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What Finally Killed AirPower

ifixit.org

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Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#81

Post by dodobirdlord »

darkpuma wrote: post #41
sneak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of money Apple makes from selling replacement cables due to fatigue due to inadequate (in their opinion “ugly”) strain relief is negligible. Please stop spreading this inaccurate meme. Apple makes money because they sell metric shitloads of $1200 phones and $600 watches and, increasingly, software and services for them. Not cables.

I can get an Amazon Basic's brand USB-C cable for $4.17 per meter. Apple sells theirs for $19 per meter. Is Apple selling these cables at cost, or are they making a profit from them? Amazon isn't a brand I trust either, but from the magnitude of that difference I'm pretty sure Apple is making a tidy profit on these cables. I don't think Apple is a trillion dollar company because of cable sales, but from where I sit i…

The USB-C standard is arcane and cables can have wildly different functionality and quality and still comply with the standard. Occam's razor suggests that there is not some cable markup conspiracy going on here. Higher quality cables + luxury brand tax is a far more reasonable solution.

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#83

Post by leoh »

pg_bot wrote: post #74

Could you put a pressure sensor on the pad and only power on the coils directly underneath the object? I assume with software you could selectively turn on/off areas of the mat to manage the heat problems that come with multiple coils being on at once. I could see it being a problem if they were charging all at the same time but you should be able to fake it and call that good enough. All the devices have to charge,…

Right. Or similarly, you could figure out which coil(s) were drawing the most power and perhaps power the others down?

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#84

Post by veryworried »

rincebrain wrote: post #31
sp332 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can slap my phone down on the charger next to my bed in the dark. I can grab my phone off the charger on my desk at work with one hand. Before wireless charging, it wasn't much hassle, and I only rarely had trouble with my phone battery dying. Now it's almost no hassle, and I never have trouble with my battery dying. It's just a nice quality-of-life boost.

Is that not something many people can do one-handed? The last time I had any trouble doing that one-handed was in the era of proprietary inch-wide charge connectors.

That’s nice for you, but some of us suffer from disorders that lead to shaking hands and poor coordination, such that plugging in a device to such a small port is a grueling, sometimes impossible task. What then?

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#85

Post by zhte415 »

kbutler wrote: post #15
brian-armstrong wrote: post #11

So my phone is charged by a cable. It plugs into the wall on one side and then plugs into my phone on the other. This system works great - I plug my phone in when I go to bed and unplug it when I wake up. The cable is long enough to plug into my phone even if I want to use it in bed. It's easy, cheap and failproof. What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?

I have a Nexus 7 2013 whose USB jack no longer works (probably accumulated damage from bumps/drops/general stressors), but wireless charging still works fine. (High-five ThatPlayer who posted at the same time)

The USB jack is always the first to fail for me too. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get it replaced. Where I am a USB jack replacement (parts and labour) is about USD 8 (and a replacement for a scratch screen (5 inch 720x1280 so nothing special) is about USD 15, both at a local electronics market.

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#86

Post by dodobirdlord »

jhanschoo wrote: post #66
DevKoala wrote: post #12

This is a click bait title by iFixit. It’s all speculation on their end.

It's an educated guess with evidence presented.

The proposition that Apple wasn't checking EM spectrum compliance until the very end is so ludicrous that it's obviously false.

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#87

Post by Simon_says »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #11

So my phone is charged by a cable. It plugs into the wall on one side and then plugs into my phone on the other. This system works great - I plug my phone in when I go to bed and unplug it when I wake up. The cable is long enough to plug into my phone even if I want to use it in bed. It's easy, cheap and failproof. What is the draw of wireless charging? What is it that I'm missing? Did anyone ask for this?

I have a waterproof case on my phone. My last two similar cases failed because the door to open the charging port broke. We're not very far off from phones that are waterproof because they don't have any ports at all.

Re: What Finally Killed AirPower

#90

Post by gpm »

skellera wrote: post #73
_bxg1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes something easy and makes it effortless . Like AirPods, this has a surprising number of implications that you really don't think about until you try it. If I'm just setting my phone down on my desk and it's at 50%, and my cable is right there, I may not bother to plug it in. Especially if I might get up again in 5 or 10 minutes. But if I can just set it down in a particular place and regain a couple percentag…

Does that have an effect on battery life though? Constant micro charges?

Possible positive? If it keeps it in the 20-70% range I'm told we are supposed to keep our devices in.
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