But you've made a lot of assumptions. What was the power value you came up with to get your "size of a door" calculation? We don't know how power efficient it is, how long the battery would last without charging, if there is a plug in charging mode, etc. So current physics could suffice with enough engineering.
MR stated that it would use wireless charging, not that it used anything else. Since it'll have a 100mAh battery, you'd need to pump in a realistic minimum of 10mAh into it to charge it up in 10 hours (assuming the watch electronics use no power at all). 10mA is a lot of power when talking about an RF receiver. As I said before, 3cm wide RFID tags work at about 15 cm away from a 10cm coil, and they use 1µA. That's 0.000001 amps, not 0.01 amps.
You also assume that it can charge the watch to 100% at a meter away. Maybe the charging rate is much lower at that point, but theoretically possible (although no more than the discharge rate of the watch).
It would still require a large amount of transmission power to even get 1mA to the watch at a meter. The smaller the transmission or receiving coil, the more power that's needed.
But when I sleep, my night table is only a few inches away, so I would get a much better charge rate. I could put a charger at work next to my keyboard, again pretty darn close and I sit here at least 5 of the 8 hours a day.
Fine, it would charge if you had the watch literally inches (2-3) away from the transmission coil, but that would mean having your arm sat on the pad all night, unless you took the watch off. A mousemat with the RF coil in would work nicely though.
Also you don't mind blasting high power RF energy into you all day and night long? People complain about mobile phones which intermittently output an absolute max of 2 watts, these transmitters would be tens of watts continually.
Engineering and innovation is what takes the "impossible" and makes it possible every day. No new physics needed. That is, if we assume "physics" is completely understood to begin with. I mean I'm sure Newton thought he had it all figured out and he was pretty damn smart. Einstein didn't invent new physics, he just understood more about it...
Of course, I wouldn't be an engineer if I couldn't come up with new ways to solve problems. But I am realistic, I can see when a problem is beyond current technology. Since you can't make "new physics", only discover things you don't know about it, there are rules that we are pretty certain to be true and cannot be broken. The distance of an RF transmission is one of these, and that is the only useful form of wireless electrical power that physicists currently know of.
Apple may make small improvements, but a huge leap in this field is fairly unlikely. By the same token, some Chinese newspaper might say they've got a battery in the watch that's 1000mAh and I would say that's unlikely, since as with wireless power, huge leaps like that are essentially unheard of.
