Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcarolan | Hacker News Reader

It seems like apple is moving towards no port. Wireless charging + airpods are already here. It feels like USBC is a step backward. Having a fully sealed iphone makes it much simpler and impervious to water.

View on HN

I read this often, but just can't see it.

A lot of common use cases are all but impossible with no port. Think, charging on a red eye flight. Using a power bank for a long hike/camping. Quick charge in the morning when you forgot to charge the previous night, etc.

Wireless just doesn't have the speed nor efficiency to compete. Even if speed is solved, I can't imagine how big a power bank would need to be to compete given the efficiency of wireless charging.

> Think, charging on a red eye flight.

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/jetblue-mint-suite-business...

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-qatar-airways-busines...

https://www.astronics.com/aircraft-in-seat-power/wireless-ch...

A matter of time before this becomes super common. It's a low-cost perk that provides a service previously not available: a free charger while on the plane. And in the meanwhile, see below.

> Using a power bank for a long hike/camping.

Plenty of power banks with wireless chargers. I use Anker's own myself, works well. Also can be used as a regular charging pod when simultaneously connected to a power source.

> Quick charge in the morning when you forgot to charge the previous night, etc.

Fast wireless charging is already a thing. Besides, if you drive, you can charge it while driving, too.

The minute public space, business offices, car and regular furniture with wireless chargers built-in become common, it will be a non-issue all of the sudden.

However, I reckon it's still a matter of 5 more years, and doubt Apple can hold-off having to switch iPhone to USB-C until then.

Wireless charging with power banks is stupid. You're throwing away half the energy of the power bank.

The weight of all those single purposes wireless chargers on planes is already a nonstarter. Airlines track weight of standard items down to the ounce, to the point that the in-flight magazines finally got removed because they were not justifying their collective weight. While many planes now have inverters where you can use an AC adapter, which can be used for phones, tablets, laptops, etc. wireless chargers can only be used for (some) phones, and they have bad efficiency (which effects fuel usage).

What you described is a de-facto 'now` situation. In 3-5 years, basically everyone who travesl planes will have replaced theirs with wireless charing ones, if they haven't done so already.

> and they have bad efficiency (which effects fuel usage).

Compared to the amount of energy jet engine consumes each second, a loss on wirelessly charging ~100 phones is really just a joke in comparison: 2500mAh * 3.7 volt * 100 = 925Wh. With, conservatively, 60% efficiency of wireless Qi chargers, that's a 370Wh loss. Not even half a kilowatt-hour.

A 787 plane uses 7000 liters of jet fuel, for a total of 490,000 KWh during a 7 hour flight. (https://www.quora.com/How-many-kilowatt-hours-of-energy-does...)

So charging those phones wirelessly increases the amount of fuel consumed by 0.37/490.000 = 0.00007551020408%

If 1 liter of jet fuel currently costs $0.611, that's $0.61170000.000075551=$0.32 cents.

32 US cents. That's the cost of the increased fuel usage.

I appreciate your math, but you’re not addressing what I said. I’m talking about weight of the devices, not the power loss/inefficiency of wireless charging. Wireless chargers require relatively a lot of wire in coils, and that adds weight. Additional weight costs fuel all the time, regardless of whether people are using it.

Given that some planes already have inverters to provide power for many types of devices, including phones, it does not make sense, from a weight perspective, to add another type of charging that can only be used by phones. It would be redundant. The power loss from wireless charging itself is just an aside.

Yeah, it seems like what's holding it back is a wireless charging standard similar to USB, once we have that and it's ubiquitous - I think we'll just expect wireless and be annoyed by cords. It needs to reach an adoption tipping point though which will likely happen slowly then all at once.

I'm sure they'll sell a charging wallet with a USB plug or something. They've gone to extraordinary and inconvenient lengths on points of principle before (from USB-only on the first iMac through to USB-C only and faulty keyboards on the 2018 macbook pros).

Then imagine (magnetic) external contacts, like the Apple Pencil.

Wireless data rates (eg- Wifi6) currently exceed wired by a good margin. The only barriers to fully utilizing that are vendor-manufactured and can be solved with both custom firmware and more open app stores.

> Wireless data rates (eg- Wifi6) currently exceed wired by a good margin

Maybe in lab tests and based on theoretical data rates from datasheets. In practice they don't; most people are in a noisy environment and use shitty consumer-grade equipment. Even if you wanted to pay to make it work, finding good equipment is not easy and often involves trial and error until you find a product that's good enough.

In contrast, even the cheapest Ethernet cable will pretty much always work, and when it doesn't it's very obvious where as Wi-Fi has so much potential for "kinda working" where it looks like it works on most speedtests (because TCP corrects for packet loss) but completely craps out on a real-time application such as a video call (where you can't conceal packet loss).

