Today your toothbrush, tomorrow your laptop
On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.It's great that Intel may one day rid us of need to run a billion cables around our homes in order to enjoy the fruits of electrification, but is a technology that "only" loses 25 percent of power in transmission something that we should be considering at this point in time? Granted, it's not like this is right around the figurative corner, but is there any doubt that functionality, and not efficiency is going to determine when this technology hits the marketplace? God only knows how much power the average American household is already wasting, with those TVs and lights left on in vacant rooms, and air conditioners running with the windows open; imagine if we had a plethora of appliances that, if they were used properly, wasted a quarter of the electricity devoted to charging them. The Times doesn't address this timely (pun intended) concern in their puff piece; presumably, it also went unaddressed in Intel's press release.
