"Look ma, no holes" - iPhone 12 rumoured to be portless

[Sauron]

35 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

Apple has been pushing bluetooth forward a lot recently, especially within their own ecosystem. They’ve also been key into integrating wifi into bluetooth, where you use bluetooth for the initial handshake, and then wifi for the actual connection. And with apple buying intel’s modem business, I only see apple being the only company in the situation take this step.

That said, gonna suck for anyone who doesn’t have a $200+ wifi router and/or a mac.

Those are just crutches for an extremely flawed protocol. It's not even necessarily the fault of BT itself, I'm not sure it could have been done much better with such a broad scope.

 

As for wifi, just get a half decent standalone AP and all your problems with that will go away. I doubt BT can contribute anything significant considering it has a lower range and power.

 

Also, bluetooth interference is a thing - having a bunch of BT devices attached to one phone will cause problems, a bunch of people in a room doing that will cause more problems. Problems that are nonexistent with cabled interfaces, by the way. That is not to say there's no place for BT or wireless peripherals, I use quite a few myself - I just take issue with taking away the alternatives.

[Guest]

Easy win for Apple. It’s not hard to keep your device charged wirelessly. Just pop it in your desk and forget about it. Anything you want can be accessed with handoff anyway 

[Curious Pineapple]

14 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

Easy win for Apple. It’s not hard to keep your device charged wirelessly. Just pop it in your desk and forget about it. Anything you want can be accessed with handoff anyway 

It's slow, wastes energy and offers no real advantage to the customer apart from having to buy yet more hardware. I really hope it's just more baseless shite, I really do.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Curious Pineapple said:

It's slow, wastes energy and offers no real advantage to the customer apart from having to buy yet more hardware. I really hope it's just more baseless shite, I really do.

It’s the ease and availability which is much better, just plop your phone down and off you go. I use my $10 bedside alarm clock, super easy. Each to their own of course.

[Curious Pineapple]

4 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

It’s the ease and availability which is much better, just plop your phone down and off you go. I use my $10 bedside alarm clock, super easy. Each to their own of course.

At the expense of any way to backup or save data without using a 3rd party service. No thanks, I'd rather have a piece of wire and just copy and paste with the added bonus of faster charging and no toaster.

 

Edit: wireless charging and a port are not mutually exclusive. Can still have the "plop it down to charge" wireless and the port for fast charging and data backups. Unless this is a ploy to actually be truthful when Apple say you can't recover data

[Kisai]

13 hours ago, bellabichon said:

If this turns out to be true, it's a pretty terrible idea, IMO. Wireless charging is still significantly slower, and being completely unable to use your phone while it's charging seems more regressive than innovative. If anything, the fact that this design would be completely obtuse makes the rumour significantly more credible, given Apple's track record in the last few years. 

Not looking forward to the iPhone that takes 16 hours to charge to use for 8 hours. On average, according to my iPhone Xs, I use 50% of the battery PER day. It would never last me two days. Considering it would take 5 hours to charge wirelessly.

 

This graph is back from the iPhone X, but it still holds true:

Now just to point out, USB-PD on a laptop is typically 7.5w or 15w also. So if you were charging via a USB-C charger to a laptop, it's likely to use the lower rating. Where as plugging into a dedicated charger will use the highest power setting it can deal with. In either case the wired methods all spank the wireless method except at 5w which is what the iPhone's come with.

 

 

 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

At the expense of any way to backup or save data without using a 3rd party service. No thanks, I'd rather have a piece of wire and just copy and paste with the added bonus of faster charging and no toaster.

iCloud is free and integrated, as well as Wifi syncing for Apple Music and TV / iTunes. 

4 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Edit: wireless charging and a port are not mutually exclusive. Can still have the "plop it down to charge" wireless and the port for fast charging and data backups. Unless this is a ploy to actually be truthful when Apple say you can't recover data

Very true, but I think Apple would rather have no port than USB C. I don’t really know what I use my port for, other than charging, so many things are OTA now. USB-C seems too bulky for an phone. We’ll have too see what happens in 2021, there’s probably a good chance for either USB C or wireless imo.

[bellabichon]

6 hours ago, HumdrumPenguin said:

What if they also release a device that charges anything wireless that is within 3m of distance? That would likely work very well. The price would be higher, but at the same time Apple is known for charging stupid prices and getting away with it.

While that would be a cool concept, there are a few key problems. Charging via magnetic induction almost always needs direct contact to work properly. If you remember the LTT video from a couple years ago, magnetic induction is so contact-based that companies have been trying a plethora of different solutions to enable truly wireless charging. Even if Apple were to develop some sort of light fixture that uses magnetic induction, it would still have the same problems as traditional wireless charging. I don't know about you, but I don't really feel like carrying around a light fixture just to charge my phone. 

[Bombastinator]

37 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

While that would be a cool concept, there are a few key problems. Charging via magnetic induction almost always needs direct contact to work properly. If you remember the LTT video from a couple years ago, magnetic induction is so contact-based that companies have been trying a plethora of different solutions to enable truly wireless charging. Even if Apple were to develop some sort of light fixture that uses magnetic induction, it would still have the same problems as traditional wireless charging. I don't know about you, but I don't really feel like carrying around a light fixture just to charge my phone. 

Wireless power is very old.  Tesla did a bunch of work on it.  There are systems that can be used for wireless charging at a distance.  They generally involve wildly high voltages l, are quite large, and aren’t very efficient.

[AndreiArgeanu]

1 hour ago, bellabichon said:

While that would be a cool concept, there are a few key problems. Charging via magnetic induction almost always needs direct contact to work properly. If you remember the LTT video from a couple years ago, magnetic induction is so contact-based that companies have been trying a plethora of different solutions to enable truly wireless charging. Even if Apple were to develop some sort of light fixture that uses magnetic induction, it would still have the same problems as traditional wireless charging. I don't know about you, but I don't really feel like carrying around a light fixture just to charge my phone. 

But that means that Apple will have to develop it's own proprietary technology or buy/license Wi-Charge for their phones which is essentially proprietary and will lead to Apple or Wi-Charge being the only ones that can provide you with chargers, and you'd probably have to buy a separate attachment as well to use a power bank