someone even claims that the data channel is used to communicate temp info so a PSU does not overheat. If that’s true, then perhaps it was a good design (noting that the USB-PD standard did not emerge yet).

But is it true? Considering there are hacks with a resistor or something to satisfy the data channel, it’s hard to believe that the communication is that sophisticated.

This page advises HP owners to always buy HP-branded PSUs. But it’s unclear if that’s just overly safe nonsense.

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