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!
You must log in or # to comment.
Having experience with electromechanics - I have seen times where this was done on purpose to make sure that people aren’t trying to reuse an incompatible plug for charging purposes. NiCd doesn’t charge the same as LiFePo, Li-ion, etc. Charging voltages, polarities, stability of power output, etc.
To be fair though, they just need to make everything USB-C anyhow. Especially shavers.
And how is it as a device?
I like it, the different clip lengths are holding on quite well, and I do like the adjustable ones when trimming my beard.
It’s also relatively quiet.
I keep buying these oneblades over and over. I’m tempted by 🧲 and steel blades
My next shaver will be USB-C. It’s now a standard for charging whatever you want.
I know a lot of RC brands did this too. They didn’t want people blowing up their Li-On batteries with old chargers, or getting complaints because it takes three days to charge.
To be fair though, they just need to make everything USB-C anyhow.
Careful what you wish for. Putting advanced electronics into very simple devices will just make them fail a lot faster.
Some old device just needed 12V over a barrel jack to run some motor or light and charge the battery and it lasted a decade - only failed because the battery got old. New one now needs a state of the art power delivery chip to negotiate the right voltage and current, and all over a very fine pitch connector that will fail if you look at it wrong. Not looking good on the durability front at all.Are you Apple engieneer? Because I have no idea why PD chip is state of art for you
I don’t work for Apple, but I am an electronics engineer. Just don’t be surprised when your simpler devices start failing.
Since when is a BMS advanced technology?
No, shavers should not use USB C. Because in developed countries you cannot have USB in the bathroom. We have special shaver sockets and they’re not USB compatible.
Then you should refine your laws. Because my shavers all use USB C; and the EU has mandated USBC in specific products, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to expand that.
and the EU
Yeah, I live in Europe, lol. Sockets in bathrooms are very specific here.
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.
Because that somehow sounds both sane and also unhinged, good luck with that.
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?
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.
I was never at any point talking about barreljack or any other intermediary power supply adapters for the devices.
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.
We should all use public chargers. I heard they’re safe
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.
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.
the new trimmer, the charger is USB-A only. Where’s the previous one had the plug on it instead.
Maybe I’m confused.
Your new trimmer takes in USB (Low Voltage DC) power.
Your old trimmer took in Plug (High Voltage AC) power.
If that’s the case, yeah of course the plugs would be different? You’d fry the new one with the old plug.
The OneBlade has a transformer in the wall plug part, the actual cable going to the handheld unit is only carrying low voltage.
What low voltage though? Unless it’s 5V like USB (non-PD and non-QC), they should and need to be incompatible.
looks like the old one was 15v, while the new one is 5v.
Now, if it has used USB-C it could still be 15v…
came to say that. Looks like the old one was 15v, while if the new one is USB-A it was 5v.
Now, if it was USB-C, it could still have been USB-C!
Neither of them take AC power. I have an older one similar to OP’s old one. It uses a wall wart and the input is definitely DC.
Are you sure they charge with the same specifications? This might just be to avoid potential fire hazards & damage.
Yea, one might be
alkalinenimh while the other is lithium. Or maybe even just different flavors of lithium.does that matter? I though only the voltage and wattage would play a role
A lithium battery needs a charging pattern that reduces voltage as it gets closer to full. And overcharging a lithium battery gets real spicy real quick. You also don’t want to charge them too fast because spicy.
Nicad and nimh batteries (I erroneously said alkaline above) don’t, you just blast it with a steady voltage until it’s done, with some nuance for nimh that’s not worth diving into here.
thanks!
Makes 0 difference. The charging circuit is in charge of that logic and will accept whatever voltage is supplied (within spec) and step it down to what the battery needs.
Nice of then to make sure you cant accidentally blow up your new razor because you assumed the old cable would work if it fit.
So stupid idea. What if some 220V cable from a third-party manufacturer does fit?
Plugging in a random cable from some random manufacturer is not a thing that most people would consider doing. (Furthermore, I doubt that any 220V cable would fit, these connectors on the picture are smaller than they look).
