iaeen2

macxpress said:

sog35 said:

Wireless charging is a huge, big, waste of time, IMO.

But I'll trust Tim Cook's judgement in the end.

I mean, how much effort is it to plug my iPhone? 1 second?

What if the iPhone X doesn't have any ports? Why would you need a port if you can wirelessly charge it? I'm tell ya people this is coming soon...as soon as Apple gets wireless charging down, that lighting port will be a thing of the past. You can sync it wirelessly, connect bluetooth devices to it (wirelessly)such as EarPods and now charging wirelessly. No need for a lightning port anymore. I know this will piss people off just like the headphone jack, but people will get over it just like they did with the headphone jack missing. 

CarPlay springs immediately to mind. Apple did come out with a wireless version, but car manufacturers are only starting to roll it out. Virtually all current CarPlay users are going to be stuck on wired-only implementations for a good long time. I'm all in favor of dropping legacy support when appropriate, but not when it cripples core functionality (and if you spend a significant amount of time in your car, you probably consider CarPlay to be core functionality).

Also, you will need something for low level technical support. Even the watch has a physical port.

peterhart said:

Herbivore2 said:

Here's hoping for a 7 nm SoC in the next version of the watch. 

So...over time, the nanometer build process has gotten smaller by number each year. Being unfamiliar with what that is, what happens when the number is down to 1? Is anything smaller?

Transistors, like any switch, are made up of two conducting sides divided by a non-cunducting medium when the switch is off. To turn the switch on, you close the gap or otherwise cause the non-conducting part to conduct electrons from one end to the other.

The nanometer measurement in this case is how far apart the two conducting sides are in each transistor. Making that gap smaller allows you to cram more into the same amount of space which allows you to have a more sophisticated chip design. It also allows for a higher clock rate, but we hit the practical limits of that for other reasons a while ago.

Unfortunately, we will never reach 1nm. When the transistor gap becomes small enough, quantum tunneling starts happening. Basically, quantum tunneling allows electrons (and other particles) to jump small gaps even if that shouldn't be possible according to the potential energy field. It's been a while since I've taken a class on quantum mechanics, so I don't exactly remember why tunneling happens, but nonetheless it will start to become a problem very soon. When quantum effects start to take over, there is no longer a discernible difference between an open transistor and a closed one, so computational logic becomes impossible. At that point, we will have reached the limits of transistor based chip design, and we will have to change the fundamental way in which computers work in order to see more advancement.