Slashdot Mirror
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.
So next year, Apple will "invent" it for the masses, using their own proprietary (read: expensive) version of 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.
Yup, and then all the Apple-heads will flock to it, talk about how amazing it is (ignoring the fact that the same capabilities existed before, from other companies). 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. Such is the power - the evil power - that Apple exerts in our dark age...
William George
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.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I understand. I haven't logged in to work for a couple of years, and it's been awesome.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Their customers (like me) are happy because the Apple stuff works well for them. There's annoyances like proprietay cables, and frustration over the reluctance of Apple to open up some of their APIs; we have custom keyboards and widgets at last, but still no Siri. But for me, those are minor. I've tried Android as well on a phone and tablets, and hated it. A friend of mine (who switched from Apple to Android) explained it well: "The advantage of Android is that you are free to tweak everything to your liking. The disadvantage is that you have to". For me, Apple's garden suits me well enough to not really even notice the wall that rings it. Complain about Apple's design choices, questionable business policies, their treatment of consumers, and the locked-down environment, and I'll agree. But my next phone will still be an iPhone because I want one that'll do what I want it to, right out of the box.
I did keep the Android tablet... the ability to just grab files from my local NAS, work with them, move them, that's something sorely missing on the iPad.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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
You're being far too reasonable. Where's the inchoate rage at the existence of any product not tailor-made for linux geeks? Where's the cognitive dissonance caused by other people liking something that you yourself do not approve of?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
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!
Yup, and then all the Apple-heads will flock to it, talk about how amazing it is (ignoring the fact that the same capabilities existed before, from other companies). 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. Such is the power - the evil power - that Apple exerts in our dark age...
If you really believe that, you need help.
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!
Excuse me, but now it's Apple's fault that CNN can't do research?
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?
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.
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.