You may not remember, but there was a time when you had to plug a cable into the side of your computer if you wanted to check your email.
Today, Wi-Fi's wireless connections make physical network cables a rarity. But that's just the beginning. Technological forces are converging to make a lot of other wires in our lives look like relics. 2018 might not be the year when every cord disappears from your house, but it could begin a new big phase of uncluttering.
It'll start with the device you likely spend the most time with every day: your cheap phone repair . Plenty of phones have offered wireless charging for years, but Apple's embrace of the technology this year in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X sends a strong message to leery consumers and to phone makers on the fence: Come on in, the water's fine.
Other wires that could be banished include your earbud cable, your laptop's power cord and maybe even your broadband connection to the internet. It's all part of the inexorable move to designs that are easier to install, maintain and use through untethering. That ultimate dream of a living room entertainment system with no cords is no longer so far-fetched.
"We've seen a trend over the last 10 years to remove any mechanical moving parts on the phone, to remove any compartment you can open," IHS Markit analyst Ian Fogg said. "At some point, we might see the removal of the data port, too, so there aren't any physical ports at all."
To be sure, wires aren't going away completely in our lifetimes, much less in 2018. They're just too useful for transferring data and power quickly, cheaply and reliably. For instance, you'll still need a line that connects your wireless charging pad to the outlet. But on a daily basis, the technology means you can just plop your phone or even your laptop onto a charging pad instead of fiddling with cables.
Qi is key
Wireless phone charging had been a mess because of multiple standards. Nobody would want to set a phone on a charger in an office, coffee shop, hotel or car and find out it's incompatible. The industry now has mostly settled on one standard called Qi (pronounced "chee"). For example, the day after Apple announced in September that its new iPhones would use Qi, charging station maker Powermat announced that its wireless charging spots at Starbucks coffee shops would add compatibility with Qi.
Samsung supports Qi in its Galaxy S8 and Note 8 phones. Furniture giant Ikea sells lamps with Qi wireless charging stations built in, and outside the house, the standard is in some cars from Ford, Audi, BMW, Toyota, Honda, Chrysler, Hyundai and Volkswagen.
Wireless charging exists for laptops too -- Dell's Latitude 7285, for example -- but that's a rarity at the moment. It's harder to supply enough power for a laptop, and the charging stations are more expensive: $200 in Dell's case.
Perhaps more interesting for laptop customers is a technology called WiGig that transmits data very rapidly over the air within a room. That can be handy for docking stations: When you flip open your laptop anywhere in a room, it wirelessly connects to a docking station that handles cabled connections to external hard drives, monitors, speakers and other devices.
Industry groups including the Wi-Fi Alliance and the IEEE are working on a second-generation WiGig technology, called 802.11ay, that should boost speeds and range and perhaps improve the technology for high-end virtual reality headsets that no longer are leashed to your computer. But the final version of WiGig 2.0 likely won't arrive until 2019.
Ta-ta, tangles
It's a marvel that our cracked screen repair can deliver so many songs, podcasts, video chats and TV shows. But untangling your earbud wires first can be infuriating. For good or ill, several phone makers want to move us beyond that hassle by killing off the decades-old 3.5mm audio jack and steering us toward wireless Bluetooth audio connections.
Sure, you can still plug headphones into an Apple Lightning port or a Google Pixel 2 USB-C port with the help of a dongle. But Apple would rather you buy a $159 set of wireless AirPods, and Google would steer you to its competing $159 Pixel Buds. Google doesn't even include earbuds in the Pixel 2 box.
Unfortunately, high-quality earbuds with Bluetooth can be expensive. They can be inconvenient to pair with your smartphone or laptop and can suffer from short battery life. You also have to worry about losing the charging case if you buy a premium set such as AirPods, Pixel Buds or Samsung's $200 Gear IconX wireless earbuds.
And another thing: "The quality of audio is less good than for a wired headset because audio is recompressed over the Bluetooth connection," Fogg said. The industry group working on Bluetooth has lowered power requirements and is working on better sound for music, but for now audiophiles should proceed with caution.
By 2022, however, the disappearance of 3.5mm audio jacks will help push us to buy 285 million "hearables" such as wireless earbuds, Juniper Research estimates. For many of us, that journey will begin next year.