Thinkpads Forum

A month or so ago I purchased a fully-maxed X1C5 - despite the 16:9 screen it's quite a jolt coming from my current four T500 and W500 machines.

This guy, as you know, uses a USB-C charger rather than the familiar round tip jobbies used since the Pleistocene Era.

Question: In a pinch, would the "dumb" USB-C charger for my cellular phone work to charge the X1, or is there some sort of magic electronic wizardry in the Lenovo power brick that tells me "Don't Do That!"?

And conversely, would the Lenovo power brick charge my phone without turning the phone into a flaming debacle?

Art

My bet is that the phone charger will not charge the laptop, because it cannot provide the higher voltage. The laptop charger should be able to provide lower voltage, and will charge the phone just fine. Every charger should have the exact supported voltage/amperage outputs written on it, so you should be able to know the answer by reading those. Usually, USB-C charging implies negotiations - if the device and charger fail to converge to a supported power output, it simply won't charge. I don't know if there are exceptions to this (there probably are; it's always possible to make dumb broken electronics).