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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.

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe it's for the same reason by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    oh dont get me wrong, I do love apple. It takes a large number of people who i used to fix their things for free to telling them to talk to apple because i dont do it.

    but as a power user, and i think thats who makes up the majority of this site, in no way does taking away functionality = an upgrade

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    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  2. Re:Wireless charging hit mainstream ~ 1-2 years ag by macs4all · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was using an Amiga when you Mac faggots were jizzing all over your black-and-white screens and fiddling with your 1 button mice. Macs4all? Fuck you. I prefer real computers.

    Amigas had some spectacular hardware. I was even going to embed an Amiga 500 into a stage lighting controller I was designing while you were busy playing Battle Chess on your Amiga.

    However, the Amiga OS was just an unstable piece of shit, and, well, we know what happened to Commodore...

    And really? A one-button mouse joke and a run at sexuality is the best you can do? Are you mentally challenged,Mir what?

  3. Apple and Proprietary by poemtree · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Let's just dispense with the "Apple does proprietary connectors to charge royalties and profit!" line. Let's ignore for a minute the fact that modern Macs (including the new USB-C sporting MacBook) have zero "proprietary" connectors on them. And let's ignore for a minute that Apple was the greatest early champion of USB, Ethernet, and WiFi. When Apple does do a home-grown connector, say FireWire for example, it is because they have come up with something better than anything that exists in the market. This was even true of Lightning, which arrived years before USB-C, and was so much better then any small form-factor USB connector. Often, as in the case of FireWire and Mini DisplayPort, Apple either made them available for anyone to adopt as standards or added to an existing standard. And let me just throw this in here preemptively, because I know someone will bring it up. Thunderbolt was developed by Intel and adopted by Apple, so it is not proprietary. Any PC maker can adopt Thunderbolt, and it is inexplicable so few have.

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    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
  4. Re:Wireless charging hit mainstream ~ 1-2 years ag by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not like you can charge your phone from a distance.

    That's coming, and soon. There's a standard coming now which does it at up to 10W, which is enough to run many small devices outright.

    I doubt it. You either have to point a beam very accurately or you lose efficiency to cube of distance. Using a 100W to get 10W a meter away is just not very acceptable.