The future is wireless. Why does it make sense to have an iPhone without a connector?

It would seem that Apple simply doesn't like connectors. It has cut them down to the bare minimum for most of its electronics, and iPhones have been without a 3.5mm audio jack for headphones since 2016, when the iPhone 7 arrived. But does that make sense?

Do we actually need a physical connector?

Foto de Lasse Jensen na Unsplash

That’s a good question. The fact is that most people could easily do without a physical connector, as they are not strictly necessary for any of the tasks we do with our phones. Charging, though often slow, is taken care of by wireless technology and of course data transfer can be solved.

Nowadays, when we all have everything on cloud storage, it’s simply not necessary to use a classic cable to back up your data. But everything has a flip side and there are situations where a classic, physical connector is priceless and irreplaceable.

The cloud is not available everywhere

The truth is that once you find yourself in a place without internet and you want to move any amount of data urgently, without a connector you’ll be loaded. Of course, even a thousand clouds won’t help you do that, although this is a fairly specific situation that not all of us are likely to get into.

Foto de Vishnu Mohanan na Unsplash

And then, of course, there are those old-world, hardened users. They don’t do cloud backups because they don’t want to have their data scattered on remote servers somewhere and they don’t trust these technologies in general, so they back up everything the old-fashioned way, nicely over the cable. For them, Apple wouldn’t be able to get away with an iPhone without connectors either.

Sooner or later, we’ll see it

The fact is that sooner or later we will see phones without a physical connector, and it is very likely that it will be the iPhone. If any manufacturer is brave enough to remove this feature, which has been inherent in phones since their earliest days, it will most likely be Apple.

So in this day and age of the Internet, which is available almost everywhere, and already relatively fast wireless charging, an iPhone (and any other phone) without a connector would make quite a bit of sense. Although we can probably agree that it’s better to have it on the phone “for Uncle Story” and not use it than to have it completely gone.