An iPhone without a USB-C port? Yes, please

I had a revelation recently while testing the wired charging speed of my trusty iPhone 16 Plus. In six months of ownership, it occurred to me as I blew the dust out like an archaeologist examining an ancient pot, I had never plugged a cable into my iPhone’s USB-C port. It seemed impossible, but it was true.

And it made me think. Do iPhone owners even need ports? When reports suggest that Apple is working on a smartphone with no port at all, everyone loses their minds. But if I can go half a year without using my iPhone’s USB-C port and not even notice, where’s the issue? If Apple wants to ditch the iPhone’s USB-C port, I say: Good.

The port at the bottom of an iPhone used to be absolutely fundamental to its well-being. Whether 30-pin, Lightning, or latterly USB-C, the charging/data port was the main, often the only route into or out of the iPhone. Aside from charging, this port was vital in the early days for uploading music and books onto the device and getting photos and videos off it. Syncing and backing up were done via a wired connection, too. But one by one these uses switched from wired only, to wired or wireless, to MagSafe, to who still uses a wire?

Most of us will have memories of times when the port connection became unreliable, and of how much of a pain this was. From that point until you got a new phone the cable had to be waggled in a specific way to make it start charging, or the phone had to be laid upside down or at some weird angle. “Don’t use that cable,” you’d warn a friend. “It only plays nicely with the official Apple one.” Just another of those modern conveniences that make life hell.

Of late, however, this particular set of annoyances has faded into the background, at least for me. I charge wirelessly overnight when the slower speed doesn’t matter. I get my music via streaming, not being 87 years old, and I transfer everything else wirelessly to and from the phone, this not being 2009. Literally, the only time I’ve needed the port since I bought the phone is to test how effective the port is.

Okay, you’re saying: bully for you, you don’t need the port. But what’s the problem with keeping it as an option? Where’s the harm? The harm, my Socratic friend, is that including a design element the user doesn’t need is a waste of resources and a cause of unnecessary compromises. As I explained when defending the notch several years ago, seemingly isolated design decisions have a knock-on effect throughout the rest of the product. And if Apple was able to ditch the USB-C port it would be able to make the phone better in various other ways.

Most obviously, having a physical opening on a phone is just asking for unwanted things to work their way inside. The dust I mentioned earlier; water, and spilled coffee. The iPhone 16 Plus has an excellent ingress-protection rating of IP68 but it took Apple more than a decade to reach that point because the port made it so difficult to keep dust and water out of the device. Open up your iPhone and you’ll see numerous design adaptations and compromises around the port module to waterproof the whole apparatus; these could be ditched tomorrow if the port wasn’t there, freeing up room within the chassis. That’s on top of the room you’d gain from removing the port module itself, of course.

If you’ve got extra room inside the chassis you can install a bigger battery, or move other components around into a more optimal configuration. Removing the port could enable Apple to have a speaker across the full width of the bottom edge, and it would make accessing the internals of your phone for repairs a simpler process.

It could even enable the company to make its iPhones thinner, transcending a limitation currently imposed by the thickness of the port. This year’s Oppo Find N5, which resorts to a custom-designed USB-C port to shave off every possible millimeter, is a good example of the way in which manufacturers are hitting a brick wall in their quest for ever-slimmer phones. As long as customers insist on plugging cables into their phones, companies won’t be able to get the size down any further.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd

Maybe the biggest reason why I want Apple to ditch the USB-C port, however, is that it will force the industry, and society, to finally bite the bullet and fully embrace wireless. Apple has massive weight as a force for change. When iPhones courageously stopped having 3.5mm headphone jacks, accessory makers shifted their focus from wired to wireless (or in some cases, for a time, Lightning or USB-C) headphones, and such devices became cheaper, better, and more widely available and understood. If a chunk of wealthy iPhone owners suddenly lost their USB-C ports, Android manufacturers would likely follow suit, and the same thing would happen for wireless chargers.

Cars would start to be sold as standard with Qi2 magnetic mounts rather than, or as well as, the cable ports many currently offer. Wireless charging pucks would become commonplace in homes and offices. And companies (including, I’d expect, Apple itself, because it would be keen to appease EU regulators) would throw their weight behind the development of faster, more efficient and longer-distance wireless charging standards in a way that would be less appealing if wired was still an easy option.

I don’t imagine for a second that the USB-C port would disappear overnight. If the iPhone 18 series, for example, turned out to be portless, there would still be an iPhone 17e with a port, not to mention older generations still on sale at a lower price. For those who still want a port, the option would remain–likely for many years, if the slow death of the Home button is anything to go by.

Nobody would be forced to join the revolution right away. But the revolution is coming, and the sooner we get started, the better.