In this age, when most electronic devices live on low voltage DC, why do we keep building them to plug into AC power, with all that lost energy and lost space taken up by bricks and other power supplies?
Instead, why haven't we standardized on some standard DC power plug, maybe with +5V and +12V, with some minimum power cleanliness? Houses and office buildings could be wired with that alongside AC, and people could buy power strips that plug into AC and provide many standard DC outlets (old houses would not have to be rewired). Then many devices wouldn't need power supplies at all, and others would need much more minimal power supplies that would just clean it up and maybe alter the voltage level to its own purposes. I know that DC doesn't travel well for long distances, so still only AC would come to the house/building, but I'd rather have one big, efficient brick in the basement, or one medium-sized, efficient brick in my office, than zillions of little inefficient bricks all over the place.
I guess we kind of have some standards like this, because you can buy 12V stuff for off-grid homes and there's the "cigarette lighter" adapter for cars, and another one for airplanes. But still most stuff we buy plugs into AC.
Imagine a world with no power bricks, and smaller, quieter PCs, tiny phone/camera chargers, etc.
Presumably because of economies of scale, the AC/standard DC adapters could be built to be smart enough to consume not much more power than they emit.
Why haven't we done this? Couldn't a relatively small coalition of big manufacturers do something like this to add value to their products and reduce their costs at the same time?
I admit to being an analog electronics moron so there must be something I'm missing.
