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Comment by glogla | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly for me the best part is the USB-C.

Some people predicted that new iPhone will be completely portless and allow wireless charging only, just to not having to support USB-C out of spite.

I guess we'll need to wait a year or two more.

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That was such a dumb prediction..

It just doesn’t make sense to go wireless only, like even as the presentation showed, there are great usecases for wires, like moving data fast to external storage during video recording. Also, charging is much much slower without a cable, and then we didn’t even talk about debuggibility, servicibility, for no reason whatsoever. Apple is not hurt by usb-c, they have been using it for many years on their own dime. They just waited around so if anyone takes offense (see other commenters) they can freely point their fingers at the EU. They only were waiting around for a scapegoat.

Based on an analysis of their product line up and past actions, I believe their ultimate intention was to introduce USB-C as the port for iPhone "Pro" models and remove the port entirely from the regular non pro models, in favor of wireless charging. You can see a proto version of this in the current iPad lineup: the Pro and Air (mid range model) have USB-C, while the base iPad uses Lightning.

You're right that USB-C can transfer data very fast in comparison to Lightning, but most casual users likely don't do this at all. They primarily use cloud backup solutions. This is somewhat supported by the fact that data transfer speeds on non pro models of the 15 are the same as Lightning.

Additionally, Apple had much more control over who could legally produce cables and accessories with Lightning due to owning the standard, which isn't the case with USB-C.

I really think the only reason it didn't shake out like this is because wireless charging tech just isn't where it needs to be. It's possible that Apple thought it was going to advance faster. They had one very ambitious product they were going to release for wireless charging that got completely canceled a couple years ago: theverge.com/2021/8/5/22611234/apple-airpower-wireless-charger-working-prototype

Do you know how rare it is for Apple to announce a product and then alter it at all from what they said when they announced it -- much less straight up cancel it?

They could have gone the iPad route, but part of the problem is that iPhones are a status symbol/conspicuous consumption product as well. There are plenty of people who buy the latest "Pro" model as a way of signaling status. This move would likely have caused a lot of confusion in general for less tech savvy people. It's no longer "Do you have an iPhone charger?" it's "Do you have an iPhone charger or that new new one?"

>They only were waiting around for a scapegoat.

I really doubt this. Apple has never been one to shy away from making decisions that can be decried as shameless profit grabs. Example: removing headphone jack. Removing wall brick charger from phones.

They could not have predicted that the EU would introduce unprecedented legislation forcing them to this standard and they fought it vehemently.

That prediction always seemed premature to me. Wireless charging still can't compete with USB fast charging for speed, and cables are more portable then even the sleekest wireless chargers. While I imagine Apple will ditch cables as soon as they think it's feasible, I just don't think that's going to happen for at least a few more years.

Ever since Jobs killed the floppy at the height of its power, people have wanted to jump the gun on the next "ubiquitous" thing Apple will kill off.

I doubt we’ll ever see that just because of how badly it would screw over CarPlay users.

Wireless CarPlay is becoming pretty common.

yes, but I've heard many, many negative things about it (lag, slow charging, phone overheating, etc). I don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually liking it.

Huh. We use it in our car and it works OK. I do know other with the car who have issues with lag however.

Slow charging though... that seems orthogonal?

It's orthangonal until however you're charging it can't keep up with demand. A 14 Max on a standard USB-A -> Lightning connection is already really marginal. Like, I can drive for an hour with waze running and the phone plugging in (wired carplay) and it'll charge maybe 5%.

Sounds like waze is the problem… I regularly drive all day with Apple Maps, MagSafe charging, and Bluetooth data. No issues keeping my phone charged

What kind of amperage is your car putting out? Older cars really struggle to power phones. In some cars, it's possible to upgrade the USB port - otherwise, you may be better off using the 12V port (cigarette lighter) since you have wireless CarPlay available to you.

In my Fusion, I'm stuck using wired Android Auto, so I am unfortunately not able to use the 12V port for charging.

No clue, it's a 2017 model so reasonably new. It doesn't even have a cig lighter.

Mine is also a 2017 and can barely charge my phone. :(

You can get an adapter to change that wired android auto to wireless. I've done this in my ute. Then with my s22 I can use the 12v port with a QC3.0 compatible charger and get above 1% per minute charge whilst still having android auto running.

The adapter plugs in to the USB port for android auto and then offers up a wireless connection. Everything is automatic once set up.

