So my phone is charged by a cable. It plugs into the wall on one side and then plugs into my phone on the other. This system works great - I plug my phone in when I go to bed and unplug it when I wake up. The cable is long enough to plug into my phone even if I want to use it in bed. It's easy, cheap and failproof.
What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?
It takes something easy and makes it effortless. Like AirPods, this has a surprising number of implications that you really don't think about until you try it.
If I'm just setting my phone down on my desk and it's at 50%, and my cable is right there, I may not bother to plug it in. Especially if I might get up again in 5 or 10 minutes. But if I can just set it down in a particular place and regain a couple percentage points, and I do this twenty times a day, it adds up.
This is what I never understood, even slightly. Why not just give an iPod / iPhone dock without all the wireless bullshit? I prefer a dock as it holds phone at a handy angle, syncs, and doesn't have the myriad of drawbacks of bluetooth.
Smartphone battery life is so shit, on every model, that I always plug my phone in. Even if the cable / socket is only going to be around for minutes. So no saving here. In the days of docks, I dropped phone on dock every time I was at my desk.
My first few phone models (Motorola StarTAC etc) had a battery life in weeks, and I usually had a charger/dock with space for keeping the phone and a spare battery fully charged.
So from here it sounds like you've made a feature of going backwards at a rate of knots.
Many people are not like you. I personally don’t plug in at my desk even though a cable is there, as it’s one more thing to do. It’s also then tethered, meaning I have an extra step if I want to walk away and bring my phone with me. It’s also tethered meaning I have a loose cable now dangling in my way, which aside from functional issues is also ugly to look at.
I know many who almost never charge their phones, essentially always living at 5%.
Having a clean looking mat that’s permanently located where I can throw my phone on, without regard to position or orientation, would be awesome.
Yep, and curiously enough it is exactly the way cordless phones have been designed for years.
For someone "on the move" the dock or the wireless chargers are equally unsuitable, for those (most of users I believe) that simply plugin their (smart)phone placing it on their night table when they go to sleep they are pretty much the same, the "you can lay it down in every orientation" doesn't seem to me such a needed feature.
You can’t use the phone while it’s in the dock, and putting it in and taking it out is actually quite annoying. I’ve had several docks in the past, I wouldn’t go back.
I had a dock and replaced it with wireless charger as soon as they were available. The ease of just placing your phone on a surface vs. lining up your phone with the dock is well worth it.
The two Qi chargers I've used don't really require much lining up. With the Pixel Stand the alignment is obvious, I've never missed the alignment on that. I also have used Samsung's round, flat charger. Its a circle. Its hard to miss the center of the circle.
The Qi wireless charger for my Galaxy S5 has a noticeable precision requirement for placing the phone - it doesn't charge at full speed unless the phone is accurately placed, which is infuriating and makes me cut back my use of wireless charging; I've confirmed this by having a USB power meter attached and watching the current draw change as I move the phone around the pad.
Your buying Apple. Price as an argument is long gone.
This whole thread is really asinine.
Wireless charging is a seamless, elegant solution to a problem.
It is not the only solution.
It is not a perfect solution.
It is not the cheapest solution.
It is not the most cost effective solution.
It is likely not the best solution for your battery life.
Docks and wires are not an elegant solution.
That's all the argument is.
One is old, painful and requires though, the other, does not.
It doesn't need to be a perfect argument, you don't have to buy into it. But unless you've tried it, please keep your opinions to yourself, because there is unlikely a chance you'll really "get it" and your single sided perspective is really not that useful.
MagSafe was in the sweet spot IMO. Doesn't require too much alignment, symmetrical pinout, disconnects quickly and safely, low mechanical wear from use.
I've taken to buying magnetic USB cables for this reason. Plug a connector into the bottom of phone/tablet, put a cable at work, in car, and next to the bed, and it's super easy to connect and disconnect, with no worry that the Micro-B connection is getting bent (with cats and a child we've gone through way more USB Micro-B cables than I would have expected).
I can see one significant improvement for the wireless mats. The number one part of my phone to fail first has always been the charging port. The mat reduced the wear and tear on that port which could extend the life of my phone.
Isn’t this bad for the battery? ISTR you want to keep the battery between 20 and 80 percent. More than that and it winds up heating up the battery during charge. Or is that just for electric cars?
That was the case, I think, with old NiCd batteries, but with lithium ion batteries, you maximize battery longevity by keeping it mostly charged, I read recently.
Not really, that’s still the sweetspot for most lithium batteries as well (being under 20% is much more critical than being over 80% though).
What’s different between them is battery memory effect. With NiCd & NiMH you are supposed to let it discharge until 20%, then continuously charge up, and then repeat.
With Lithium based batteries it’s a recommended practice to charge in short bursts and keep the battery at a medium level.
In any case, most devices now a days will manage the battery in ways that you should not really bother. It’s amazing the conplexity that battery systems have nowadays.
That's called (mild) OCD and ordinary people don't suffer from it. Don't feel bad, I do the same, it seems to be a common trait in IT (anyone writing code kind of has to have it...).
If I don't keep my phone at 100% while at my desk, and then I go out somewhere after work, there's a chance my phone will run down to 0% while I'm out, potentially stranding me somewhere.
I don't think that's OCD. It's just planning ahead.
If I'm in an area with good connectivity I can easily last two days with my OnePlus. On the move, though, or in bad signal areas, and 20 hours might be the limit.
I used to live life at the edge and only charge my phone at 1%. Then a relative had a medical emergency and I had to stay at the hospital for hours, and my phone lost power so i couldnt call anyone. Now I always try to keep it fully charged. So no this is definitely not OCD.
People with OCD still learn from their own and other people's mistakes and adapt their own behavior.
It's not the learning part that's important, it's how one applies what they learned, and the way they act on what they fear might happen that can fall into OCD.
An obsession with being always 100% charged when you leave the house, immediately plugging to charge etc, always checking to make sure, etc, can point to OCD, even if it "makes sense" (e.g. to avoid being ever stuck without charge in an emergency).
I'm still annoyed that Apple made an excellent dock connector, it became widespread especially in hotels, it was ideal for use with external speakers, and then killed it off.
You mean the (IMO) inferior 30-pin? In order to make the phone smaller, they had to ditch it. Also, they were running out of unused pins to assign to new functions
> Smartphone battery life is so shit, on every model, that I always plug my phone in.
Buy a better phone next time. I'm currently using a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 which lasts about 5-6 days on a single charge (10-15 hours of screen-on time), before that I used (and still use when doing 'dangerous' work) a Motorola Defy which lasted almost as long on a single charge. Neither of these phones were the newest or thinnest when I bought them, both of them have a relatively large battery (4000 mAh in the Xiaomi, 1750 mAh in the (> 8 years old) Motorola). Neither phone had the fastest SoC when they were launched.
I also removed all bloat from the devices before using them, either by swapping the default Android distribution for an alternative of by disabling/removing unwanted packages. This alone adds a day or two to the longevity.
