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Reports: Apple AirPower still overheating, may be “doomed to failure”
- joshstrange 8y agoDoes anyone else know about an announced Apple product that never came to market? This feels like a first and pretty crazy they would announce it before ironing out the bugs. My guess is they thought they were close and wanted a piece of the wireless charging market so they announced it with 8/8+/X so that some of the population would hold off for an Apple charging mat instead of third party. I am very happy with my iPhone X and Anker charging mats everywhere.
- snowwrestler 8y agoThe original white iPhone took way, way longer to bring to market than they originally predicted. At one point people were speculating that it might never happen. The problem was in getting the various plastic and glass pieces to look fully white and the same tone. Steve Jobs announced that Facetime would be open source and never happened, apparently because he didn't check with any engineers or lawyers before making the announcement.
- xoa 8y ago>Does anyone else know about an announced Apple product that never came to market? Sure. It's rare precisely because it's such footgun and so "easy" to avoid simply by never keynoting and talking about stuff that isn't actually in mass production and ready to ship, and Apple has generally been very conservative about that and taken their secrecy seriously. But it has happened, one of the most famous ones of the Jobs era was the PowerMac G5 intro, where there was a slide (IIRC) and explicit promise that the PowerMac G5 would reach 3.0+ GHz within a year. But the G5 could never manage that, and my vague recollection on internal scuttlebutt at that point was the Jobs was pretty fucking furious about it. The G5's problems and the massively increasing importance of notebooks vs desktops to Apple made the Intel switch inevitable anyway but that didn't hurt the push. Edit to add that it's happened more with software related promises then hardware, though in fairness the two big ones I can think of instantly there were ZFS and FaceTime open source and such and both were down to IP bullshit. Maybe Apple could have had its ducks in a row there somewhat better, but maybe not, and at any rate it wasn't due to technical fault on their part. Software patents have been an eternal plague upon our industry.
- FireBeyond 8y agoThis doesn't seem like an overly complicated problem to me - I wonder why they're having issues. And by that I mean, I can buy wireless charging mats everywhere - hell, my desk has one built in, cars are coming with them. There's something "odd" about a product when a company can build things like the XS, but not a charging mat that uses a well-supported standard.
- paulornothing 8y agoWell right now charging mats require your product to be over a very specific spot. They are trying to just require you to lay your item on the mat and have it charge, no shifting it around and making sure it's in an optimum spot.
- wool_gather 8y agoThe Airpower was also supposed to support multiple -- very different -- devices at the same time (i.e., phone, watch, AirPods). Is this possibly also a complicating factor?
- wodenokoto 8y agoMeanwhile Ikea is wirelessly charging 3 devices on 1 mat [1] [1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10308315/ https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10308315/
- screye 8y agoAren't both devices different ? The Ikea product is 3 wireless chargers that are connected to each other. The apple mat however, seems to be attempting a system where you can place the product anywhere on the mat and it just works. This does seem significantly more difficult to me. Isn't there a clear distinction between both products ?
- wodenokoto 8y agomaybe from an engineering point. But looking at the pictures of the apple mat, they line up line up devices pretty neatly, just liked you'd have to do on a normal mat.