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Comment by rutierut | Hacker News Reader

Apple contributing to an open standard here must mean they've got ambitions to go portless with the iphones.

With wireless-only charging, prevalence and compatibility is more important than exclusivity and using it as an USP which they usually seem to prefer.

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Wireless only charging would be wasteful as it's rather inefficient (most tests show about 50% more energy put in to achieve the same charge) and this magnetic system is unlikely to work well for anyone who uses a case to achieve good coil alignment... I really hope the market doesn't go in this direction.

a) Wireless charging is a significantly better user experience. Every morning I quickly put my phone up against a magnetic dock, there is a click and it charges. I can also attach battery packs the same way. No cables. No hassles.

b) MagSafe cases exist which are also magnetic and so there is no issue with coil alignment.

a) It's okay that you can use it, but please don't remove port. It's bad for me.

Going portless would be so bad in terms of ewaste. I still use wired headphones. I'm not about to bend the knee and buy some junky bluetooth cans that have degraded batteries in a year. My Sony MDRV6's have held up for 10 years now and still look and sound new, no reason to throw them away just because apple designers want to make a phone without the ability to connect a cable to it.

Bluetooth to 1/8” adapters are a thing.

Bluetooth audio ain't as good.

It's also a pain to pair something to each and every device you happen to switch it to. My blutooth mouse gives me trouble enough, I'd have thrown it away by now if such an action with an otherwise good mouse wasn't so wasteful.

That’s less true today and won’t be true at all within the next year.

Great, a new thing to buy and charge and watch the battery degrade that I didn't need until it was forced upon me

Idk if that is a good extrapolation necessarily, they also contribute to USB-C.

More likely, it’s better to just have their standard be the main one so they don’t need to deal with the complexity of messaging “well this doesn’t work on our phones etc”

What is Apple contributing? Alphabet has the patent on magnet alignment: US7026789B2.

You can’t patent an idea like “magnetic alignment”, only specific implementations. There are many possibly implementations.

Apple has many patents in this space, for instance US 10804748.

> You can’t patent an idea like “magnetic alignment”, only specific implementations.

Well, I'm frankly surprised you can patent it at all, but you can cover many possible implementations in a single patent.

> Apple has many patents in this space, for instance US 10804748.

That's pretty much worthless as far as magnetic alignment. That patent is specifically geared towards foreign object detection.

Point being, there are probably tens, if not hundreds, of patents for magnetic alignment of wireless chargers. You asserted there is one and only one all over this thread, and that’s not how patents work. Only the specific implementation, to some level of detail, is covered.

Apple had about 40 patents in this space, Samsung has a bunch, etc.

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