Some of these features already exist. If you have a dual-role device attached (and no dedicated charger attached), you should be able to select it as a power source in MD Settings. The dropdown menu should include the port name right there.

If those aren't working in Dev/Canary, could you file a new bug? And can you see whether chrome://settings-frame has the same information?

Adding PM and UX folks for the feature requests.

Hi Michael : 

Yes, I agree that the dual-role device dropdown works today.

I think we should build upon that and make it a more useful UI though than a simple dropdown box. We have the entire settings page in MD settings when the user clicks on Power, and it's really sparsely populated. There's a bunch of info that would be informative to the user, but also for our debugging as well.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "michaelpg@chromium.org" to the cc list and removing "Needs-Feedback" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Note that  issue 633455  will add some more stuff to this page when I finally get around to doing it.

As with most of Settings, we tried to minimize how much info/options we surface to users with the Power settings when we added USB-C. Without clear use cases and user need, I don't think we'll add settings to show the different power outputs for chargers, diagrams of devices attached, etc.

If there's a clear need for any of these, let me know and we can take them to UI Review.

Max power is something that I'd like to see as a user (to determine how powerful a particular charger is).

Hi Tom!

Thanks for the insight behind the settings. I agree with that sentiment that we want to minimize the clutter in these settings.

However, in my USB-C adventures, I have definitely seen bad chargers or bad cables that a more robust UI would help demystify quickly what's plugged in without an analyzer or digging through the powerd logs as I do today.

I have seen USB-C chargers that lie about their maximum capability, for example.

In one case, I found a charger that claimed on the box that it was a 30W charger, but it digitally advertised to the Chromebook that it was a 45W charger. The Chromebook treats that digital advertisement as a contract, so it starts drawing 45W, and potentially causes overheating and other bad conditions.

If a user plugs in a charger and the Chromebook settings page says that it's a different Wattage than what the user is expecting, that's a valuable piece of information for the user to seek help and stop using shady chargers.

Furthermore, right now we have a popup that says "low power charger" but we don't explain to the user what that really means.

Along with a more robust display of what the chromebook thinks its power sources are, the user could be notified that "oh, i see. a 15W phone charger is under the 20W that this Chromebook needs to charge at 'full' speed. I'll go and find a 24 or 27W charger instead."

Let me know if this is a clear enough need.

All of this data is in the power manager today, but not many outside of our team knows to go to file:///var/log/power_manager/powerd.LATEST to pull up the most recent log to see what kind of charger is attached.

Hi Benson,

I think you have a deeper knowledge of USB-C than most (certainly more than me!). I'm still hesitant to add anything to Settings since we don't want people to need to think about the wattage of their power supplies, which is why we show a simple low-power notification when we detect it isn't enough for the device.

Apart from low-power issues, are there any cases where we could automatically detect an issue with a USB-C cable/charger? Those would also be good candidates for notifications.

Hi Tom,

In a world where all users can be expected to use the chargers that come with their laptops, I'd agree with you that we don't want people to think about the wattage of their power supplies, but that's actually not the world we live in.

USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery allows for completely valid chargers that supply from 0.5W to 100W of power and any value in between. Chromebooks will charge from a large range of that, but with the caveat that chargers < 20W will pop up the notification about low battery.

I have had LOTS of conversations with technically savvy people inside and outside of Google asking, "why doesn't my phone charger charge my laptop fast?" and I have to explain to them the thresholds we set and the YMMV caveat when using a charger that is much less powerful than the one that came with the laptop... a UI that explains why would go a long way in answering these questions without sending me an email. :)

The USB-IF has standardized on actually putting the wattage of the chargers on the official certified power supply logo. take a look :
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160816005385/en/USB-IF-Announces-Certified-USB-Charger-Logo-Compliance

The USB consortium (of which we are a part) actually is encouraging maximum wattage (instead of voltage and current combinations) as the thing that consumers compare in the stores, so it's not the case that consumers should be protected from the knowledge of what power their power supply is capable of.

I don't think we need anything complicated here to get the largest benefits -- just append e.g. "(30W)" or "(30 watts)" to the charger's description on the settings page.

#14: we'd need more words to clarify whether that wattage is the maximum or the current (hah!)