How did many people “give up on USB” when that’s all that is available on PCs?

Besides, wireless charging is much slower and video over wireless introduces lag.

I'm asking the same questions. There's no giving up on USB because there are no alternatives. Wireless charging is terrible and inefficient.

Wireless charging cellphones uses so little power that their ~70% efficiency is practically irrelevant. A single USB wall charger that wastes 0.5W when not in use consumes about 4x as much energy as is wasted by using wireless charging your cellphone.

As to recharge speeds, it’s easily comparable with USB. Sometimes USB charging is noticeably faster, but use the wrong charger and USB will be far slower.

Wireless charging can not even approach the speeds of wired charges and your energy estimates are off.

https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-...

70% efficiency requires 43% more power, your article says “47% more power than a cable” at the top which is a little worse but wait “In general, the propped-up design helped align the coils without much fiddling, but it still used an average of 19.8 Wh, or 39% more power, to charge the phone than cables.” that’s better than 70% efficiency. So ~70% efficiency is spot on.

Wireless charging can do 15+W depending on the phone.

As to the scare quote about 3.5 Billion phones, the charger they mentioned consumes 0.25W when the phone isn’t attached or 6Wh per day that’s the same energy it wastes charging a battery 12Wh per day. You can find many wired wall chargers that waste more than 0.5W when the phone isn’t charging so using one would actually take more energy than using that wireless charger for a single phone.

You can still use HDMI etc for video.

Wireless is close enough to the fastest possible USB speeds not to worry about it and much faster than the slowest USB speeds.

Wireless isn’t “close enough” for charging larger phone batteries.

I travel a lot for business and I will soon be doing the digital nomad thing flying across the United States. I use a portable monitor that is both powered via USB C and does video over USB C.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GG31KX

I also have a few of these truly “universal” USB C cables.

https://a.co/d/21TFe3e

A 40$ cable with 5 dongles is a great argument that USB is fine.

As to wireless, an iPhone 13 pro max can do 15W wireless vs up to 27W with the right USB charger or 2W USB if you happen to plug into the wrong charger without thinking about it. In practice I only charge overnight or while driving so it’s hard to see a practical difference.

> The idea of running video signal over USB is just cringe inducing.

Although the cable can passively fall back all the way to USB 2.0, apart from that the only thing that these cables have in common with USB is the name. It's a very high speed serial bus with insane tolerances and complex protocols (even the cables have CPUs in them). So no need to cringe, except at the absurd naming conventions of the USB consortium.

Of course this also means there aren't many chipsets, unfortunately.