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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

It gets kind of lost in the summary, but only devices that are rechargeable via a wired cable have to be chargable via USB-C. So going fully wireless is perfectly legal. It's also perfectly legal to offer other charging ports in addition to USB-C, though that's less likely to happen in phones.

And while this regulation puts some limitations on innovation in connectors, Thunderbolt shows that there is lots of room to innovate within the USB-C format (in a way that's compatible to normal USB).

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Wireless magsafe is like half the speed of wired (peak 18w, nominal 11w vs 20w)

I’m not in a hurry, I can charge slowly during the night.

Remember when people said they’d never use an phone that needs to be charged every 2 days? Now we all charge our phones every day. Habbits change with technology.

Personally fast charging changed everything. Plug phone at random occasion (few minutes before leaving home or during short ride) and never have to think of overnight charging. I've mounted magsafe thing on my car dashboard and it was somewhat of disappointment. Sure it's convenient but slower charge was def noticeable.

But the whole point is being able to depend on a cable that just about everyone has. All of your gear has USB-C. Apple just being cocky.

Like this you waste charging cycle. I doubt this "few minutes before leaving home" can charge your phone up to 100%. Every cycle you do not charge from 0% up to 100% can be considered a wasted cycle. And in wasting things we are good ;)

I don’t need anywhere near 100%. Mere 20% with low battery mode will last me the evening.

That is not accurate, as far as I understand. The opposite might even be the case.

From what I understand, the battery is damaged most when close to 0% or close to 100%.

So, if a phone could do, say, 1000 full cycles until the battery reaches a certain stage of degradation, and now you used an identical phone, but with shorter cycles only down to 20%, then charge to 80%, you could not only do 1000 of those short cycles, but even 1000/60% = 1667, and still have the battery in a better shape than the one with 1000 full cycles.

I am not certain about this, though.

wireless charging efficiency isn't too great either

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

Fast charging is bad for the battery. I’d actually be happier if the wireless MagSafe charger was slower, say around 5-8W. I have all the time in the world while asleep, why would I care if it finished charging in 1 hour vs 3 hours?

Few percent of capacity over incredible convenience easily wins. IPhone batteries are trivial to replace these days too.

For you it’s easy - there are Tons of crappy chargers and weak power supplies you can use.

I have the MagSafe battery and if your iPhone is hot it won't charge wirelessly at all. It was frustrating to come prepared with a 100% phone and 100% battery pack, and leave an event with a dead phone and 60% still in the battery pack.

Permitting wireless charging without a USB-C option basically topedos the legislation. This whole affair is going to end up as an embarrassing meme.

Well i dunno, it worked tremendously well for USB 2, don’t you think? Might be my age, but I distinctly remember having heaps of different charging cables. Gone, thanks to EU legislation.

Why would it be different this time?

I too remember the bad old days of a different charger for every phone, and for no real reason in most cases (other than profit-motive).

It was about the charger and they settled on USB as the outlet.

Now the EU is settling on the socket on the devices, that's dofferent.

You're not completely honest here, though. It was either Type A jack for power supplies without a cable, or Type B micro jack for fixed cables, and the latter very much specifies the port on the device.

> Gone, thanks to EU legislation.

Sort of. Standardizing on a USB-A charger did slightly push people to use a USB form plug on the other end - but data transfer is what really killed the proprietary connectors.

The multitude of USB connectors has been pared down - mini USB was withdrawn due to its design flaws, micro USB was obnoxious for 5Gbps data transfer, as was the larger USB-B plug. The convenience and capabilities of USB-C have slowly replaced them both on the device side, as well as the capability to go higher than 5 Gbps.

If anything has slowed adoption of USB-C, I'd point at desktop PCs and the reluctance to put 'real' USB-C ports on them. This is mostly because of what I consider to be a design error on the USB-IF's part - they added backward compatibility, allowing a USB-C dongle to supply a USB-A connector, when they should have supplied forward compatibility instead. This left a lot of bundled cables as well as hardware dongles like wireless mouse adapters stuck on USB-A.

The decision passed today also talks about harmonizing wireless charging in the future, to make sure it's compatible across brands and device types. Presumably that would happen once the technology has matured a bit more.

And with this outlook, industry should/will get ahead of the legislators and gravitate towards a standard of their own.

The current legislation was introduced because 1 manufacturer chose to not follow the standard and mostly for profit reasons.

How so? Wireless charging is still slower and inferior (in the usability sense) than wired charging, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Move to wireless only is shame since charge is slow, not good for battery health, breaks many compatibility like wired only CarPlay, and not fixing big file (high quality 4K video) transferring issue.

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