I'm saying a crowbar isn't a diode, and you're saying that you should call a crowbar a crowbar? Color me confused. Usually a crowbar is a circuit with a triac or SCR in it designed to protect against overvoltage.

This isn't about frayed cables. Frayed cables don't do this. This is about a cable which is wired the opposite of the way it should be. A minimal protection circuit is probably going to cost around $0.20 in quantity (Si2323 on Mouser). For a $500 Chrome Pixel C, the protection circuit is worth the effort if more than 1 in 2,500 ($500 / $0.20) laptops would fail due to charger cables with reversed polarity.

If you think that fewer than 1 in 2,500 laptops will fail this way, then don't bother.

Crowbar is a general concept - a short across a supply. A diode across the rails acts as such, so I referred to it as a crowbar. I'm familiar with SCR-based active crowbar circuits - what we're disagreeing about is narrow-prescriptive versus wide-descriptive usage of a term.

Most frayed cables are going to simply short or open, but the right combination of such would cross wires. But sure, they're going to be rare.

On a $500 device I would indeed expect a modicum of robustness against negligently designed cables and other weirdness. I mean, I'm not the only one that doesn't have a cable tester and buys cables without a connected-equipment warranty, right? Historically, electrical connections have been designed to deal with weird shit. Do you think you could kill an RS-232 port with any permutation of connections?

Of course the cost metric explains why devices are no longer robust. In fact the manufacturer only has to worry about in-warranty failures, and furthermore only the ones they can't blow off as "user error". Just because devices are designed for the 4 month (or whatever it's down to) upgrade cycle, doesn't mean that informed consumers shouldn't call out designers of such equipment as the cheapskates they are!

Ugh. Am I the only one who appreciates cheap things for what they are? Over-engineering something is a bad thing, just as under-engineering it is too. It makes things more expensive than they have to be.

There's an art to designing something to last for no longer than it has to, and to use not a single part that isn't necessary. How much worse would our lives be if we had to pay industrial/commercial prices for all of our goods?

> It makes things more expensive than they have to be.

Consumer electronics are -generally- ridiculously cheap these days. I welcome more "overengineering", even if it drives up the cost somewhat. :)

The problem is cost != quality in any reliable way any more.

That's an entirely separate issue from the one that my comment speaks to. :)