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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that there already is a universal charger that works with almost all phones made in the past couple years. That is a Qi inductive charging plate. I suspect Apple will be ditching the lightning cable fairly soon, and will be replacing it with wireless charging as the only charging solution. I currently have a snazzy Qi mount in my car that works great, and a plate by my bed. The only downside is if I want to watch a video whilst charging or similar, it’s nearly impossible to do that with current plates/docks.

These chargers work with my phone (iPhone 8) and my partner’s phone (Samsung), and I couldn’t be happier with them.

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That's a good point, but I think it would be a shame if wireless charging completely replaced wired, because it's much less efficient.

Something like 20-40% of input energy is wasted when using wireless charging versus a wire. If every existing phone switched to wireless charging, that would cause a non-trivial increase in total power usage.

Perhaps an acceptable trade off for the substantial reduction in e-waste. You can always generate more clean power.

Not saying it's entirely unrelevant, but when looking at energy consumption by production and by usage of smartphones, the usage basically consumes no energy at all (https://imgur.com/VHpJ5et).

That is probably because batteries can hold a very limited amount of energy and therefore mobile software is developed to use very little electricity.

But on the other hand, less energy efficient chargers wont help this. I just mean it's not the big problem about our smartphones energy consumption.

Sorry, meant co2 emissions, not energy use.

Ahh because these two are decoupled. I am sure smartphone usage contributes a significant portion to CO2 then.

    > therefore mobile software is developed to
    > use very little electricity.

I see that you're _not_ in the mobile dev industry! Power consumption is the type of thing that is talked about in prerelease mobile software, and removed from the bullet points during release. Nobody optimizes for power consumption at the expense of features, bugs, or developer time.

Wireless charging does not work with the majority of devices produced worldwide. It might work with 'flagship' devices and maybe with some devices in the tier under it but it doesn't with the rest.

Qi generates excess heat which degrades the batteries glued in to smart phones, thereby increasing e-waste.

Years and years ago when qi was available on the Google Nexus phones the wireless charging was pretty annoyingly over-sensitive to alignment.

E.g. you put the phone down but it was 0.5mm too far to the left or 1 degree rotated wrong and it would not charge, meaning you'd wake up in the morning and the battery was flat. Often the phone vibrating knocked it out of alignment even if you got it right the first time.

So instead of just plugging the phone in, you had to delicately place the phone in just-the-right-place - repeat 4 or 5 times before you got it right etc. Good riddance frankly - it was a shit user experience. I think the high-priced OEM docks relied on really strong magnets to force alignment.

Has it got better yet?

Sometimes I need to use my phone while it's charging.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple build in some sort of not-Qi charging in future phones. Really surprised they didn't do that to begin with TBH. Where the NFC has to read a compliant Apple chip to allow charging.

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