My car only has wireless Carplay, yet it supports wireless and wired Android Auto. It sucks. The only thing worse would not be having Carplay at all.

I think that's largely due to car manufacturers being shit at software. The previous generation of my current car was absolute trash when it came to CarPlay. Even the wired version of it sucked.

The 2023 model had the entertainment system massively upgraded. Wireless CarPlay is seamless and fast. The wireless charging pad isn't amazing but it does the job just fine.

I love wireless CarPlay now. :)

Wireless CarPlay works great in our VW. What sucks is that when Apple abandoned Qi wireless standard the wireless charging pad in the car doesn’t work well or consistently with the MagSafe design.

Apple didn’t abandon Qi… all wirelessly chargeable iPhones are Qi compatible.

They’re technically QI compatible but they don’t work as well with those chargers — much harder alignment issues and therefore less stable and reliable charging in my experience.

Doesn't do anythign for the millions of people (self included) that already own a car with wired carplay.

I'm sure there will be a dongle for that.

There already are some:

https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/10/carplay-wireless-carplay-adap...

There already are several wireless car play adapters for under $100, I have one and it works perfectly

Existing cars remain over a decade

I honestly didn't know non-wireless carplay existed until you said something. Everyone I know just keeps their phone on a charging pad somewhere in the car.

It fits a use case for some but it doesn't appeal to me.

- Plugging the phone in is so easy.

- With Wireless Carplay presumbably I'd have to futz with the phone anyway if both of our phones are associated with the entertainment system

- I still have to take the phone out of my pocket to put it on the wireless charging pad. That is actually the hassle, not plugging the phone in

- If I don't care about charging my phone, I assume my phone is going to heat up in my pocket and drain the battery while I'm doing Wireless Carplay stuff

- A lot of my driving is short 10-15 min trips. Can put a pretty decent charge into my phone during that time with the wired connection. Not with inductive charging.

I had wireless CarPlay in my last car and every single iOS update would brick the connection somehow. Eventually muscle memory for just plugging in the damn phone took over.

I suspect they have a few things to work out with regards to CarPlay wireless connection(s) before they could remove ports on the device, in addition to the other comments on this thread.

My prediction is that Apple's going to introduce some sort of "MagSafe Data" protocol — some kind of high-bandwidth NFC that runs through an autonomous controller chip that comes up before the rest of the device, such that it can be used to DFU-restore / JTAG / etc. the phone, just as Lightning currently does.

Which is a lot of the people who have bought new vehicles in the last 5+ years. And I can't think of any way to work around it that wouldn't (or at least couldn't) be some horrendous kludge which probably wouldn't work very well.

I'd never say never obviously but dropping ports entirely would have to be a terrible decision anytime soon. (And one wonders what assurances Apple has made to auto manufacturers adopting CarPlay.)

> terrible decision

I think you meant brave decision.

There's brave as in people whine because it's pushing the envelope but it can be easily worked around (see headphone jack) and there's brave in the sense of foolhardy which I have to believe all wireless would be in the next decade. (On a phone. Seems reasonable on a watch especially one advertised as suitable for fairly extreme conditions.)

> And I can't think of any way to work around it that wouldn't (or at least couldn't) be some horrendous kludge which probably wouldn't work very well.

One could always dream of head unit updates for wireless carplay support...

But according to some wireless carplay adapters do work quite well so that might be an option: https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/10/carplay-wireless-carplay-adap...

Apple could even release an official one.

Where "work quite well" means "latency". It's even a sub-header in TFA linked above. It's the reason we didn't buy a dongle for our new Hyundai Ioniq 5 (which inexplicably still uses USB-A in 2023, and no wireless CarPlay), because every single review for every single dongle at best said, "...and the latency isn't all that bad." Oh, it'll be bad for me if it's bad enough for a reviewer to notice. Grabbing the cable when I get in the car isn't nearly as annoying as waiting for my button press to register.

My new Honda Passport was USB-A and no wireless last year--but then I was happy to be able to get a car at all.

Not that CarPlay is a necessity of life but glitchy CarPlay would be a pretty big negative for my experience with a vehicle.

Could Apple perhaps sell you a $99 wireless wired CarPlay dongle?

Maybe $199?

non-apple wireless adapter is 100 bucks, Apple's would be at least 199.

Now that it's become like the USB-C port on the iPad (at least at high end) I doubt it will go away, but maybe the SE will be replaced with a watch-like "no ports" phone someday.