I don't use Apple products, but I do use a wireless charger for my Samsung phone. The reason is that I keep it in a rather beefy protector case and fiddling with the charging port flap is annoying, which would also impede it working with any kind of dock, and I'm not about to carry a naked phone - I can't trust myself not to drop it.
The one distinct advantage of wireless charging is that my Galaxy S5 has the same waterproofing flap over the USB port, and I've already worn through one of these (thankfully Samsung had the foresight to make them very easy to replace when the clip breaks), so the charger does not require opening the flap.
With the angle it sits at, when notifications come in FaceID will correctly ID me and unlock the device so I can at a glance see what the notification is.
As for syncing? All of that is done to the cloud, so that's not really something I care much about.
Quite - why complexify and lower the charge efficiency it by making it wireless to hold it in exactly the same position as dock?
A perfect example - to my mind - of where a dock would be better, and probably cheaper.
As far as cloud goes, I realise I'm an outlier - perhaps not so much on HN - but I want local copies and start by mistrusting cloud unless I have adequate redundancy. So iPhone gets locally backed up still. Can't see that changing soon, wireless or no. :)
All docks I’ve seen require careful insertion of the phone, to a) hit the spot where the cable goes in and b) not to scratch the phone if I miss. Wireless: just slam the phone on the puck (or stand), carelessly.
maybe you use your phone agressively, but consider picking a phone with a good battery.
In my light use situation, my MotoG4 has aprox 2 days of battery. Under heavy use I can expect at least 12 hours. Add a phone compatible "rapid charger" and you can expect full charge in less than an hour.
My wife on the other hand, has a new Huaweii and it's battery lasts about 8 hours with moderate use. Not a phone I would consider, but she bought it for the fancy camera.
Your argument could equally apply to some kind of dock/cradle. With the added advantage of it being propped up into a better reading position, and the possibility of a wired data connection.
They never seem to have taken off though. My only guess is because it would only fit one phone/ trap a manufacturer into a form factor.
The difference is with a sock I need to consciously put it in and take it out. Getting a text message with the phone at an angle so I can read it doesn’t matter to me because I still need to pick it up and carefully line it back down to respond.
Yes it takes less than a second but you know what’s even more effortless? A wireless charging mat that I can just set my phone onto.
If we are splitting hairs over 'a second' and 'effortless' (when effortless still means you've got to make sure it's nicely lined up, if we're talking about actual products here), then surely some kind of in trouser charger is even better. Why should I spend seconds rifling through my pocket, to find my phone to charge it?
With a dock you can see if the message is even worth responding to. I don't need to respond to that text from my bank, and I don't have to waste multiple seconds picking my phone up to discover that.
A charging mat goes on a flat surface that ends up attracting clutter. A dock with phone in doesn't, so when my phone does beep, I don't have to go rifling under paperwork to find it.
So to me a charging mat doesn't seem like the obvious slam dunk you seem to think it is.
You know they make wireless chargers in angled form factors, right? Here's one I used to use when I had a Qi compatible Samsung. Also you don't have to do any aligning. If the phone is not falling out of the charger, then it's in the sweet spot.
I can’t use it on a wireless charger. That kills the only use case where I might actually need to charge the device during the day. Playing movies while sick.
Any point where I can’t just charge at night in normal useage means a larger battery is going to win over easier charging.
i've found what I believe to be the heat generated by wireless chargers to have a negative effect on my battery longevity. Personally, I avoid them now after being a huge advocate from them. The reality is, Battery life on phones have improved to the point that I also rarely need to charge my phone anymore other than what I'm about to go to sleep anyway.
» The reality is, Battery life on phones have improved to the point that I also rarely need to charge my phone anymore other than what I'm about to go to sleep anyway.
On the Android side, batteries have gotten bigger with phones but more importantly the OS is getting better at battery management. With lineage 16 (Android pie), I can choose to enable battery saver at 75% battery.
I'm still on a Nexus 6. What has changed in battery technology recently?
I have no idea. I imagine most of the improvements in battery life stem from them being able to fit larger batteries in smaller packages along with hardware and software optimizations as well as improvements in cell reception. It could also be my usage. I listen to a lot of music during the day and perhaps the larger batteries are just able to accommodate me longer than the smaller ones.
I loved my Nexus 6 but I doubt I could still be using it still today so I am impressed. Can I ask what your reasons are for not having upgraded it? I generally upgrade my phones bc of the battery but this time I hope to just get it swapped out in a year or two.
» I loved my Nexus 6 but I doubt I could still be using it still today so I am impressed. Can I ask what your reasons are for not having upgraded it? I generally upgrade my phones bc of the battery but this time I hope to just get it swapped out in a year or two.
My main excuse is I got it a year after it was launched on a black Friday sake so I want it to last one more year.
On top of that I got to use a Samsung Galaxy s7e for almost a year in 2017.
Mainly, it was probably that I didn't want to spend the money. I can make the excuse that I an saving money toward a new desktop computer but I've been giving myself that excuse since before ryzen launched so I know it is just an excuse in telling myself.
My main use apps at the moment k9 mail, Google voice, slide for Reddit, and Mozilla Firefox. The camera on the Nexus 6 is horrible for current year. Perhaps I'll finally get a new phone this year. Perhaps if xiaomi releases the poco phone F2? 4Ah battery sounds nice.
Not sure on the camera or rest of the specs, but the moto G7 power is pretty cheap I think and has a 5Ah battery. Haven't got around to reading reviews since it launched the other month.
I would not consider "enabling battery saver" as the OS getting better. I would if it battery saver was by default on, at which point it's not a "battery saver" mode, it's just normal mode.
Yes, this is a reason I avoided wireless as well, but Samsung have a wireless charger with a fan in it which pumps the heat out. I've used it over a year and never felt my phone even being warm when charging.
It's not the heat, it's the increased use. when you're hardwired, you get enough power that your phone just bypasses the battery. If you use a charging mat, you still 'run' from battery. This means increased cycles which reduces battery life.
If the battery is charging then logically there must be enough residual power to run the phone.
If there wasn’t then the battery would not charge at all unless you turned off the phone first, but it obviously does.
Also a phone on a charging mat cannot easily be used and the screen will be off most of the time lowering power requirements.
The things that kill smartphone batteries today are age and power cycles. It doesn’t matter if you charge from 0% to 100% in one go or from 90% to 100% ten times. Both add up to one power cycle.
To keep your battery fresh for as long as possible, always keep the phone connected to a charger. No battery cycles. It will get worse after a few years anyway.
> It doesn’t matter if you charge from 0% to 100% in one go or from 90% to 100% ten times.
This isn't really true, as far as I know. If you avoid fully charging or deeply discharging a lithium-ion battery, the wear per unit of energy extracted is smaller.
There are some statistics quoted here (https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_l...) showing that if you, say, halve the amount of energy you retrieve from a battery in each cycle, the battery lasts for more than twice as many cycles.
