At Computex 2014, Intel has indicated that its next-gen Skylake platform — the new microarchitecture tock after Broadwell — will enable new PC designs that are completely cable-free. Intel will use WiGig for wireless “docking” to peripherals and streaming media, and Rezence for wirelesss power transfer. Eventually, we might move towards a future where your PC’s only cables are inside the case. Obviously this is slightly different from the previous dream of using a single, awesome ultra-high-speed Light Peak cable to connect everything together…

Since prehistoric times, the humble PC has been inexorably tangled up in a tangle of wires. Because computers are electronic beasts that are powered by electricity, receive input as electrical signals, process data in the form of electrical signals, and output data in the form of electrical signals, conductive metal wiring has generally been the go-to material for connecting everything together. Copper wires are cheap, flexible, have a huge bandwidth capacity, and can run incredibly long distances. Cables have served us very, very well.

But, as you all know, this over-reliance on cables can result in some pretty nasty nests of wiring that get inextricably and inexplicably knotted. Case in point, here are a few of my favorite cable fails:

In recent years, though, as wireless technologies have improved, it has become increasingly possible to do away with cables. The most obvious examples are cell phones (which replaces the grandest cabling system in the world, the POTS) and WiFi, which, in the home at least, has almost made wired ethernet a thing of the past. There are wireless mice and keyboards and headsets too, of course, and thanks to Bluetooth 4.0 LE more devices are being freed from their wired bondage every day.

But two areas have remained resolutely off-limits for wireless tech: Power delivery and outputting to a display. Until now. Kinda.

The thing is, we can wirelessly transmit power fairly efficiently with magnetic resonance, but the range is still very short (a few inches) and your device needs to be placed fairly exactly (you can’t move around with the device; it has to sit on some kind of charging plate). We can beam data to a TV or monitor using WiGig — but with a max speed of around 7Gbps (in perfect conditions), there’s a pretty hard cap on the resolution and frame rate; you won’t be playing a video game at 4K via WiGig any time soon, put it that way. WiGig uses the 60GHz band, which requires line of sight and only works over short range (a few meters).

But, seemingly, none of this is going to stop Intel. At Computex 2014, the company showed off a range of prototype devices that use WiGig and Rezence (magnetic resonance charging) to achieve cable-free nirvana. There was a wooden table with Rezence tech built-in, which could wirelessly charge an Intel tablet sitting on top. There were some WiGig displays. By the time Skylake rolls around, probably in 2015 or 2016, it seems that Rezence and WiGig will be built into the platform — or at least an easy addition to the platform — allowing OEMs to push out lots laptops that can be joyously marketed as “cable-free.”

Personally, I would much rather Intel invested its time and effort into One Cable To Rule Them All — a high-bandwidth, multi-purpose cable. Something like Light Peak, or its bastardized offspring Thunderbolt. I think wireless displays and charging have their place — but more in the sense that it’s useful to send photos and videos from my phone to a TV, and I’d love it if power could be beamed to the smartphone in my pocket, rather than to a laptop on a desk.

Having said that, though, I’m sure there are a lot of people who are pissed off by having to plug a power cable into their laptop (and, of course, the added risk of tripping over it). If Skylake makes it cheap and easy to deploy cable-free laptops, then so be it — but just be aware that it’s more of a mom-and-pop thing than a power-user thing. Also, with decent battery life, isn’t a laptop already kind of cable-free anyway? In the photo at the top of the story, is Intel’s cable-free laptop actually just a laptop sitting on a table?

[Top image credit: CNET]