Name that Ware, March 2026

The Ware for March 2026 is below:

This ware malfunctioned, so I took it apart to see what’s going on and now it’s this month’s Name that Ware. As it would be far too easy to guess if I showed the whole circuit board, this is just a portion of the whole ware. I suspect the nature of the ware will be easy to figure out, but would be impressed if anyone can determine the exact make & model, since these are likely OEM’d by a handful of factories and the same core design is shared among a wide family of devices.

As a mostly unrelated side-rant, one side effect of the transition to USB-C that I’ve noticed is that power ratings just aren’t what they used to be. If a power supply said 100 watts on the label, it used to mean 100 watts continuous over a full consumer temperature range. Now, somehow, it seems to have become normalized that it’s 100 watts “briefly”, and maybe two thirds of that continuously on a good day. This is a problem if you use your laptop to do board layout (stressing the discrete GPU) while compiling large Rust programs in the background (stressing the CPU) for hours at a time, while also trying to charge your battery after a long flight. Then again, a 90% efficient regulator at 100 watts is dissipating roughly 10 watts of heat – as much as a small soldering iron – so maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked by this outcome.