After plugging my phone in to a power source, it will not begin to charge the battery until I unlock it. My laptop similarly can “ignore” the voltage coming through the power cord.
How do these devices reject/ignore/disregard the voltage coming through the power cord?
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At its most basic, a **transistor** is a simple electronic component which is essentially a switch, it will only close the circuit and allow electricity to flow from an input (the *source*) to the output (the *drain*) when another input (the *gate*) is powered. And that gate can absolutely be controlled in software, that’s fundamentally how a computer works.
Modern electronic devices will be far more complicated than a single transistor for their charging circuits, but the basic principal is there. It would be bad design to hardwire the battery to the charging port with no controls in between, one main reason being if you keep blindly charging a full lithium ion battery it will explode. So charging circuits have been a necessary thing pretty much as long as we’ve had rechargeable batteries.
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