Inductive charging, waddya think?

Should (will) Apple incorporate such technology for their mobile devices?

Reading that, Nikola Tesla came to mind immediately.

I googled around and found this report (from July 2009):
Tesla’s Wireless Power Transmission Reinvented by Witricity

Gads, how threads do wonder... Your mention of Nikola Tesla took me back to my days of satellite development & testing vis-a vis magnetic flux density. Alas I stray-

What I'm most curious about is what the trade offs are in terms of battery longevity, weight, size, cost, etc., though I suppose I'll have to wait until someone has actually tested one of those Dell critters.

There are lots of relatively low power gadgets around that use inductive charging. I have an electric toothbrush, but the power requirements are quite modest and it spends 23 hours and 56 minutes a day charging. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Inductive charging is inefficient (not all of the energy makes it into the battery; some is wasted) and requires space inside the device, leaving less space available for other things.

Whether or not those are important depends, I suppose, on the application. A laptop doesn't typically consume that much power anyway (less than a 100-watt light bulb, in most cases), so the fact that it's wasteful probably isn't a big deal for most folks.

Why not just use a flux capacitor? Doc Brown did and got something like 1.21 gigawatts out of it.

Well, one watt of power is one joule of energy per second, so 1.21 gigawatts would be 1,210,000,000 joules of energy...would you feel safe with that sitting right next to you? I sure wouldn't!

(Interesting side note: I always assumed that in Back to the Future, actor Christopher Lloyd was mispronouncing "gigawatts" as "jiggawatts". It turns out that the scriptwriters had wanted to invent a totally nonsense unit of measurement; the script, allegedly, says "jigowatts," and it's just coincidence that it sounds like a mispronunciation of "gigawatts.")