USB and charging ports will be history by 2020

There's already an undeniable trend to remove sockets. In May 2015, Apple's redesigned MacBook caused a stir not simply because it is available in tasteful gold, but because it came with just the one port, a USB-C socket that also doubled as the power supply. Just as Apple did when it removed the floppy disk drive from the iMac, the design assumption here was that, well, you don't really need it any more.

It's not that big a stretch. Just as, when it was dropped, the floppy disk was being entirely superseded by the CD-ROM and the USB flash drive, today's cable-based connections are being rapidly replaced by the network.

Consider the iPhone or iPad. With all of the iCloud services turned on, there's practically no reason to plug either into a larger machine. Yes, the external drives and tablets beloved of this magazine's art department are going to need a machine that will support them, but for the rest of us? With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless options, most of your laptop's sockets are used to charge other things: your biggest device wet-nursing all of your little ones.

Socket-less charging is already here: the Apple Watch has it, many Android phones have it, even Starbucks offers it in many of its cafés. Using magnetic induction, the power supply simply needs to be in the vicinity of the device you need to charge. Not inserted, but simply alongside.

If the iPhone 8, for example, follows the path of the Apple Watch and uses magnetic charging, and ships with Bluetooth headphones, perhaps made by (recently bought by Apple) Beats, then it doesn't need any external ports at all.

There's a transition phase, of course. In early 2015, Philips was the first to demonstrate headphones that connected to an iPhone's Lightning socket -- the one you usually use for charging and syncing -- ignoring the regular headphone socket entirely. Apart from a digital output for audio, potentially allowing the headphones to do their own digital-to-analogue conversion and hence sounding way better, the Lightning socket can also provide power, which means the new headphones don't need batteries to run, say, noise-cancelling.

That power could also be used to drive other features: lights, or health-related sensors, or an amplifier for that extreme bass the kids like.

But in the end, this doesn't solve any of the main problems. It's cool to have available power, yes, but cooler still to have cheaper devices with fewer problematic parts, with fewer restrictions on minimum thickness, with a design that embraces the networked present. Cut the cord, Apple - it's time to get unwired.