Also, I want to add that what I wrote above is only regarding smartphones. I don’t know how much stress/extra heat etc that EV batteries are subject to, but I imagine they drain/charge at more intense rates relatively.
The sole reason I rooted my pixel 2 was to install a simple app which disables charging when I reach 80%. I get all the wins of not killing the battery by constantly saturating it, together with being able to leave it plugged in whenever I am at at my desk.
I so wish manufacturers would offer this option, for those primarily deskbound who do not relish ungluing their battery after a year
I think it is a built in (but configurable) option on newer Sony models.
Edit: they call it Qnovo Adaptive Charging and they get another minus from me [0] for making it impossible to select text on tye page by long-pressing it.
[0]: they got a huge minus from me back when they added "sponsored links" to my flagship Z3 or what it was.
Age, cycles and heat. Inductive charging loops are going to generate a ton of waste heat, and worse yet a good chunk of that is going to be coming from the coil inside the phone.
Yeah, but a battery gets hot when charging fast. Keeping it connected at 100%, the phone stays cool in my experience. And charging often makes the window where it generates heat from charging smaller
The act of charging the battery does itself generate some heat, as does the charging circuitry within the phone. This will happen with either method of charging. Wireless inductive charging will also generate significantly larger amounts of waste heat.
Fundamentally, wireless charging is less efficient. Theoretically you could be putting 16w of heat into the phone but only getting 8w of charging.
EV batteries cost $5000+ to replace and are expected to last 7-10 years, maybe more if you push it. And they are a huge pain to recharge in the middle of the day if you suddenly need to. How many years do you plan to keep your phone for? Who cares if the battery only has 70% of original capacity after 3 years and on some days you need to find 20minutess in the middle of the day to leave it plugged in to recharge?
I can slap my phone down on the charger next to my bed in the dark. I can grab my phone off the charger on my desk at work with one hand. Before wireless charging, it wasn't much hassle, and I only rarely had trouble with my phone battery dying. Now it's almost no hassle, and I never have trouble with my battery dying. It's just a nice quality-of-life boost.
This made a lot (more) sense when even corded charging was kind of slow and meant that the use time to charge time was pretty bad; ~2 hours to charge: ~12 hours to use gives an optimistic 6 use/charge time ratio, but now that fast charging and USB-C power deliver devices can charge in ~30 minutes and last ~20 hours that gives a use/charge ratio of 40. Given that if I have to leave my phone on a wireless charger for much longer; I greatly increase the risk that I'm picking up an undercharged phone.
But like in your use case, it's a nice to have thing that provides standby charging and can prevent your phone from at least loosing power over the day. Honestly, I think the best solution would be a USB-C dock so that you would have the convienience of wireless with the fast speed (and PC connection potentionally) of a wired connection.
I have done some testing with the 3rd party iPhone chargers recently. I have a device that measures the number of watts the charger is generating for the phone. The limit on wireless charging is 7.5 watts and many of them don’t quite get there. Most are between 5 and 6 watts. Now this is about the same as the stock Apple charger that comes with your iPhone. I ended up buying a 3rd party charger that supports up to 20 watts for the fast charging compatible iPhones such as 8, X and Xs. You also need the $20 Apple usb-c to lightning cable, but the result is a truly fast charge. Of course my 2015 Samsung Galaxy s6 came with a fast charger in the box, but I am glad that with pricy accessories we can have the same with the iPhone
I have to agree. A dock or pad with a cable or two and an inductive charging mat would be ideal. I like my setup, but it'd be much easier to remember to charge my AirPods if I could just place them on a pad, or just casually laying my phone down, and still getting a charge, but having the option of a cable for the fast charge and being able to charge and use simultaneously.
I have a quad lock desk mount with Qi charger attachment I use at my work desk. It's wonderful and fulfils a similar use case that you have specified here. I can quickly attach the phone and it's charging... often charging all day as I work. I also have a Qi Ikea charger next to it that is often used while I am doing other activities away from my desk. The Quad Lock desk mount is great for seeing notifications coming in, and the Ikea charger is handy if I need a quick top-up during the day and I'm in a rush and drop it in place.
As the other commenter said, the more convenient method is to hold the phone upside-down and pull it out.
The less portable method, assuming you have a phone sufficiently smaller than your hand and sufficient pull, is to pull the cord out using some of the non-opposable digits that are located near the phone bottom when it's right-side up.
I usually opt for the former, but the latter is much more feasible than I would have expected (IME USB-C is not that hard to tug out, by mistake or otherwise, though it's still better than microUSB B).
It’s not super convenient, but I do it this way: press the phone to the ball of my palm with the middle, ring and little finger and use the thumb and the index finger to pull the cable out.
The trickiest part is the positioning of the phone in the palm, because that pulling motion has a very limited range.
That’s nice for you, but some of us suffer from disorders that lead to shaking hands and poor coordination, such that plugging in a device to such a small port is a grueling, sometimes impossible task. What then?
Sure, I wasn't trying to imply anything about people who, for one reason or another, had difficulty with or could not do it, I was just expressing surprise that this might be a much larger subset of people than I had previously thought.
I think it’s something most people _can_ do, but _don’t_ do simply because unplugging the cord from the bottom of your phone with one hand is rather awkward, especially with larger models.
I think the real point is the eventual removal of the port altogether.
If you can sync your phone over Wifi, stream to audio over Bluetooth, and reliably and quickly charge wirelessly, then you can remove the port altogether allowing for thinner, more robust, more water resistant designs. It's probably also cheaper to boot.
That's the wireless future that I imagine Apple was/maybe still is imagining.
I wirelessly deploy from Xcode regularly. It’s slower than cable-based deploys, but not much, and the convenience is worth it for me.
(Apple’s wireless deploys replace the cable, but I assume they do not happen over the cloud — both devices are on the same local network. I haven’t checked the network traffic, but I’d be surprised if the broader internet is involved.)
Well so does mine since it was an important feature to me. This conversation is about Apple products though, and they decided to make a convoluted reason to try and prop up their Airpods and Beats headphones to be "courageous". Samsung almost has the problem solved by wireless charging of devices from the phone, however I'm not sure about the long term ramifications of sending electrical signals directly at devices plugged into your ears. Apple Airpods remind me of that scene about hair gel from "Something About Mary" and are basically meant to be thrown away after a few years of use. Meanwhile I've had the same headphones with different earbuds for literally over 5 years. When there are two USB C chargers I might consider dropping the headphone jack.
In the present/short term, having a few spots in your home and office you can slap down whatever it is (phone+battery case, headphones, watch) whenever you don’t actively need to use it and just quickly pick them up when you need them. Even a few minutes charge can be handy.
