Lightning could strike back — expect portless iPhone problems, says analyst
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What you need to know
- Apple is heavily rumored to be considering a portless iPhone in future.
- Analyst Kuo doesn't believe the current technology is ready for the removal of ports.
- MagSafe charging and AirDrop are both too slow currently.
Ming-Chi Kuo says that current technologies aren't ready for a portless iPhone.
Apple is now increasingly rumored to be ready to ditch all of the iPhone's ports at some point in the relatively near future, but one analyst is warning that it won't all be upside if it does. In fact, we should expect "more problems" from such a switch according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Kuo believes that next year's iPhone 15 will be all about that USB-C, but a future iPhone is increasingly likely to ditch that in favor of no charging port at all. And while that will help with waterproofing and aesthetics, it won't help with things like charging and data transfer. The move to USB-C would allow for faster charging and faster transferring of data — switching to a portless design would undo both of those benefits in one fell swoop.
Portless iPhone may cause more problems due to current limitations of wireless technologies & the immature MagSafe ecosystem.
It's true that MagSafe is a potential replacement for Lightning and USB-C, but as we already know with the iPhone 13 and iPhone 12 lineups, anyone wanting to charge as quickly as possible will need a cable and that seems unlike to change soon enough for Apple to remove that cable option without impacting people. That appears to be Kuo's belief, and it's one that is difficult to argue with.
Charging isn't the only issue here, of course. Increasingly capable iPhone cameras create increasingly large files. We've already found that transferring those files over AirDrop or Lightning is cumbersome and USB-C would help here. Removing that option would take us back a step or three, something that will need a much-improved AirDrop to fix.
Despite talk of a portless iPhone having been around for a couple of years now, we still don't really know when we should expect Apple to take the leap. Moves are in motion to get it closer to a portless iPhone, however — iPhone 14 is already rumored to be ditching the SIM card tray, for example, removing another potential water ingress point. Would that make for the best iPhone in terms of water resistance? It surely wouldn't hurt.