I have about ten of these cables, and they are interchangeable.
Yeah because they are standardized. However, these are too big to fit in that razor and the only reason these cables are interchangable is because they follow that standard.
IEC C7
These cables only supply power straight from the net, which is why they are interchangeable. I have some trimmers/shavers that use a similar cable as the one OP is showing, but they are much smaller then what you are showing. The trimmers have an adapter somewhere in between (because incorporating it into a handheld device would be bulky and… why would you want to?) So, because the power is ‘adapted’ it’s no longer interchangeable.
The old cable supplies 15V, which would fry your shaver that is expecting 5V
I think the real sin here is making the shaver dependent on stored charge instead of just letting it run immediately after being plugged in.
It’s a common safety feature for wet & dry razors. It’s so people don’t take them into the shower or bath while it is plugged in.
Battery charged trimmer lets you shower and trim, which is pretty awesome.
I think commenter meant trimmer should be able to work druring charging
Ooooh, yeah. That’s a characteristic that a lot of electronics have that really don’t like.
Is the charge voltage the same on both?
I guess not, the USB one is 5V obviously, but the other one can be 12, 7.2, 8.4, 3.2, whatever
deleted by creator
Figure eight connectors like that input line voltage. So even if the charge voltage is different, the chargers still require the same line voltage.
These are smaller plugs than the figure-eight cords you’re thinking of that plug into old boomboxes, Playstations, etc. They’re DC voltage, not AC.
The WTF here is not that the manufacturer changed the connector slightly, it’s that they were too cheap to include the AC-to-DC converter part of it like they did on their older models, so OP has to buy a USB wall wart to power the stupid thing. The fact that he can’t use the old charger with the new shaver is just an irritating side effect.
I have the same razor. I promise you that it’s not DC. It’s a regular plug that passes 120/60 to the device.
Any company that’s passing 120 (or god forbid 240v) into those tiny little plugs with almost no insulation between them is begging to be sued for electrocuting people. No device used in the bathroom should be passing straight 120v through a connector like that.
I have both of these and one charger is 8v and the other is 15v.
Isn’t it to make sure that you’re not mixing two incompatible chargers? I have 2 Philips chargers that do fit (as far as I can see), but are not the same voltage. I’ve previously also had something like this where 2 fitting chargers were completely different electrically, one 12V AC and the other 9V DC. One time a family member mixed them up, bit luckily the extra voltage didn’t fry anything. I don’t mind having to get an extra charger of it prevents me from doing something dumb and frying my electronics.
I can tell you for certain, I measured my plug phiips (foil and ‘one’) and they are both 14VDC. So short answer is that the plug charger would blow up the usb trimmer you have (which is 5VDC).
The reason I know this and measured them, was because I wasnt sure the two plug chargers were the same, and I didnt want to blow up my philips one.
Also the charger is required to show its voltage and amperage output ratings.
This is true, but something about being an Electronics Engineer makes you want to check. (I didn’t even trust Philips to get it right, but they did.)
I didn’t go into detail, but simple Dashed/Solid line doesn’t tell you the whole story. Those simple wall warts are not fancy switch mode, or even old school rectified. I measured 14VDC unloaded, which I can probably guestimate in experience, to be a 9VDC loaded reading.
The actual reading on wallwarts are generally untrustworthy, unless its a thing from Samsung or apple, where the circuitry are what you would expect (switched etc).
God, why don’t they just make it usb-c PD and be done with it?
This style of connector wedges itself watertight, so there’s that
Because USBC isn’t watertight
The one on my phone is though? It even knows when it’s wet and won’t charge until it’s dry.
Many wet-dry rechargeable razors don’t let you run them when they’re plugged in. Power cords + water = ⚡💀 ⚡
You mean cable or socket?
Here’s my only issue with making everything in the world USB-C…
Different cables have different functions or even are able to handle different voltages and amperage and right now, it’s not clear what cable holds what functionality.
