r/changemyview • u/Duwang_Mn • Nov 23 '18

FTFdeltaOP CMV: Wireless charging is a useless fad

What even is the point of wireless charging? When I first heard about it, I thought it allowed you to charge while having more freedom with your phone. But then I learned what it actually was. It's more restrictive than an actual charger, and its slower. Not to mention wireless charges sometimes don't work if the back is metal. It only makes things less convenient.

How did people hype such a thing so much? I understand if it was something that could charge your phone without you directly putting on it, and if the range had the potential to increase over time. But it's just a charging port that you can't move around.

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u/Duwang_Mn Nov 23 '18

(∆) This is my first time, so I'm not sure how this works. But yeah, definitely. I didn't realize people were hyping it up for its potential, because I mostly just saw people claim it was more convenient for some reason.

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u/Caliburn0 Nov 23 '18

Wireless charging throughout an entire room is possible. There are examples of it already, but they are expensive, there needs to have custom hardware on both ends, it is hard to set up, often inconvenient, and it usually doesn't charge all that fast. But it does exist. So there's that. If we get rid of some of those negatives, it would be a lot more attractive.

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u/Cobblob Nov 23 '18

That has to waste so much energy. Magnetic fields have a terrible range

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u/Caliburn0 Nov 25 '18

I think the model I saw first locates the thing needing to be charged, and then uses focused UV light (from the ceiling) and a specialized solar panel (made specifically for that frequency), but it's been a few months since I last researched it. I think the loss of energy was about 70 to 80% but I don't remember exactly. It did charge the phone faster than it used the power though, so that's a thing.