Idea

• We are all carrying powerful batteries around with us all the time, in our phones.
• Heated jackets, gloves and socks are a thing, and they are powered by USB phone chargers.
• USB C supplies power to external devices, and many phones support that.

So… Why on earth don’t we have phone-controlled heated clothes? Where are the standard adapters to link different items of clothes together? Why hasn’t this already been a big thing for the last 5 years?

Hypotheses

First thought: San Francisco is warm, South Korea is warm, so phone companies like Apple, Google and Samsung aren’t about cold things, they’re all hot and sunny. Like how because men design the tech standards we end up with worktops and toilets that are at a perfect height of the average man but not the average woman, the average person in a cold climate isn’t really considered by Silicon Valley. Could this be tested somehow? I think it’s a pretty interesting thought, and it probably applies to social class and a bunch of other factors that I haven’t considered.

2nd: Apple or someone else owns the patents on magnetic connectors, which would make this idea work, and they’d make it prohibatively expensive.

3rd: The heating things aren’t really safe and it’s dangerous to use them, so they can’t pass safety standards and you need to ship dodgy ones in from China, which no big company will do. So other people have thought about this idea and rejected it on grounds of risk.