Birthday present to myself: iPhone 7 (but why no wireless charging?)

Today is my birthday (39 again!). I think that I deserve an iPhone 7 Plus as a gift to myself.

The Chipworks teardown shows that the phone contains two Sony camera sensors.

Why no wireless charging, though? Especially given that the only way to use conventional headphones is via the Lightning connector, wouldn’t it have made sense to enable the phone to charge on a bedside pad?

Related:

  • my iPhone 7 presentation comments
  • DxOMark’s objective review of the iPhone 7 (not Plus) camera, in which it seems that there is no substitute for a larger sensor (even an old Samsung S6 turns in a slightly better performance). See the “image quality versus super-slim phones” section toward the bottom of the article: “Samsung also made an interesting choice by managing to pack into an equally-thin handset an f/1.7 lens and a sensor whose area is 35% larger than the iPhone 7’s sensor. … Samsung chose to use a lens with a wider field-of-view to reduce the thickness of the Galaxy S7 Edge.” (i.e., you can’t have a big sensor, a not-super-wide lens, and a thin phone)

7 thoughts on “Birthday present to myself: iPhone 7 (but why no wireless charging?)

  1. Presumably wireless charging would have made the handset thicker, and Apple doesn’t like thicker handsets. Or so I heard about the lack of wireless charging in the Nexus 6P.

  2. What’s the intellectual property / patent situation for wireless charging of smartphones? That’s a totally uninformed guess on my part, but it’s the first thing that sprung to mind about why Apple might not have wanted to “go there”.

  3. @Alex

    I doubt IP is the issue. Apple uses a modified version of the Qi wireless charging standard for its watches. It’s modified just enough so you cannot use standard Qi chargers and have to use their proprietary ones instead.

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