In the medium term, the fact that it is portless and at this point, standardized, are features. Even a modicum of wear and tear can eat through ports (in both the phone and the power brick, but usually the phone) and cables (which is the common failure case if you travel with cables because you otherwise wouldn’t have one every place you need them). Anything that eliminates even a bit of wear and tear necessitating fewer repairs and replacements is a plus. Well the caveat here is I don’t know the failure states of Qi wireless charging pads yet, so there is possibly something I haven’t considered here.
In the long term: I would like a desk, where recessed into this desk is a a pad where I can place my phone, desktop, laptops on top of and have both power and a high speed LAN confined to that desk without the access point in the other room acting as the medium of exchange, and without having to plug every powered device individually into an outlet or cable to charge. This would massively cut down on RF interference, reduce the total number of cables I need to be concerned about, and make keeping the area around my desk clean a bit easier. I manage now, and it is fine, but I really dislike having to replace any cables in my current setup with another cable unless I’m reducing the number of cables, and I strongly dislike having to add to the number of cables in any space I maintain.
Might be a dream, but it is my dream. If all I cared about was keeping my phone charged, proximity charging wouldn’t be a selling point. When I factor in all the other infrastructure in my life I have to keep powered and charged and cabled, it is a much stronger sell.
Thank you for sharing this. I think this is a very good idea.
>I would like a desk [...] and have both power and a high speed LAN [...]
Based on what I've seen I think there is a huge (untapped) demand for desks like these in coworking spaces. The tough part in making something like this is actually the design. So you'll have to work with someone who is skilled in carpentry/ sketching and go through a few iterations before you can have a good product/ something to show prospects.
Like a self contained cubicle but essentially a workdesk. I like this idea very much. You should work on it.
Wireless charging’s nice to have at home— it’s pretty convenient to just be able to throw my phone on the charger at night and have it charged in the morning, without having to mess with a cable.
The real killer app for me, though, is wireless charging in the car. I’ve got a Qi charger built into my car (and Qi phone mounts are readily available as retrofits for cars that don’t) and it’s really handy (and likely safer) to be able to just throw my phone in the pad if I realize it’s low while driving rather than having to fumble around with a cable.
> and it’s really handy (and likely safer) to be able to just throw my phone in the pad if I realize it’s low while driving
Why are you doing anything with your phone, including ascertaining it's on a low charge, while driving? Plug your phone in at the start of your trip if it needs charging.
Plugging the phone in the car is the most irritating thing to do in my car. Maybe with CarPlay it’s better as I wouldn’t have to fight the mount and the cable.
I was of the same opinion until I got a charging pad from Costco for Christmas. I decided to try it out to be polite, and was surprised at how much I like it. I don't have to fish for the cable, I don't have to try to plug it into the speakers a few times in the dark before finding the right port, and if I want to pick up my phone to check something really quick I can just do it without unplugging or having to hover near the cord. Life-changing, no, but certainly worth a few bucks to me.
Yeah I bought some wireless charger off amazon (I think it supports up to 10W, but you know how amazon is) just to try it out and haven’t stopped using it. I really thought it was going to be super gimmicky and that I was going to just keep using a cable.
Cables fall off the nightstand and slip into crevices of death. They get stolen to power a device in the kid’s room. They are hard to find in the dark. They have to be attached and detached. They can snag and knock a glass of wine all over the sheets. They are a choking hazard for your pet gecko.
Ok, I made that last one up.
I didn’t understand the appeal until I put one on my nightstand.
Now if my phone buzzes I can grab it, glance at it, and toss it back on the wireless charging stand.
My kids have T1D and I monitor their blood sugars on my phone. If they are too high or low I get an alert. Sometimes the sensors drop out, and I get an alert. If I wake up during the night I glance at their numbers. In short, there’s a lot of quick burst of phone use most nights, and I carry my phone into their rooms if I need to make a correction.
Not having to plug and unplug my phone every time I get up to check on them is a small miracle.
But for anyone, really, being able to just toss down and pick up the phone is a tiny little dopamine hit versus fidgeting with a cable.
Cables are subject to breaking (specifically the connectors) and given how hard it is for many phones to listen to music via headphones and charge at the same time, I can see the appeal. Also, jacks are only rated for a limited number of cycles (connects, disconnects) due to the fact that there is mechanical connection taking place.
In the future, I imagine wireless charging being built into key pieces of furniture (see Ikea's attempts) where you might like to charge your phone. At the makerspace I run, we are embedding wireless charging into our custom-built tables which, I have to say, is super nice just to drop your phone down and have it charge.
Wireless charging is not without costs. One of the costs is that coil heating the article talks about is not limited to the charger, the phone coil also heats up. And being usually stuck to the battery, the already stressed battery (by the charging) is also stressed by the additional coil heat - not good for the non-replaceable battery. I understand that phones (even $1000 ones) are disposable these days, but this makes them even more short-lived.
yep. The more I think about it and my own prior habits, I think there are a lot of people who are overusing wireless chargers. I once had wireless chargers everywhere and I never had such poor battery longevity in a phone than on those I charged wirelessly everywhere. If I do it again, I'll leave it by the bedside and that will be it.
The amount of money Apple makes from selling replacement cables due to fatigue due to inadequate (in their opinion “ugly”) strain relief is negligible. Please stop spreading this inaccurate meme.
Apple makes money because they sell metric shitloads of $1200 phones and $600 watches and, increasingly, software and services for them. Not cables.
I can get an Amazon Basic's brand USB-C cable for $4.17 per meter. Apple sells theirs for $19 per meter.
Is Apple selling these cables at cost, or are they making a profit from them? Amazon isn't a brand I trust either, but from the magnitude of that difference I'm pretty sure Apple is making a tidy profit on these cables. I don't think Apple is a trillion dollar company because of cable sales, but from where I sit it sure seems like Apple is a company that loves nickel and diming people even though they don't need to.
The USB-C standard is arcane and cables can have wildly different functionality and quality and still comply with the standard. Occam's razor suggests that there is not some cable markup conspiracy going on here. Higher quality cables + luxury brand tax is a far more reasonable solution.
Apple's filings show that less than one half of one percent of their revenue comes from the entirety of the MFi program, which includes not just the first-party cables they make, but every single licensed iPhone-compatible accessory of any kind anywhere in the world.
It seems silly to me to think that Apple would jeopardise the value of the number one consumer electronics product on the planet, the product that produces 60% of their revenue, by nickel-and-diming customers on cables.
Who is buying $19 Apple branded charging cables? I guess if consumers want to lean into every minor expense it's hardly fair to blame the company for taking their money... Clearly they were eager to give it to someone in a hurry.
Ah there it is, the obligatory blaming of the user. It's a well known fact that Apple makes cables with insufficient strain relief[0]; it's infuriating when somebody starts pretending that isn't the case. Cables aren't fruit, they aren't meant to "go bad". Even a cable that gets replaced for free is still a cable that gave me grief and wasted my time.
Even your claimed failure rate, 2 replacements in 10 years, is abysmal! That's what, 3 or 4 years per cable? I have cables 20+ years old that are as good as the day I bought them.
