What is Apple is heading toward completely sealed phones with only wireless charging / data xfer and they’re nervous that the EU is going to force them to keep the physical port on the device?
Well, not that it's relevant to the topic at hand, but if they do so, I'm leaving the ecosystem.
Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me. I go weeks without plugging my phone into the wall, but when I need it, I really need it.
> Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me.
In this hypothetical future you'd have to replace the power bank and charging cables that you currently own, but you'll be able to achieve both of those goals just fine. You can already buy power banks[1] with built-in charging coils, and I imagine some enterprising company will be along with a svelte USB-to-Qi-coil cable that suctions onto your phone any day now.
I carry a 10000 mAh battery pack[1] in my jacket[2], which besides powering the heater elements inside the jacket also provides wireless charging to my phone.
I don't know about effectiveness, but 20-30 minutes of wireless charging gives 60% + of battery power on my phone, and while i don't regularly charge my phone fully in the jacket, only top it off, i charge the battery pack once every week or so, and it is very rarely at 0%
Apple has worked on wireless proximity charging where the device merely needs to be within a few feet of the charger. I hear there are serious engineering challenges that make this hard to achieve but I don’t think they will remove the port with the current QI charging experience. Maybe there will be a charging battery you can just throw in the same bag as the phone and the phone will charge.
I'd say there are serious physical challenges with this problem. Wireless power transfer over distances of more than an inch without big parabolic antennas is about as realistic as hoverboards.
uBeam is the canonical example of this. Their own VP Engineering left and publicly stated that the technology simply doesn't work. ELI5 is that you need an impractically large phased array to transmit, and the attenuation is precipitous even at short distances. The commentary I've read (by no means exhaustive) treats it as if it's a "laws of physics" problem, but I would assume the company had some reasonably compelling answers to this challenge given that they raised $40m USD from some bright investors.
Please tell me you read my "Sealed" iPhone comment on macrumors :D
Yes. And I think they will use Smart Connector currently used on iPad as Data and Power Connection. Since it isn't really a port so the devices is still all sealed up. Assuming they get rid up Sim tray as well.
I wonder what that will do for security. It seems the publicly known exploits tend to use the wired connection to swipe data from the phone. It would likely be much more difficult to do that wirelessly. It would be a shame to lose the potential hardening benefits because of some lawmakers who may not have privacy as a core interest... or indeed quite the opposite.
USB-PD doesn't use the data wires (dp/dn or the two high speed diffpairs), it uses a sidechannel (CC). You can have a full PD implementation without a host controller or any data connection.
Who could possibly criticize the EU for mandating something which has a history of being successfully used by some of the producers to fuck over the rest?