If there were some sort of international color code standard or something, it would be perfect. As of now, I have to keep track of what cable goes with what device.
Every cable should be rated minimum 5V 3A, have functional CC, power and data(Dp, Dn) pins as Type C spec requires. Which means it should also be capable of USB PD(still doesn’t need data pins).
AFAIK every in-spec cable should be able to carry 20V 3A.
Problem is not bad standard, problem is non-compliant cables.
If all your devices are USB-C PD rated then you only need to have cables and wall adapters for your highest rated device as all others will only demand what they can tolerate when the handshake happens after plugging in the cable. The only exception would be devuces that don’t follow the spec but use the plug for cost saving reasons which is a completely seperate issue.
I’m with you. Our phones, the laptop, the Switch, even my vape pen, all use USB C, but most of the cables we have only work on half the devices. Kind of defeats the purpose of being “universal”.
deleted by creator
They used to be an insurance company. How can I trust them knowing that?
Wahl for trimmers.
Pretty sure they never were an insurance company. They’ve always made (consumer) electronics.
Yeah, think you are right and I got my wires crossed. I hear so many random facts at work and they all blend together.
Regardless, still Wahl. Have used Wahl for a decade or more to groom and have had zero issues.
Haha, no worries. Turns out there is a Phillips insurance company, just with a double L, rather than a single L.
They started out as a lamp manufacturer, not insurance.
Make sure the voltage and power requirements are the same. Maybe the old one cannot deliver enough juice for the new one.
That’s one reason a lot of device designers go for USB C proper: it supports multiple voltages and multiple power levels, and in a way where the devices shouldn’t be able to pull too much power from a smaller charger. (assuming they implemented the spec and didn’t just use the plug anyways) In theory, one smart charger with enough oomph could charge anything that sticks to spec up to 240W.
Yup. Lots of conflicting guidance here, but OP needs to check the actual power requirements for each. If they’re the same, then okay, Philips were kinda being dirtbags with the plug. If not, whether different DC voltages or one feeding AC into the shaver body itself, then the bigger sin is not changing the plug MORE to make it more obvious they’re not the same.
Remember the good ol’ days where it was barrel jacks or raw terminals regardless of what the device actually worked with?
ahhh, those were the days … of easily breaking things.
My favorite was devices that just said 12v X Amps, but never specified center positive or center negative.
Fuck you Sony, stop using center negative. It’s a crime against humanity.
looks like the old charger was 15V, while, if the new one is USB-A its 5V
Ouch, non-standard plug for a standard power source? That’s almost worse. If only certain insanely rich companies didn’t do it as a standard practice even after the EU tells them to knock it off…
are the voltages actually the same?
I don’t see how it could be. One plugs into line voltage and the other 5v usb. The reason they changed the plug size is probably to keep OP from frying his new razor.
One plugs into line voltage
Well, but that’s not what’s coming out of the end that you plug into the razor. The wall plug for it contains a transformer that steps it down to 15V. Would still be a bad idea, but it’s not line voltage.
After seeing some other comments I see that is the case. The one I had plugged straight in with the transformer built into the razor. That is why I said probably though, since I couldn’t know for sure.
I don’t know how to check that, also can’t find the specs on the old one.
FYI, to figure this out you would look at the part that plugs into the wall. there’s a bunch of writing on it. at one point it will say something like " input: 120-240 VAC, output: 15 VDC 0.5 A". that’s true for pretty much all transformer bricks. like if you want to see how much a USB brick will supply it will say on there “5V 2A” or whatever.
I only checked the (new) one that is USB-a only and that didn’t have any writing on it.
USB is typically 5v.
Philips was a great company decades ago. They’ve really gone to shit. Especially their CPAP fiasco (Respironics recall).
Philips sold most of their IP and companies use their name. Hue is not made by them either anymore. The CPAPs are made by another company that is owned by Philips. It’s all just a name now.
Good ol’ late stage crapitalism!
The charging requirements have likely changed so the plug was redesigned sup you don’t fry your new shaver using the old plug/adapter.
deleted by creator