One factor is expansion into multiple devices. Right now that's Apple watch, AirPods, and iPhone. Maybe a few more future ones like beats isolating headphones (existing product that doesn't charge wirelessly), a keychain dingus, augmented reality glasses, chest strap sleep monitor, or a bike computer.
Apple would very much like to sell you more hardware every year. They are very well equipped to innovate here.
Pile all your gadgets on this mat is much easier than plug 3 things in every night. In the non tech world, people don't baby their gadgets. I know of a few non tech friends who just leave the apple watch at home if they forget to charge it (instead of hauling the charger to work). Do that enough and you start to wonder why you bought the Apple Watch and then you wonder if you should really buy the next one.
There are also lots of form factors where the space saving is key to product success. Apple Watch is the current one. But in the future... AR glasses look dorky if there's anything bigger than about 5mm cubed on them. A sleep monitoring headband or chest strap would be much better being very low profile. (You might put your apple watch on the nightstand and put on the chest strap every night.)
I have a Nexus 7 2013 whose USB jack no longer works (probably accumulated damage from bumps/drops/general stressors), but wireless charging still works fine.
(High-five ThatPlayer who posted at the same time)
I wish that were the case here, as I've "fixed" other ports by lintectomy (and it has been long enough I had to go check it again!) but this is physical damage to the port.
The USB jack is always the first to fail for me too. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get it replaced. Where I am a USB jack replacement (parts and labour) is about USD 8 (and a replacement for a scratch screen (5 inch 720x1280 so nothing special) is about USD 15, both at a local electronics market.
I felt the same way until I bought my wife a wireless charger as something she might think was “neat”. I wasn’t even sure if she would use it but at least it would be an option. Once I saw how nice the experience actually was I bought one for myself. It’s really nice on the bed side table. Much nicer than fiddling with a cord in the dark. It wasn’t life changing but it definitely felt better than plugging in.
Convenience. I keep one on my desk. Everytime I sit down, I place my phone down on my charger pad, because that's where it goes. The 1 less step of having to hunt for a cable and plug it in makes it second nature to have my phone always charging or fully charged. Similarly in cars that have wireless charging nowadays, there's a tray of some sort to put it in.
Rather than charging when I need to, wireless charging makes it convenient enough to be charging all the time. Unless you have a lifestyle where you're out and about, and you don't have chargers everywhere you are, it's a nice addition.
Also less stress on the physical port. My Nexus 7 2013 has a broken microUSB port that I can still wirelessly charge.
"Everytime I sit down, I place my phone down on my charger pad, because that's where it goes."
I hope you enjoy destroying your battery prematurely, because constant charging cycles wears it out rapidly. Lithium chemistry hates that kind of treatment.
Have you ever tried fumbling with cables in the dark when going to bed? It’s not a huge thing, but wireless charging is a nice quality of life improvement. Try using it for a couple weeks and it will be hard to go back.
The other small benefit is less wear on the charge port. It’s not such an issue for usb-c or lightning ports, but micro usb ports have terrible reliability in my experience. All my android devices developed a broken micro usb port after a year or two of plugging it in over and over.
The wireless charger is a better experience than putting a cable in your phone in my opinion, but the dock they used to include in the box is a far better than both.
It was simple to put your phone in (as opposed to a cable that might fall off the table or move around), and kept the phone facing you making it easy to interact with while charging (unlike the wireless charger).
But at some point they probably figured out they could save 20 cents by selling it separately.
I second that. I have an Anker charging stand and it works beautifully. As it is a stand, there are no alignment problems, and it is easy to keep using the phone, especially, as face id always triggers when looking at the phone when I get a notification. The charging mat I have requires careful alignment and while lying flat, face id usually does not trigger.
I think it just boils down to we all have subtle differences in how we use products so while some features are a revelation to one person, they are pointless to another (always on Siri on the AirPods or wireless charging on the AirPods is pointless for me, I'd have simply preferred longer battery life as an example).
Wireless charging is incrementally nicer based on how I use my phone. Would I be fine without it? Absolutely. But getting an extra 2 inches of legroom on a flight costs more than a wireless charging pad so the bar for incremental benefit is pretty low for me.
The small incremental benefit for me is that I often randomly wake up in the middle of the night with something on my mind, if I don't look it up, I won't get back to sleep. Reaching over and grabbing my phone off the nightstand with a cable means possibly knocking things off the stand if I leave it plugged in (I keep a glass of water there usually), if I unplug it then I have to find the plug and replug it in all while trying to not wake up too much. I'm also always anxious about the cable bending too much at the connector so I'm always guarding that carefully. If I get a high gauge cable so I don't worry about it bending too much, then it's even more prone to knocking things over and possibly just pulling the plug out of the wall. Stands aren't much better, when trying to get the phone back on the stand in the dark without getting up it takes both hands usually to try to line it up correctly. The pad is simple, the phone is on the corner of the nightstand, I grab it, look up whatever, drop it back.
As I mentioned it is definitely a small incremental convenience based on my particular use of the product. For less than the cost of economy plus on a single flight, I don't keep knocking crap off my nightstand. Seems worth it (for me). I've definitely paid more for less tangible benefit.
I agree totally. Not to mention that wireless charging uses about 40% more power. Which for charging phones is a small amount until you think of every person on the planet charging their phone every day.
> Which for charging phones is a small amount until you think of every person on the planet charging their phone every day.
It is a small amount of power though.
There are about 4.68 billion mobile phone users; let's assume each has one phone. Let's be conservative and assume that all these phones have high-end battery packs, on the order of 4,000 mAh. Let's be even more conservative and assume each phone is used to depletion and recharged each day. Let's assume a voltage of 4V, so we end up with 2.7e14 joules used recharging mobile phones per day. In 2014 (so conservative, for 2019), human civilization produced 23,816 terrawatt-hours of electricity, or about 8.6e19 joules per year or 2.6e17 joules per day. (Let's also assume electricity production and consumption are equal.) Even under this very conservative estimate, cell phones charging accounts for 0.115% of world electricity consumption. Increasing that figure by 40% is negligible.
Thanks for doing the math but I don't think one product that consumes one one thousandth of the world's energy production is negligible. (How many coal power stations is that?) And a 40% increase in this consumption for a very minimal increase in 'convenience' (itself debatable) is not negligently wasteful.
> And a 40% increase in this consumption for a very minimal increase in 'convenience' (itself debatable) is not negligently wasteful.
That's your opinion. I have a different opinion. How do we choose which of us is right? In general, we decide on the allocation of scarce resources through markets and price signals. Electricity is metered almost everywhere. If wireless charging's 40% increase in energy use doesn't hurt adoption, it means that the utility gained from wireless charging outweighs the resources consumed. That you personally have different utility function doesn't invalidate anyone else's, and you certainly don't get to make people use your utility function instead of their own. If you think electricity is too cheap and doesn't incorporate necessary externalities, you can argue for some kind of extra climate tax. But arguing against specific products here because you personally don't find them useful isn't the right approach.
