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Comment by mgolawala | Hacker News Reader

Use a wireless charging setup.

It has been standard on most flagship phones for a few years now.

I rarely (if ever) use the port to charge my devices anymore. They just look messy, wear out and take more time to plug in and un plug.

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You probably don’t carry a wireless charger with you on the go, which is incidentally when you’re most likely to need this. You’re not going to wirelessly charge your phone while you watch a movie on a flight or a train, but you sure do want to charge it so you have power left at your destination.

If that's something that's important to you, you can:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Wireless-PowerCore-Portable-Com...

And you then need to make sure that it doesn’t get jostled around enough to disconnect from the phone on your flight or train.

I’d rather just plug a cable in.

Wireless charging is nice but has a few problems. A cable charges my phone ~3x faster, generates less heat, and wastes less electricity. On the go, a USB-C cable is also more useful than a wireless charger.

>A cable charges my phone ~3x faster

You need a faster wireless charger. The high-power ones aren't as slow as this.

But still, you're right: wires are more efficient and faster. And the big factor is that no one brings a wireless charger traveling with them. A cable is much smaller and lighter, and the wireless charger still needs the cable and power adapter anyway.

Or use a USB-C headphone adapter that allows charging too. There are lots available.

When I first got a phone without a headphone jack, I bought one such dongle. It didn't work. My two subsequent phones have had headphone jacks, so I'm not going to worry about this problem again for a while, but at the time at least it was certainly not as simple as buying a dongle and knowing it would work.

Every answer here is "buy this other thing, no wait, that may not work for your use case, buy this other thing to lug around or that makes your laptop effectively a desktop".

This is strictly worse than the previous status quo.

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