I did quickly fact-check myself after posting and my brief reading suggested that it was possible to break the port, motherboard, or the peripheral, but that it was rare and more likely to cause corruption and/or crashes.
and more likely to cause corruption and/or crashes.
Yeah, that’s the neat trick they basically solved by making the power connectors longer. If everything connects at the same time, you connect the data lines while power is still coming up, meaning there’s a few milliseconds of data that you can’t really trust. If the hardware and software on the other side is designed to “trust” the data from the keyboard, who knows what could happen. Probably not something that breaks the hardware, but definitely something that can result in unexpected data for the software.
But, just by adding a few millimeters to the power lines, you give a few milliseconds of power getting stable before data is attached, and that’s enough for things to be nice and stable.
Interesting stuff about the plugs, thanks.
I did quickly fact-check myself after posting and my brief reading suggested that it was possible to break the port, motherboard, or the peripheral, but that it was rare and more likely to cause corruption and/or crashes.
E.g. some anecdata in https://superuser.com/questions/172420/is-it-safe-to-hot-swap-a-ps-2-keyboard and https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/50883/why-some-computer-peripherals-should-not-be-disconnected-without-turning-off-thi
Yeah, that’s the neat trick they basically solved by making the power connectors longer. If everything connects at the same time, you connect the data lines while power is still coming up, meaning there’s a few milliseconds of data that you can’t really trust. If the hardware and software on the other side is designed to “trust” the data from the keyboard, who knows what could happen. Probably not something that breaks the hardware, but definitely something that can result in unexpected data for the software.
But, just by adding a few millimeters to the power lines, you give a few milliseconds of power getting stable before data is attached, and that’s enough for things to be nice and stable.