u/Plastic_Hunter8845

Stayed in six hotels this year across three chains and the bedside situation is always the same. One outlet, usually behind the nightstand, sometimes already taken by the lamp and the alarm clock. The desk has two more on the other side of the room, and there's always one mystery outlet near the floor by the TV.

Between my husband and me it's two phones, two watches, a laptop and earbuds. Every night was a negotiation about who gets the bedside one.

The rated number on wireless packs is close to useless for comparing them, and the reference format here should probably account for that.

Ran four Qi2 certified packs, all rated 15W, same phone, same starting point at 30 percent, screen off, room around 24C. Checked battery percentage every five minutes.

At the five minute mark they're all basically the same, within a couple of points of each other. By twenty the best one had moved the phone about 22 percent and the worst about 13. Same figure printed on all four boxes, nearly a two thirds difference in what actually got delivered.

A wired baseline over the same window just held its number the whole way through, which makes the wireless drop pretty obvious when you put them side by side.

Bottom line is that wireless packs in 2026 are still meaningfully slower than what the box says, and not by a little. The rated figure describes the first few minutes. Everything after that is a thermal negotiation between the pack and the phone, and nobody seems to be winning it yet.

Every charger converts AC to DC and wastes some energy as heat. One charger is nothing but with billions running worldwide, does the aggregate waste heat matter at any meaningful scale