I don’t recall any prior agreement(s) between Google/Framework and Volta in creating a magnetic cable connector expansion card specifically for Volta’s “products”. Never mind that the very last thing an user wants is having the power pin(s) misalign - because this isn’t Apple’s MagSafe or Microsoft’s Surface Connect - and watch their laptop go up in magic smoke.
I would hope Framework would make a blog post if there was any real level of legit collaboration.
I imagine they’re simply misusing “collaborated” to make people think Framework was fully involved in design & verification, in order to imply that Framework gives their blessing on the safety of it.
They could have just asked someone if it was “ok” if they make an expansion card. If they got an answer, boom, “collaboration” justification. FW wants people to make cards, so of course it’s ok. Or maybe it was slightly more than that. But anything short of Framework fully verifying the safety of the card, saying they “collaborated” with Framework is misleading, intentionally so imo.
Why would it not be safe?
I have not seen the design of it, but it should be at least possible to make it safe. My understanding is that the main aim of this type of connector is no matter which way it is bashed or pulled out, it cannot damage the connector.
ESD, arcing, USB not being designed for it, and Volta’s adapter trying to do 20Gbps Thunderbolt. You can’t protect high speed data lines cheaply or in a small package.
And in a package this tiny? Not even if money was no object.
That tells you they did not concern themselves with protection.
this is a VERY fiddly class of technology, and even apple has had a long history of trouble with their magsafe connectors… there’s a reason they’re up to magsafe 3, and it’s not just total amount of power transmission; magsafe 2 charging boards had a higher-than-expected failure rate over the lifetime of the machines that contained it, and that’s with apple’s ridiculous engineering budget AND them being on the second revision of the connector. probably played heavily into the large gap between magsafe 2 and magsafe 3, where apple just didn’t bother trying to do magsafe for a while.
and of course nobody can do it the way apple does, because of patent encumbrance, so they have to do hinky things to dodge that. so yeah, the connector will probably be fine, it’s the electronics on the expensive side of the connector we should be concerned about.
Even more importantly the apple thing is power only which could be made pretty safe relatively easily (you just need the power and cc pins and you can put a ton of protection on the cc pins pretty easily).
Putting data on there too adds way more sensitive and hard/expensive to protect signal pins that also have to be a lot smaller and closer together.
I just hope the people using them are honorable enough not to bother the framework warranty people when they blow a usb4 re-driver, pd controller or parts of the soc depending on what port they use.
We provided them with some CAD and they gave us some early samples to test out a couple of years ago while we were developing the Chromebook Edition of Framework Laptop 13. We provided some feedback from initial testing, but didn’t do deeper validation around the system. Overall, we would consider this an interesting but not validated 3rd party product in the ecosystem, similar to the many other projects that individuals or small companies pull together and discuss with us, but not like the Cooler Master Mainboard Case, which was a formal partnership.
