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Macbook Pro in Europe...Help!

V

volntitan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 4, 2005
374
0
Hey folks...

My daughter is heading to Europe tomorrow afternoon to study for 3 months. She has a 15" Macbook Pro. I know she can use the charger without the converter, but she uses her extended chord with her charger and it has a 3 prong (grounded) plug on it. Can she just put the 2 prong european plug adapter on that and plug it in to charge?

Any help with this or any advice I can give her before she leaves tomorrow concerning her Macbook Pro would be great.

Thanks in advance....
 
MowingDevil said:
Is that extra plug from the travel pack?

If so, yes it just pops on the North American plug & the power supply does the conversion automatically for you.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Just pop the two prong European adaptor plug onto the North American plug and it will work perfectly well in any European outlet. She can always buy a spare few at an airport shop, - for anything else she uses, - or any electrical outlet. Apple also sells world wide adaptors in its stores.
Cheers and good luck.
 
We didn't get the "official" Apple Travel adapters. We only needed the European plug, so she didn't want to spend the $50 on the Apple plug when she didn't need the rest of them.

My concern is the 3 prong ground plug. So all she has to do is take the 2 prong Europe adapter and slide it on the 2 bottom prongs and not worry about the ground plug?

I hope this makes sense...was up late and got up early...seems like the wife and I are doing a bunch of work, but it's the kid that gets to go to France!
 
volntitan said:
Hey folks...

My daughter is heading to Europe tomorrow afternoon to study for 3 months. She has a 15" Macbook Pro. I know she can use the charger without the converter, but she uses her extended chord with her charger and it has a 3 prong (grounded) plug on it. Can she just put the 2 prong european plug adapter on that and plug it in to charge?

Any help with this or any advice I can give her before she leaves tomorrow concerning her Macbook Pro would be great.

Thanks in advance....
Click to expand...


You can get three prong American to Euro (whatever country). Try Radio Shack. I advise finding one as the laptop will not be grounded propery if you use the extension. I lived in Germany for over 4 years and lost a few devices to improper grounding and polarity.
 
daflake said:
You can get three prong American to Euro (whatever country). Try Radio Shack. I advise finding one as the laptop will not be grounded propery if you use the extension. I lived in Germany for over 4 years and lost a few devices to improper grounding and polarity.
Click to expand...

Agree. I have travelled quite a bit and always have several of these adaptors which are properly grounded with me (get the correct equipment at the start and you'll be fine). Ikkeson is quite right to say that there are some differences in Europe - the UK and Ireland have one standard (three pronged, but different to the US) - but virtually all of the rest of mainland - west and east - Europe has the two-pronged system. France is a standard European two-pronged system.
Cheers
 
Well one thing I wouldn't want to cheap out on is the power supply to expensive electronic equipment. Keep in mind there is a HUGE difference in an adapter & a converter. Not all adapters are converters.

I just recently moved to Australia so I bought the travel kit through Apple to handle my computer...their power supply is already a converter....so any cheap adapter should work....although I didn't want to take the chance (I'm no electrical engineer) if there was some kind of subtle calibration or whatever. This way I'm also covered if something goes wrong.

For most of my other gadgets like bathroom stuff we picked up a converter/adapter....which wasn't cheap but so far is doing the trick.
 
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