I personally would not want to have wireless charging only for this device. Given the number of different places in which I want to charge my phone over the course of a week, and how few of them have wireless charging stations, that would be a big problem.

CarPlay is also probably a limiting factor. There are a few options for wireless CarPlay, but it seems the vast majority of implementations still rely on the cable. I doubt Apple would be willing to effectively kill such a feature with so much investment and partnership, and without an effective and equivalent alternative available.

Sounds a lot like the headphone jack now that I type it out, but I guess ‘if you want to listen to music, buy Bluetooth headphones if you haven’t already, or use the adapter’ is easier on the consumer than ‘if you want to keep using carplay, buy a BMW.’

Diagnostics, developer experience and backups are all hard to do wirelessly, but I am sure they are thinking about it.

Qi charging is slow. All wireless charging is (by its nature).

It’ll get better but I’d be very surprised to see a popular phone go totally port-less in the next 5 years.

I heard somewhere, (but have not been able to back it up) that Apple guarantees a certain lifetime for their connectors to accessory manufacturers. This would explain why Apple hasn't switched to USB-C or no port at all.

As I understand it, Apple committed to X years of the lightning port to certain MFi vendors, which (if true) is just another checkmark in the "why have ports" column.

I mean, they could. But does that mean they should? Personally, I don't think so.

The lightning connector is used for data transfer, not just charging.