What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?
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.
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.
Fundamentally, wireless charging is less efficient. Theoretically you could be putting 16w of heat into the phone but only getting 8w of charging.
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.
This paper arrives at a similar conclusion (see figure 4): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318292540_Analysis_...
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.
I so wish manufacturers would offer this option, for those primarily deskbound who do not relish ungluing their battery after a year
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.
Thanks for making me aware that such a thing exists.
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.
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.
It's the EP-NG930
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.
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.
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.
With the added advantage they were cheaper than wireless, and unlike AirPower actually available.
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.
Cables were never old, painful nor requires thought. I see the cable, I plug.
Your side is just that, an opinion.
Just place on a mat is much less effort compared to plug cable.
That's why I stopped using a wireless charger.
If it isn't what your really telling us is you couldn't learn how to place a phone on a small surface.
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.
That's amazing since I'm the opposite. I always try to be near or at 100% (both phone & laptop) while I'm at my desk.
I don't think that's OCD. It's just planning ahead.
Compared to tons of people who couldn't care less on living on 70% or 50% or 20%.
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).
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?
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.
Very few docks support more than a tiny fraction of the cases available.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Qi-Certified-Compatible-Fast-Ch...
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
Not sure what’s so hard to understand about this.
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.
Any point where I can’t just charge at night in normal useage means a larger battery is going to win over easier charging.
So why not just plop it into a dock?
The last time I had any trouble doing that one-handed was in the era of proprietary inch-wide charge connectors.
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).
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.
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.
(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.)
-embedded camera into the screen
-embedded fingerprint sensor into the screen
-embedded speaker and micro into the screen
All of these also mean there wont be a top or bottom with the phone, it could be used in any direction.
Especially, having thinner designs is important to have thin foldable phones in the future.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple cables are. Somehow I don't have this problem with other brands... ever.
Apple makes money because they sell metric shitloads of $1200 phones and $600 watches and, increasingly, software and services for them. Not cables.
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.
Well that's the contention isn't it? Whether that tax is present, and whether the mechanical build quality justifies it.
Assume for every phone or iPad they sell, they average one extra cable (for work, for the car, because it breaks, whatever..)
Apple charges $19 for an extra cable. Assume it costs them $2 to make the cable (and it probably costs much less).
That's 43.5 billion right there. Which even for Apple is not small potatoes. Especially because cables are probably their highest margin product.
https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/136947-apples-mega-c...
And the video dongles do transcoding, IIRC. https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...
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.
I think two have gone bad, both replaced by Apple care.
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.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Apple%20strain%20relief&type=c...
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.)
(High-five ThatPlayer who posted at the same time)
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.
I hope you enjoy destroying your battery prematurely, because constant charging cycles wears it out rapidly. Lithium chemistry hates that kind of treatment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amdahl does though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
> 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.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Personality-Plus-Understand-Understan...
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.
So for years I've been turning-off the chargers at bedtime.
Has this advice changed?
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 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.
- 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...
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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen cracked plastic around the end of the cable, but never burning.
No day in, day out strain on the charing port of the device?
No having to plug in/out, just put it down on the mat?
It's not a vital feature, but since decent chargers are only like $25, why not?
Wireless charging is the future.
Nice to know my port gets less wear!
(Also, both iPhone and Android support Qi. Don't need to play the different cable game.)
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.
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.