There is a book called Personality Plus[1] that you should definitely read because you're most likely a very detailed oriented person. I have friends that are not as diligent as you are with plugging their phones in and their battery is almost dead all of the time. Them having a Qi charging mat is the one saving grace that no finally keeps their phones above the 5% - 20% low power mode battery area that they usually hover in. The cognitive load is just low enough to get them to charge their phones more often if they can just place it on a mat. I'm like you when it comes to charging my phone, but I know quite a few people that are not.
>What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?
Apple is trying to release a series of devices that don't need wires. Apple Watch, Airpods, removing the 3.5mm headphone jack. They're trying to make a sheet of glass a few millimeters thick that does computations, like you'd see in Star Trek. There's no big mystery to it.
Nobody asked Apple to remove 3.5inch floppies or optical drives; people freaked the fuck out for months when they did. Now, nobody cares or needs those things. This is how Apple operates. People (myself included) seem to forget that they do this all the time on their path to making great products.
I have four of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K702S66/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_z8UN... with little 2-inch micro USB and Lightning cables. I keep they in different sockets around the house. When I want to charge something I just pick it up and plug it in and fold the battery around the back. I can hold it in my hand or set it down on a desk. More wireless than wireless.
The thing that gives me pause is that we have spent two decades worrying about standby power, but now we are willfully adding an inefficiency. It feels like the wrong direction to be moving in.
A wired charger is a personal item. A charging mat can be a communal space--pads in restaurant tables, bars, and other community spaces. Charging everywhere.
What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing?
If you haven't figured it out and you're happy with a cable, stick with it. There is no greater disservice in life than relieving yourself from something you're happy and perfectly content with in search of something better. In the worst case you become acutely aware of the downsides of both methods and you're no longer happy with either.
With a cable, you have to put your phone in a place AND put something in a place in your phone.
With a mat, you only have to put your phone in a place.
Obviously the latter is life changing. ;)
Seriously, however marginal, it is arguably a gain, and ... marginal gains can be kindof nice if they don't force some other annoying tradeoff. For me that'd include an appreciable cost higher than the cost of a long-lasting cable, but YMMV.
I think wireless charging can be great for two reasons:
- hiding it visually, Ikea has done it very well. A cable is ugly, air power is ugly. but if your night table has wireless charging hiding, it is very pleasant to hide cables entirely in your bedroom.
- occasions where you want to be fast. at the office or when going to sleep you don't need to be fast. but in the car I think wireless charging is nice. If you travel frequently, being able to just drop your phone in your car and have navigation and wireless charging instantly is very nice in my opinion. Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/iOttie-Wireless-Samsung-Enabled-Devic...
My mom suffered a stroke and has 70% use of only one side of her body. She's been known to take risky measures reaching for a fallen charging cable. For her, wireless charging would make her life safer (and me, less worried about her). But yeah, personally, I find this tech rather gimmicky.
So I used to think the same until one day I dramatically learned the utility of wireless charging.
I was traveling on a 30 hour journey with two airplane changes from Asia to the US. Some combination of temperature and humidity changes led to condensation in the charging port my phone basically refused to charge from USB C irrespective of what I tried to dry it out. I barely managed to save enough battery to send a "arrived safely" msg home and book an Uber to the hotel since I landed close to midnight. I could buy a cheap burner phone the next day but all data is on my regular phone. I luckily found a mobile store carrying a wireless charger and was able to get my phone going again.
It's happened a few more times and now I never travel without the wireless charger.
It really is a matter of convenience. Micro-USB is so annoying because of the dexterity needed to plug it in, lightning and USB C are much better because you don’t have to think about the orientation, wireless is better than that because you don’t have to attach any wires.
Connector wear and obstruction is real and can make charging or wired interaction extremely hard or even impossible. Connectors also have a lifetime.
For example, my phone's (Samsung Galaxy S6) port has dirt in it that I can't get out, some micro USB connectors wont fit and all of them don't stick in and readily fall out. This is one of the reasons I absolutely loathe and hate micro USB. It's just an extremely bad connector.
Compare this with my Surface Pro 3 (or the magnetic Mac chargers): the magnetic charger is wonderful and Just Works.
Wireless charging is the next step. Sure, you need the pad and it's not as readily movable but damn it's effortless.
Personally I'd prefer magnetic connectors, though.
The seconds it takes to plugging in and unplugging your phone add up and it takes mental effort. I’d rather just set the phone down on the nightstand or on the desk while drinking coffee and have it charge without whipping out the cable each time.
I thought it would be a nice improvement, just laying my phone down in a few common places I charged it, so I bought a charging pad to try it out. Physics got in the way, even with a simple "high speed" charger from Samsung, with a Samsung phone. It was the case on the phone. Probably no more than 2mm thick, but it made finding the right position to charge very difficult. If it wasn't just right, it wouldn't charge, and even when it did it was much slower than the normal high speed charging.
I think there's potential in this arena, but it's not quite there yet, not for a lot of people and every day situations.
Cables are not entirely fail-proof - I imagine many people here, including myself, have seen smoldering Apple branded mag-safe, 30 pin, and lightning cables. Moving energy from one place to another, quickly and efficiently, at the small-scale of modern electronics, is tough. I prefer cables for charging, too, but as others have posted wiredless-ness sure is convenient, a la AirPods. I swore by wired headphones until I got AirPods - now I never yank my EarPods out of my ear while cooking or if my dogs jump on me while I am on the phone (for example; small conveniences).
The charging port is now used for more applications, like plugging headphones. Using wireless charging helps to reduce the port's wear and tear that it must faces everyday.
The handiest place to have one, IME, is not at home but at work: you can leave it on the pad for most of the workday but always pick it up right when you need it and not have to worry about fiddling with the cable. Especially when the phone gets a couple years old and you need midday charges for it to last through the day.
It's not a vital feature, but since decent chargers are only like $25, why not?
There are more conveniences than just at home, e.g. in the car, you just place it in the place holder and it charges, no cables to fumble with. No multitude of connectors and there is also a portion of society that has trouble with keeping their hand steady to plug in small connectors - its accessibility for folks with disabilities.
The two benefits from the wireless charger: 1) you dont wear out the usb port 2) I have the charger next to my bed. You can pick a phone at night to check anything and put it back without looking for a cable - much less mental and eye strain when you're half asleep.
I got sick and tired of cables fraying and breaking and finding the cable after it falls off the top of my night stand. It’s also easier to put my phone on the charging pad in the dark than fumbling with finding the cable and getting it plugged in.
I have a tablet with a broken USB port, so I can only charge it wirelessly. For my phone, wireless charging makes it easier to top off the battery. Less friction than digging around for a cable, plugging it in, and unplugging when I'm done.
I have a waterproof case on my phone. My last two similar cases failed because the door to open the charging port broke. We're not very far off from phones that are waterproof because they don't have any ports at all.
