Why two power ports on a budget laptop??

[dsimic]

You're right on both of the points above.  If the battery charging current (or the max. current available from the charger) is greater than the current required by the computer, the battery may be charged.  Otherwise, the battery will be drained to compensate the difference.  The underrating of the charger outputs and overestimation of the system power consumption is what actually makes such "charger overclocking" physically possible.

No offense, but frankly speaking you're not making much sense here - going back to my pretty tired by now example of R50 with a 30W PSU, it matters very little whether the PSU is capable of outputing 36W when it's rated for 30W if the machine expects 72W.

I'd say that we're basically conveying the same thing all the time, but for some strange reason we're unable to acknowledge that.

A laptop that is declared to consume 72 W will actually use 72 W only under 100% system load, plus 100% screen brightness, etc.  Otherwise, it would consume much less power, which allows it to be powered most of the time by a 30 or 36 W power supply.

However, I've switched from the factory-installed Debian to Manjaro ARM on my PineBook Pro, and it seems that one of the charging issues was caused by some weirdness inside the Debian's Rockchip-provided Linux kernel, which caused much higher power consumption.  The laptop is actually now able to stay away from discharging the battery while being subjected to pretty much the same load as it was the case with the factory-installed Debian, which used to cause the battery to become completely drained in a few hours, despite the laptop being connected to the 5 V, 3 A charger.

I used the Rockchip-provided kernel only for as long as it took me to prepare a microSD card with (nearly) stock Debian using the unofficial "installer" script by danielt@, which is barely a couple hours after I opened the DHL package. And even then, soon afterwards and all through now I've been using the Manjaro kernel with my Debian installation. So whatever charging weirdness I've been experiencing is definitely _not_ due to Rockchip kernel. I've been keeping all my firmware blobs up-to-date, BTW.

It would be very interesting to perform a thorough investigation, because my own experience is rather different.  I can see significant improvements to the power consumption from running the Linux kernel shipped with Manjaro.

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I see my battery drop by about 9% to compile the manjaro kernel package, with screen at 75%, using the pine supplied charger.  No NVMe drive, which would be a considerable extra power draw.

I saw my PineBook Pro battery going from about 95% down to 60% as a result of running "make -j6" inside a Linux kernel tree for just about half a minute.  That was truly disappointing.

PSU in the PBP seems under powered to me.  They could easily get 36W with USB-PD if the regulator could go up to 12V and the rest of circuitry could handle the extra power.

Let's hope that the hardware modifications required to use a higher voltage over USB PD will be actually possible.