The reason for USB-C was to adhere to a common standard. Getting rid of the port entirely and depending on a MagSafe charger is just the same as insisting on lightning, and you would have to buy special cables or devices for it.

That wouldn't pass muster in the regulation.

They need to keep USB-C until they figure out another way to transfer large ProRes videos from the iPhone. Wifi is just too slow.

Probably see WiFi upgrades to laptops first before client devices. So another year or two before that gets solved

But its like fundamental physics and it doesn’t make sense to ditch wires — it will always take more energy and more loss to transport anything in a medium of distant molecules vs a tightly coupled one with interesting properties.

And for what benefit? That port is already water-proof.

> That port is already water-proof.

Resistant.

Who cares? How many people are dropping their phone in the ocean and retrieving it?

How many people have wound up with unusable phones due to accidentally dropping it in water? Sink, bath, toilet, stream, pool, spa, etc?

I care. It's a safety / insurance feature.

They're IP68 resistant, those scenarios are pretty much covered already.

I don't know about spite — I feel like they were holding off on moving the iPhone to USB-C for so long precisely because they had already planned on going portless "soon", and it would have been silly to do two of these "brave" transitions in quick succession.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37485328. (There's nothing wrong with it - I'm just trying to prune the top-heavy thread)

Those people were way off the mark anyway because there was no rumor to support that and it wouldn't even make practical sense.

recording your footage directly to external storage is kind of a dependent feature though. They are angling on the prosumer / low end commercial videography with that.

I suspect lots of people who would be happy to shoot on a phone have upgraded to blackmagic specifically because you can just swap the card and keep rolling.

Nobody believed it. Wireless charging just isn't there. Heat and speed need to improve first.

God, I hope not. For all the "eco-friendliness" they spouted, this would be a step in the wrong direction.

I found it amusing that they tried to spin Magsafe as eco-friendly too... because, uh, you can't use leather cases anymore(?)

Yeah, certainly eco-friendly, if we forget about all the energy losses :)

Exactly!

Energy loss from wireless charging is utterly meaningless. It’s like focusing on the length of your shower instead of agricultural water use.

The cynic in me knows the real reason for them to be a carbon neutral company is so that you don't feel bad purchasing another one of their phones since it was produced "neutrally".

According to my research (1) wireless charging increases the consumption between 40 and 80 % depending on how well you align the coils.

It would be very much Apple move to take something that wastes enormous amount of energy (given the number of people who have iPhones) and claim it is eco-friendly.

(1): I looked on Wikipedia for 30 seconds

Iphones use such a small amount of energy that doubling the energy consumption is fairly negligible in the grand scheme of things.

12.7Wh per battery for the iPhone 14, times a billion iphones. Assume a worst case scenario of full battery usage per day per phone, which gives us 5 billion watts or 5 gigawatts.

Doubling that power use if everyone switched to low quality wireless charging (50%) would require another 5 gigawatts, or a few thousand more wind turbines.

Bigger than I thought in a worst case scenario, but still not too bad.

Especially if wireless charging prevents premature replacement by reducing port failure, as the embodied energy is estimated to to be the majority of the energy involved in the lifecycle of a smartphone.

Running an Air Conditioner in a small room for an hour (~500Wh) uses the same energy an iPhone would take in ~40 complete charge/discharge cycles. Of course, the numbers look big when you scale them up but as a percentage of total energy use, it's marginal to non-existent.

> Especially if wireless charging prevents premature replacement by reducing port failure

Interesting. I wasn't aware this was a common problem? It's not something I'm used to hearing about as an Android user.

I'd be more interested in whether Magsafe or USB-C wears the battery out sooner.

Back of the napkin: hundred million iPhones recharging their 13 Wh battery once a day every day from zero to full for a year is about 60 % the electric energy that this power plant [1] makes in a year.

Not huge amount of energy, but not negligible either.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project

edit: I see someone else did the math as well.

Not negligible, but also a small cost of the total cost of the iPhone system. call it 500 megawatts for 100m iPhones, which for moderately expensive generation capacity is ~ 2million per megawatt of capacity, works out to $10 per phone in electricity. A typical power plant has expected lifetimes of ~25-50 years, which if we assume a generous 5 year phone lifespan, and a 25 year plant life...

That works out to $2 per iPhone to build power plants to charge the iphone every day for it's an entire life. Not bad for a device that costs hundreds of dollars.

Sounds like the same logic used for writing apps in Electron. :)

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