Intel Ceases Work On Wireless Charging
For the last three years, Intel has been stoking demand for PCs ahead of the next big buying cycle with the promise that new machines will be totally wireless. “We carry around a lot of wires,” Kirk Skaugen, Intel's senior PC exec said at Computex Taipei 2015.
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel spent three years selling the 'totally wireless PC' as the next buying-cycle hook — Kirk Skaugen pitched it at Computex Taipei 2015, and the Broadwell vPro launch added wireless docking to the roadmap. Killing wireless charging in June 2016 lands just weeks after the CEO's strategy refocus on cloud, IoT, 3D XPoint memory, and 5G, which already signaled that PC-peripheral differentiation was losing priority.
The retreat didn't stop there: within a year Intel also discontinued its consumer WiGig (802.11ad) product line per the related coverage, keeping the standard only for VR. Read together, these are not one-off cancellations but a systematic unwind of the short-range wireless portfolio that underpinned the wire-free PC pitch.
First-order effects
- PC makers who built roadmaps around Intel's wireless-charging and wireless-docking reference designs lose the silicon-side anchor for their 'no wires' marketing, leaving the 2015 Computex promise unfulfilled on Intel's own machines.
- Intel's engineering and partner resources shift off wireless charging toward the priorities named in the April strategy outline — connected devices, cloud, new memory, and 5G.
Second-order effects
- OEMs pursuing wire-free docks and chargers must source the technology from third-party wireless-power vendors or drop the feature, since no other chipmaker had been pushing an integrated PC-side solution at Intel's scale.
- The WiGig consumer discontinuation that followed confirms the same squeeze: partners betting on Intel's short-range wireless stack for docks and displays saw the whole stack pruned back to a single VR use case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Intel's PC business competes on CPUs and connectivity rather than platform-level differentiation — culminating in plays like the 5G-connected Windows 10 PC partnership with Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, and HP, where the differentiator is the network, not the dock.
- Wireless charging for laptops is left without a chip-scale champion, ceding the category to phone-centric ecosystems and standalone accessory vendors unless another PC silicon vendor picks up the mantle.
The trend: Intel has been steadily trading PC-peripheral differentiation bets like wireless charging and WiGig for a cloud-and-connectivity portfolio, repositioning the PC as a terminal for its network and datacenter ambitions rather than a platform it differentiates itself.