Your Next iPhone Or iPad Could Charge As Wirelessly As It Syncs

By

Apple

With iOS 5’s new Wireless Syncing functionality, the umbilical cord of your iPhone or iPad has finally dried up and fallen off… except when it needs power, when you have to plug it in to a wall socket.

But Apple’s serious about cutting the cord. Future iOS devices might be truly wireless, sucking in power as wirelessly as they will sync.

A new patent application spotted by Unwired View shows that Cupertino is planning on building near-field magnetic resolution (or NFMR) power supplies right into future iMac computers.

What do NFMR power supplies do? They’d make it possible for your iPhone or iPad to just slurp electricity out of the air to charge just by being in proximity of your Mac. Neat!

Of course, if Apple’s serious about cutting the cord of iOS devices, that goes from the figurative cord as well: Apple doesn’t want iPhones to be tethered to PCs anymore, even for powering. However, Apple could always sell NFMR chargers to plug into walls, as well as dongles for plugging into non-NFMR equipped computers.

Unfortunately, as neat as this tech is, and as much as I’d love to toss all of my old Dock Connectors into the trash, I think we’re a while aways from this technology seeing prime time. Still, who knows? Maybe the iPhone 5 or the iPad 3 will be the first iOS device to not even ship with a little white cord?

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