It's very convenient in the car. Get in, drop the phone in the charging area and you're done, phone is now charging. Hell you can even use some apps through the infotainment system through carplay; it's great.
I love it for nightly charging. I can still easily grab my phone (for those mid-night ideas) while half asleep and not having to fiddle with a cable. Then plop it back down and go back to snoring.
One hand vs. two. Never have to look for the cable that fell behind the nightstand. Picking up the phone at night doesn't risk yanking something else off the nightstand with the cable.
For me the win would be being able to charge my phone, watch, and airpods all at once. This is way, way better than 3 cables (one of which is different).
Charging phone when you are off to bed is really very bad.
Lithium charging protection circuit could fail anytime due to one of the components in the circuit malfunctioning and your lithium battery inside the phone can catch fire.
Many houses have been burned down to ashes from lithium fire. Just YouTube for 'lithium fire' and you'll see how dangerous it can be.
I usually charge the phone in an empty place where lithium fire won't cause much damage.
residential lithium fires are unlikely to be coming from phones. (unless people still have those exploding Notes still kicking around)
Far more likely to be lithium batteries being used or abused in a hobbyist capacity. E-cigs and RC are both ripe for it when users have lower quality cells to begin with, routinely discharge them above the rated current and then charge with sometimes questionable chargers. Worse yet when people try to charge them above the max voltage.
I'm pretty comfortable assuming that Apple wouldn't design a lipo charging circuit that could fail in an unsafe way due to a single component failure, but I can't speak specifically to what those might be.
What a shame, this would be the actual experience of wireless charging that I had envisioned it was. The reality of wireless charging is quite different: fiddly and possible to have your phone be dead in the morning.
I wish someone could figure out how to make a true wireless charging mat like this. As it stands, I wouldn’t buy a wireless charger for my wife for example. She’ll just plonk it on there and then ask me why her phone is dead in the morning.
Who cares about convenience when there is a non-zero chance of waking up to a dead phone?
I hope someone figures out how to make “true” wireless charging that just works so that there’s no more fiddling with positioning.
I think that’s why there is so much hate on AirPower, people say “who cares there are plenty on the market”. Yeah true, but not any that my wife would want to use. And I’m betting there are a lot of people like that out there.
I've had really good luck with the tilted stand ones. If my phone is propped up on it, it's charging. I have had much worse luck with the lay-down pad ones.
Yeah I've had problems with previous chargers but my Pixel Stand works great every time. The design makes it very easy to get it in the right spot and keeps it there.
My problem is it's really easy to get just barely on the edge of the charge zone, and then at some point in the night you bump it ever so slightly and it leaves the zone and stops charging.
I've had my wireless charger for 4 months now and never once experienced this. You put it down and it makes a slight vibration to tell you its charging. Sometimes if I've had a few beers I don't hear the noise and I have to pick it up and drop it down again.
This is still way easier than digging out the cable from between my bed and my nightstand and fiddling with it 'till it gets in exactly the right spot. Now I use my phone in bed and don't worry at all until I go to sleep and then it just works.
It occurs to me that what made my phone fall off the sweet spot wasn't actually me bumping it, it was vibrations from notifications received during the night.
I believe you may be conflating ability with willingness. I've seen many people seemingly wilfully avoid learning things of which they're clearly capable.
You'd have to intentionally position a phone to not work on the Samsung charger. Plus it tilts and looks a lot nicer than the apple version. People hated on the airpower because it is a crowded market with multiple mfgs already making superior ones.
Although why would the phone be dead in the morning anyways? Even on low battery it should still be on low battery in the morning.
> The FCC rules for wireless charging devices like AirPower are quite strict, and limit exposure to 20 cm (8 in) above the device to 50 mW/cm^2.
I'm surprised they waited till the end to do the testing. When I used to work on hardware products at smaller companies, some preliminary tests are done on early designs to make sure we have a comfortable margin. A company like Apple should have dedicated in-house facilities to do this earlier.
I'm quite sure they didn't "wait until the end" to do the testing. First, this article is iFixit's speculation. Second, they probably did something similar to what iFixit envisioned: they did test early and knew it didn't pass muster, but thought they could eventually engineer themselves a fix, until they finally just hit a brick wall (aka physics) and found it wasn't an issue they could overcome.
They probably knew they were close to the legal limit and their engineers probably said on a hunch "we can stay beneath the limit and retain adequate power with the right mix of tricks" and then just ended up being wrong on that hunch by a little bit.
That's why we have to bend them so often in real life with tricks. In media they can just make something up, we've got to find real solutions. I'm sure that one exists but it's either too expensive currently or not consistent enough yet. Yet being the key word there. I'm sure this will be an elegantly solved issue at some point, just might require some more smarts on the hardware side.
C(32, 3) is 4960. That means almost 5,000 different interference patterns to deal with. Since every manufactured device will vary (since each of its 32 manufactured coils will differ slightly from the next), that's 5,000 calibrations that need to be done on every single manufactured device. And that's best case, assuming (for example) that calibration is a single metric per coil over time.
Could you put a pressure sensor on the pad and only power on the coils directly underneath the object? I assume with software you could selectively turn on/off areas of the mat to manage the heat problems that come with multiple coils being on at once. I could see it being a problem if they were charging all at the same time but you should be able to fake it and call that good enough. All the devices have to charge, but they don't have to all charge at once. I think you could get tunnel vision and forget that.
Could someone who is better qualified tell me why that wouldn't work?
There wouldn't be any need for pressure sensors; this already happens. The charged device adds some power to its own coil and the charging station detects that (it's unidirectional communication). For example my charging station lights up about a second after putting my phone down, and can show the battery status with the light. I would assume that when there's nothing on them the coils transmit in a low-power mode, with the protocol allowing the device to ask for more/less power as required (edit: Wikipedia confirms that the device can actually send some pretty precise instructions to the station, with voltage controllable in 50 mV increments [0]).
So logically it would seem the heat issue happens when there are three coils active at the same time transmitting at high power - the peak heat output is the issue.
What I don't follow is how other multi-charging mats do exactly this. According to the article, by their estimation it was powerful harmonic EM interference that did AirPower in. If AirPower were only powering 3 coils at a time like other multi-charging mats why did it run into this problem when others had not
I guess it is because no other mat has overlapping coils. In the apple one they wanted you to not care where you put down your devices. Since they have so many coils, it then becomes likely that the 3 active ones overlap.
There has to be something else going on here. It strikes me as relatively simple to have the device talk to the mat and optimise on which coil was providing the most current draw.
I suspect that engineering does have a design that meets regulations but they couldn't get the cost down. I.e. the extra circuitry in both the met and possibly the devices to precisely sense which coil(S) are providing optimal charging is cost prohibitive.
>And that can be difficult—that can stop someone’s pacemaker
It was that very point that made me think: thank you Apple, you ARE doing some things right! With risks like that, I like that they pulled the plug and they didn't take chances.
