Hacker News Reader

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.

The laws of physics are very unforgiving.

View on HN

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.

For example detecting where the device is and adjusting the current in separate coils accordingly?

I don't buy the explanation that this is about interferences. It doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com