Why the hell laptops do not have wireless charging at this point? Would rant about phones, but I’ve heard that Apple will release iPhone 13 with wireless only, so that’s great

I prefer type c cables though, because it would be a bit confusing in where should they put the wireless charger port on the laptop

Wireless only is not so great to begin with until we entirely migrate to wireless only

I care less about that than usb-c changing.

I can think of two reasons

- laptops are another level of power, I know devices with like 80W power supplies

- laptops are supposed to be mobile, and having to put the laptop onto some plate that charges it kind of defeats the purpose.

So the charging plate would sit on your desk and you could use a normal power cord "on the go".

Almost like a docking station.

Induction with that amount of power would be dangerous, honestly.

@LotsOfCaffeine Pppff. Mine's 200W.

@ScriptCoded exactly

I don't want that much power over induction unless it's a stove

There's standardization on radiation emissions that are deemed "safe." Charging a laptop inductively would violate most of them. They're fairly consistent the world over as well.

Ex
https://fda.gov/industry/...

MacSafe was nice.. of course they got rid of it...

Imagine buying a table from Ikea with wireless built in xd

Regular charging wastes about 25% of energy, wireless charging wastes more than 50%. An average laptop has about 70 Wh battery, and takes about 2 hours to charge. Based on this info, wirelessly charging your laptop would emit about 35 watts of power, mostly as heat (~70%) and EM radiation (~30%). For comparison, the most powerful i7 laptop CPUs consume 45 watts in performance mode, so using your laptop while it charges wirelessly would essentially produce twice as much heat as regular use, which can be a significant problem. Further, it would produce as much "free" radiation (radiation not captured by charging antenna or other laptop components) as the highest range 5G cells, so using your laptop while charging would be like hugging one of those, or being surrounded with 100 WiFi routers. Obviously you'd also have a whole lot of problems using any other wireless device in the presence of such high EM radiation.

Why is "wireless only" a good thing?! Carrying around some chunky wireless bad / docking station is far, far less convenient than just grabbing a USB-C cable from... anywhere.

@AlmondSauce If wireless was a real thing for laptops, I bet most places would have stations or some kind of alternative. Look at headphones nowadays. Most people were outraged by the lack of them, but wireless buds are, well, convenient.

Look at this f* mess

@yehaaw I doubt it, especially if you need different charging stations for different laptops and devices.

*Eventually* maybe, but even if Apple release a wireless-only charging MacBook tomorrow, it's going to be a heck of a long time before shared offices have them ubiquitously, let alone trains, buses, etc.

@AlmondSauce

* I’m sure, that wireless charging docks work with any kind of device, which supports this feature. 🤔

* Many non-tech businesses still use Windows 7, IE and other super duper legacy software solutions, so that’s not an argument really, haha.

@hitko Qi (most widely used wireless charging standard for phones & small electronics) produces about 2.6 watts of EM radiation. Imagine "wireless charging only" devices on an 8 hour flight in a 747, which has about 450 passengers - that's well over 1 kW of radiation while passengers charge their tablets and smartphones. That's roughly the same as having 60 highest range 5G cells on board.

@yehaaw There's at least two incompatible mainstream standards at present. And that's just electrical compatibility - your device has to be positioned pretty precisely, so physical compatibility could be a whole different ball game.

Not sure what you mean by your last comment? Businesses use legacy crap, but that's nout to do with wireless charging.

@hitko Did not know about that! Hopefully these barriers will be bypassed in the future.

@AlmondSauce I meant, that new tech adaptation is slow in some areas and it can’t be an argument against innovation.

@yehaaw Innovation could be considered providing wireless charging. But *only* providing that certainly isn't.

@yehaaw why do you keep your soundbar and headphones on the floor

@electrineer it’s temporary 🙃

@yehaaw I doubt there will be some major changes in the future. Above visible spectrum we have ionising radiation, which we can't use since it causes damage to cells and DNA. Visible spectrum doesn't work either, since it's blocked by most materials and no one would use wireless charging if it worked using a high-power light source. Below visible spectrum we have radio waves and EM induction, which are used by most wireless charging technologies as they're the most powerful types of non-ionising, non-visible radiation. Both of them are also used to cook food, induction on your stove, and radio waves in a microwave, which is a pretty obvious indicator that we can't use them without wasting energy on heat.

For the second part, the only way to limit the amount of "wasted" radiation would be to make transmitters more focused, but then you'd have to carefully align the device and the charger, which defies the whole purpose of wireless charging.

For purely scientific purposes, how do induction stoves compare to wireless chargers? Could a wireless charger boil water in an appropriate pot?

@homo-lorens For the sake of argument let's consider a coffee maker filled with 10dl of water.

@hitko visible light is already widely used for charging

@electrineer It's used for charging since there's this huge thing called sun up in the sky, which emits tons of energy, and the only part to penetrate Earth's EM shield in sufficient amounts is visible light and corresponding heat. Nobody uses powerful lights and photovoltaic cells to transmit energy, because it's just too impractical and inefficient.

Energy loss is pretty big, I would guess. And the charger itself is a bit more complex than just a wire

@homo-lorens They both work on the same principle, called the Faraday's law of induction. By running electric current through a conductor (usually a coper coil), you get an EM field. By oscillating the current, you get an oscillating EM field. If you then put another conductor inside your oscillating EM field, electric current is induced in the second conductor.

The difference between wireless charging and cooking is simple. For wireless charging, the second conductor is a piece of wire, where each end is connected to the battery to store the resulting current. For cooking, the second conductor is the bottom of your pan - since it's a single piece of metal, the current induced inside it immediately turns to heat.

However, you can't really use wireless charging to heat anything - the power is too low, and transmitter coils are configured for a different coupling. On top of that, wireless chargers are programmed to communicate with the device during charging, and won't work otherwise.

@hitko Of course wireless charging still generates plenty of heat due to the electrical resistance of coils and other components, and because the resulting oscillating current has to be converted to DC before being stored in a battery.

While a wireless charger could theoretically heat things through induction, it's not configured for optimal induction in things like cooking vessels, so the resulting heat would be minimal compared to its power output.

Global warming, that’s why. Wireless is just cool, but it actually sucks.

Don’t use it.

@yehaaw CABLE MANAGEMENT, HAVE TOU HEARD OF IT???

Would most likely solve all your cable related problems.

@bagfox Fuck cables and fuck you

@hitko FWIW I suspect wireless charging will see developments in future - but I think that will be driven by lower power consumption of arm or riscv based machines making it viable, rather than higher power wireless charging solutions. On the wireless power front I'd be surprised if we saw much more than a modest efficiency boost.

That's really spoiled idea. Radiation is baka.

Wireless only is a horrible idea.

because it's a wasteful needless gimmick?

@yehaaw no u

@bagfox uno reverse

@yehaaw double up

@bagfox uno. I win