The battery fiasco on the other hands, I still cannot forgive that.
I would love for this all to be one elaborate April Fool's joke and it becomes available on Monday.
On a more technical note, this was a bit surprising to read: "'No one looks at [Electro-Magnetic Interference] until the end.' The FCC rules for wireless charging devices like AirPower are quite strict, and limit exposure at 20 cm (8 in) above the device to 50 mW/cm^2."
Depending at which point was "the end" of the AirPower development cycle, Apple either spent many many months attempting to remedy the problem with small enough breakthroughs to keep the marketing parade going, or Apple discovered something severe last minute. The issues discussed in this article, I would think, were well enough known for some time--still making this a perplexing story.
Why can't they cycle through coils one by one and see where the biggest drain is?
I mean:
1. Cycle through coils until you discover a drain. (From two (or more) overlapping coils which both show drain, pick just the one with the biggest drain.)
2. Assume that's where a device to be charged is (or aligns best to a coil).
3. Give power only to the this best-fitting coil (one per device)
4. Pause charging for a few ms every 500ms to repeat at (1.)
As they have full control over the receiving hardware they could also easily hide the small pauses in charging when a "search cycle" happens.
I (an Apple fan) do not consider this a failure. I love it when companies take chances and go all in on pushing the envelope. Great products do emerge from these sorts of products.
it is a failure by definition. i don’t see the point of letting your love of a company aid in changing the definitions of words and meaning of concepts.
and i personally feel this failure is an indication that their product line isn’t as streamlined and consistent as they market it or they’d like it to be. because this is a wireless charger, which has already existed on the market for many years. so why did the airpower fail or why is it so different from the others? well, for one, it was trying to charge three different types of devices, which probably complicated their solution.
and their response is typical apple. it seems they actually couldn’t make it work at all or pass standards, not this idea that they have every going good but it doesn’t meet their “high quality standards”.
Writing this just in case it might help. My S8+ had started to lose contact with the charging cable as well within about a year. I thought it was wearing out because I never had any other phone's connector be clogged up, but it really was pocket lint that jammed into the connector. Once I cleaned it with the needle it was like new and very grippy. Since then I've had another friend make the same assumption and "fix" his port like that, so do give it a try if your port does not "hold" the cable as it should.
Ideal, possibly inevitable, future: Every device, including the cybernetic implants in our bodies, is constantly charged wirelessly at all times (over-the-air, with no contact required with any pads etc.)
Made possible by the etherspace we just discovered, with no harmful implications until it attracts eldritch entities from the far realms.
If it's hard to make an interlocking loop design, why not startwhere everyone else is, put out the product, and then iterate to where you want to get to?
Does anyone know what happened to Intel's once promised wireless power standard Rezence? It would use magnetic resonance instead of magnetic induction.
meantime i bought in December a pair of phone charging pads at Costco for $35 and still feel like it is the best thing since sliced bread :) Works like a charm for both our phones - wife's iPhone in the case and my S9. If only all these wireless earbuds that we also have to charge had the wireless charging antenna inside - the life would be grand. It is very strange that Apple couldn't pull it off.
I first discovered air charging many years ago. I was in the office, and outside wad a digger working on the road, and its engine noise was causing the walls to vibrate. I thought, i could put some kind of capicitor on the wall positioned to exploit the vibration, and charge my phone with that. Brilliant i thought. I got to work immediatly on the invention. And then realised that running a noisy tractor outside everytime i charge my phone, is going to cost me significantly more money than using the supplied usb charging cable and adapter.
Strange, the most obvious benifit of having lots of coils while would be to selectively use only the ones directly in the optimal location for charging so the charger - device coil relationship is still 1 to 1, I don't think any electrical engineer would think a M to N setup would be practical.
I think it's the combination of slow charging and as the article said; heat production, - and the physical design the charging 'station' requires to account for these problems. A lot of the current 'fast' wireless charging solutions seem to have fans or a design than can dissapate a lot of heat. A flat mat charging multiple devices would need to either have a fan or a hefty heat sink to dissapate all that heat. Apple's very picky about the physical aestetic of their products which throws out a lot of designs that include visable heat sinks and/or grills.
Also, if I'm not completely out of the loop, Apple devices tend to excel (relatively) at battery life making wireless charging, likely, an even more niche product for their devices.
TLDR, once again Apple's aestetic requirements and the currently, relatively niche market of wireless charging make an Apple manufactured (not just branded like Google might do) a poor product to invest time and capital on and is unlikely to impress share holders.
> The FCC rules for wireless charging devices like AirPower are quite strict, and limit exposure to 20 cm (8 in) above the device to 50 mW/cm^2.
Who's to say that 50 mW/cm^2 is the right field strength limit? Remember when we couldn't use cell phones on airplanes during takeoff because of the theoretical possibility that something, somewhere might interfere? As it turns out, there was no interference problem, cell phones were perfectly safe to use in that environment, and the precautionary ban just stalled progress without improving anybody's safety.
Maybe we're in the same situation here. I'd like to know what specific problem an EM field of the strength AirPower produced would cause in the real world. It's possible that we're weighing "backward compatibility" with existing EM-sensitive devices too heavily relative to technological progress.
I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here, in what way did the ban on cellphones on planes stall progress? It seemed more like a minor annoyance / inconvenience, but I could be misunderstanding or not have context.
One thing: it's become increasingly common to ditch in-seat entertainment units and just have people watch airline-provided entertainment on their own devices over wifi. This approach saves weight and money. Would it have been viable if electronic devices were still banned during takeoff?
Regardless, utility matters. This argument from frivolity --- that we shouldn't allow thing X that has rare side effect Y because X is just a "toy" --- is dangerous, because everything in modern civilization, from the right perspective, is frivolous. The whole point of technology is to make life easier, so it's not fair to argue against thing X merely because thing X exists to make life easier. Everything we really needed for survival was invented a long, long time ago.
Personal devices were taking over from built in entertainment units long before the ban was lifted on portable electronic use below 10,000ft. Having an extra 20 minutes to use your own device doesn’t make that much of a difference.
We're already risking that. The regulatory limits aren’t a 100% guarantee of safety, they’re just an effort to make a good tradeoff between safety and utility.
There’s no guarantee that all pacemakers will accept interference that falls below the regulatory limit, nor is there a guarantee that every certified device actually complies with the limit. Manufacturing defects or gaps in testing mean you can never be totally sure. If your standard is to not risk even one pacemaker failing due to outside interference, you would need to eliminate all other electronics. (And you’d still have the unlikely but non-zero risk that one pacemaker would emit interference that causes another one to fail.)
Well, yeah --- just like I'd risk one person getting hit by a train in order to achieve the "technological progress" of rail transport. Every new technology comes with risks. If we focus on the risks and ignore the benefits, we can't make progress, and it's progress that ultimately benefits more people than any amount of harm avoidance.
What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?