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Why Apple Won't Adopt a Wireless Charging Standard
Lucas123 writes As the battle for mobile dominance continues among three wireless charging standards, with many smartphone and wearable makers having already chosen sides, Apple continues to sit on the sideline. While the new Apple Watch uses a tightly coupled magnetic inductive wireless charging technology, it still requires a cable. The only advantage is that no port is required, allowing the watch case to remain sealed and water resistant. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, however, remain without any form of wireless charging, either tightly coupled inductive or more loosely coupled resonant charging. Over the past few years, Apple has filed patents on its own flavor of wireless charging, a "near field" or resonant technology, but no products have as yet come to market. If and when it does select a technology, it will likely be its own proprietary specification, which ensures accessory makers will have to pay royalties to use it.
Charging isn't the only thing the cable does. When you want to sync those multi-GB's of pictures, music and videos or do an iTunes backup, you'll want the cable.
Their social zeal and Apple's marketing will overwhelm the field, and at some point everyone will call all wireless chargers "iChargers" even if only half of them are, and the others are actually other brands / technologies that work similarly but pre-dated it.
Sadly, that is probably actually what will happen.
When Steve Jobs died, major news sites like CNN ran stories proclaiming that he "invented the computer mouse". Steve Jobs. Now granted maybe someone typed "Jobs" when they meant to type "Engelbart" as a mere innocent slip of the fingers. Could happen!
Real Nerds know that you need AC for wireless charging, DC just won't cut it.
Seriously though, my opinion as a physicist/engineer is that wireless charging is a little dumb. It wastes a lot of power in an age where energy conservation is paramount, for what exactly? It's not like you can charge your phone from a distance. Inductive charging is a sensible tradeoff in things like dil^Welectric toothbrushes -- just because it can be done, doesn't mean it's great for everything.
As a practical matter, the efficiencies are affected by the frequency of the AC Signal. At 50/60 Hz, there are significant losses to heat, due to poor power-factor numbers as well as problems with core saturation (esp. At 50 Hz). However, if you crank the frequency up to about 100 kHz, like a lot of SMPS designs, things begin to look a lot better. Crank it up again, to a few MHz, and the efficiencies get really good, and the components get pretty damned small.
But, as a "physicist/engineer" (which no one who was really either of those would call themselves), you should already know all this.
And beside all that, the measly few Watts that are needed to charge a phone in a reasonable period of time aren't going to deplete the planet's energy reserves anytime soon. Even a poor transformer operating in the 60 Hz world typically achieves over 80% efficiency in it's energy transfer from Primary to Secondary. So, extrapolating from the real-world example of the original 10W iPhone "cube" charger, you would only have to increase that to around 12W to overcome the 20% loss from a small air-gap.
I am NOT talking about charging-at-a-distance. The inverse-square law gets you pretty quick when doing that!
Yes, I hate all of Apple's proprietary standards. Like how they used AAC for their iTunes store, or mini-DisplayPort for the video connectors. And then they used Thunderbolt. Oh, and now they're using USB Type-C ports.
If you're confused as to why I grouped USB Type-C ports in there, it's because I was being sarcastic. Contrary to popular belief, none of those things that I listed are Apple proprietary technology. AAC does not stand for "Apple Audio Codec", and it's a standard put out by the same people who put out the MP3 standard, but actually has had fewer patent issues. Mini-DisplayPort was created by Apple, but the turned it into an open standard that is completely free to use, with no patent issues. Thunderbolt is a standard that Intel created, though supposedly Apple helped develop it. It's being used on lots of non-Apple hardware.
I guess the MagSafe port is proprietary. It's also really good, and they were smart to develop it. iPhones and iPads have the Lightning port, which was apparently used because they found the specs for the current USB micro connectors to be insufficient. There have been some rumors that Apple helped develop the USB Type-C ports because they wanted a replacement for USB's current micro connectors that would be usable in their products. Their wireless communications are all WiFi and Bluetooth. A lot of their software is based on open-sourced software.
Yes, obviously not all of their software is open source, and they aren't producing commodity hardware. However, it doesn't really make sense to imply that they refuse to follow standards and instead create more expensive non-compatible alternatives.