Thin Is In

Saturday, 25 January 2025

Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge, “Oppo’s Next Foldable Is About as Thin as USB-C Allows”:

Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou Yibao has now shared photos that highlight its size, adding that the obstacle to making it any thinner is now “the limit of the charging port.” [...]

The company claims the Find N5 is the thinnest foldable yet. That title is currently held by the Honor Magic V3, which is 4.35mm thick when open, meaning the Find N5 must be close to 4mm. That explains why it looks about half the size of the 8.25mm iPhone 16 Pro Max it’s shown next to in the photos. For reference, a USB-C port is 2.6mm at minimum.

I see four possible futures:

(a) We never see phones thinner than 4mm, and USB-C will be with us forever.

(b) When we start getting phones thinner than USB-C allows, they abandon plug-in ports entirely and move exclusively to inductive connections (e.g. MagSafe) for both charging and data.

(c) One or more companies — most likely Apple — devises a proprietary charging and data port that is significantly thinner than USB-C.

(d) The USB Consortium devises an industry standard significantly thinner successor to the USB-C connector, and the EU swiftly updates its regulations to allow it as an alternative to USB-C.

Option (a) strikes me as guaranteed wrong. We will, sooner or later, see phones that are too thin for a USB-C port. The only question is when.

Option (b) seems entirely plausible for consumer-targeted devices, but the literally professional-caliber video features enabled in iPhone Pro models with USB-C ports would be impossible, at the moment, to offer via any existent inductive connector. Because of the ubiquity of USB, no one has even tried establishing a inductive connector for high-speed data transfer. Data transfer could be the limiting factor that keeps professional phones on USB-C for the near future, but the Smart Connector on the back of recent iPad models handles both charging and data (albeit low-speed data transfer, intended only for trackpad and keyboard input). The thinnest-ever iPhone 17 “Air” model that’s much-rumored for this September is expected alongside iPhone 17 Pro models, not in place of them. If it proves popular I could see a near future where the iPhone “Air” drops its USB-C port and goes MagSafe-only for charging, with all data transfer taking place wirelessly (meaning over the air, via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi), while the iPhone Pro models, with thicker batteries and both more and better cameras, keep their USB-C ports for a few additional years, until they too go inductive-charging exclusive, perhaps with a breakthrough magnetic Smart Connector that supports high-speed data transfer. I suspect this is the path we’ll see that delivers too-thin-for-USB-C-port phones and tablets. And I believe it would neatly remain within the EU’s charging port regulations, but would irritate proponents of those regulations, because it’s unlikely Apple would choose to make such a Super Smart Connector an open standard. (The EU USB-C mandate applies only to charging ports, which is why Apple Watches, to name one prominent example of a device that charges only inductively, via a proprietary connector, remain available there.)

Option (c), of course, would be disallowed in the EU, meaning such phones either wouldn’t be sold in the EU, or the company that made them (which, let’s face it, would be Apple) would need to make different models for sale in the EU that omit the proprietary port and charge only via MagSafe/Qi. My spidey-sense says this just isn’t worth working on, and thus won’t happen. I can imagine a port and connector that are thinner than USB-C — something that looks like Lightning, but thinner — but to maintain any sort of structural rigidity, it couldn’t be that much thinner than USB-C, and thus wouldn’t enable the creation of phones or tablets that are that much thinner than USB-C ports allow. What I can imagine are phones and tablets that are more like credit cards in thickness. But there are so many engineering challenges that need to be solved to get there — battery technology, display technology, chip efficiency, and probably a dozen more.

Option (d) makes me laugh just thinking about it.