I'd hazard that the usage rate of RNDIS on iPhones is rather low, though.

And you may be right for certain contexts, but ubiquity counts for a lot.

"Gosh this bus is making a lot of stops, let me just whip out this USB-C/Lightning to Ethernet adapter and plug into my battery powered switch to access this content on my Raspi file sever" is something I've only said a few times, followed by "why didn't I make this thing ad hoc?" or "why'd I make this service internal only again?".

I do however have Wifi6 APs at home and get better than USB HiSpeed data rates from my 10GbE network. The whole network cost around $500, which is probably near what people spend on replacing crappier all-in-one consumer gear over a similar lifecycle. It seems unrealistic that anyone would be required to spend remotely close to that much to make a reliable video call, though.

Why can’t you use MagSafe while flying?

For frequent travelers, every gram of weight and size counts. A little charging wire with USBC or Lightning is far lighter and smaller than a (relatively) giant MagSafe disc.

I have a magsafe charger in the same bag with my ipad mini and MBA.

The idea that a magsafe charger is an end all for frequent travelers makes zero sense.

Isn't the efficiency of MagSafe quite high?

Out of curiosity, is it harder to charge on early morning flights?

> Isn't the efficiency of MagSafe quite high?

A quick search says 75%, which still seems quite wasteful.

> Out of curiosity, is it harder to charge on early morning flights?

Good point. I guess I just meant that everyone packed in tight using wireless chargers seemed more cumbersome than a simple lightning cable, but perhaps that view isn't reasonable. I've never tried it.

My Apple Watch already does this. It’s here already.

Isn't wired charging faster than wireless? And isn't wireless charging less efficient, too? You're bound to lose some energy unless you really focus the radiation that's emitted.

In his 2020 article about wireless charging inefficiency [0], Eric Ravenscraft wrote:

> In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable.

[0]: https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-...

Yes, yes, and yes.

It is but the magnetic alignment of Apple's version makes it a bit more efficient than usual wireless charging.

Fully sealed is probably also desirable by Apple to kill off the screen/battery replacement market.

Fully sealed? So no built-in microphone or speaker either?

Open headphone jacks and ports in a water resistant phone has been a solved problem from Sony for nearly a decade with the Xperia line.

Likewise with Apple's water resistant iPhone line. iPhones have been IP67 rated since the iPhone 7, and IP68 since the iPhone XS.

I sure hope not. Wireless charging is very inefficient compared to wired (slower charge time, bigger external battery packs, environmentally wasteful). Wireless headphones mean another thing to charge and of course connectivity issues that largely don’t exist with wired.

Current iPhones are already rated for IP68 water resistance (6 meters depth for 30 minutes), and “fully sealed” would probably require removing the microphone and speakers, so I don’t really buy that argument.

Only having bluetooth as your audio option would be really disappointing.

It'll be awful when Android phones copy Apple with the horrible Android Bluetooth peripheral market. I've had really bad experiences with Samsung buds and a Samsung phone.

>It feels like USBC is a step backward.

Not if you want to transfer a lot of data. Say for example, 4K ProRes video.

That may be the spin but ultimately it’s about the peripheral licensing fees for Apple.

The new MagSafe charging breaking comparability with existing items in practice due to making alignment harder is such a cynical moneygrab.

MagSafe doesn’t break compatibility with any qi chargers, and you have the difficulty of alignment issue backwards. MagSafe is easier to align - that doesn’t mean magnetless qi is made worse.

Alignment is easier with MagSafe 2 MagSafe but aligning on Qi chargers is significantly harder. As one example automotive qi chargers, often in the center console, are regularly cited on automotive forums (in my experience) as not working with newer Apple products due to the more challenging alignment.

It could also be argued as "more secure" if traditional wired data exfiltration is hindered by the lack of ports.

Why do you believe that to be true? If there are no physical ports then all data transfer and access must happen wirelessly which means there must be means to connect, and extract data wirelessly. Sure, maybe there’s a temporary reprieve until the same level of exfiltration can be done wirelessly, but it will happen. And in this future wireless-only world your data will be exfiltrated without you ever knowing about it.

> Why do you believe that to be true?

I don't but I think it has the potential to be framed that way. If your phone was seized by law enforcement looking to extract your personal data, I imagine "plugging it in" will be the first thing they try.

I'm sure water is a grave concern for middle+ class cosmopolitans that are the target market for 1000+ $ apple products

I don't get it, are middle class cosmopolitans hydrophobic?

In the US at least, they tend to live on the coasts, so maybe water intrusion is a bigger concern ;)

It wouldn't suprise me if water damage is more common on water resistant phones, since they don't drain once intrusion has taken place.

Imagine a car without draining holes underneath.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com