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Apple Cancels AirPower Product

• minimaxir 8y ago
  The whole AirPower saga is a weird event in product development. AirPower compatibility was highlighted as a feature in the packaging of the just-released AirPods 2: https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/1110656926965063680 https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/11106569269650636... There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.
  • azhenley 8y ago
    Something indeed. I don't understand what the issue could be. I have a few $20 wireless chargers that work just fine. I expected Apple to put one in premium packaging and sell it for $150.
    • drakenot 8y ago
      Their design had many overlapping coils which dynamically could be activated. This design would allow you to place the multiple devices on the mat in any orientation.
    • nickthegreek 8y ago
      Kinja posted a deal on a dual powered mat for $35 yesterday. Crazy to think that Apple couldnt crack this to reach some level of product that consumers would find attractive.
      • gumby 8y ago
        They wanted you to just toss some devices arbitrarily on the mat and have it "just work". The one you discuss requires alignment, like all others -- for a reason! There's a reason the watch has a magnetic alignment setup. I thought you might be able to use a 2D array of small loops but a little bit of modeling shows that to be a pretty dumb idea.
        • randyrand 8y ago
          In retrospect, I wonder if a motorized device that moves the coils to match the location of your device would have been a better approach.
          • canthonytucci 8y ago
            I had the same thought. I l suspect that Apple has so little in house experience with moving parts these days that they’d have a hard time shipping a good one that worked this way.
        • ghaff 8y ago
          That’s what you really want to get too. A big charging mat you just toss everything on. TBH I don’t find wireless charging today a particularly big win. It’s a bit easier than plugging in a cable. Of course, in the watch, it eliminates a port which is a win for other reasons.
          • covercash 8y ago
            I find Anker 24w fast charging bricks and 10’ lightening cables are a pretty reasonable way to quickly charge Apple devices while still using them. I bought a cheap 5w wireless charging pad to throw my phone on while I sleep.
            • ghaff 8y ago
              I don’t even bring my wireless charging when I travel. One more piece of gear to pack and keep track of.
              • disc 8y ago
                I wouldn't either but now that I have one one my desk, nightstand, and coffee table; I could never go back.
                • 8y ago
      • pwthornton 8y ago
        That is not remotely related. Having a mat with two or three separated coils for phones is really easy to do. You basically just glue a few of these together. AirPower was intended to have basically an entire surface of charging pixels. You could place phones, watches, AirPods, and combos of those on the mat in any orientation. There was also no sweetspot. By attemping to make inductive charging mats work really well, Apple ran into some big tech contraints.
    • sandis 8y ago
      The article mentions (rumored) issues with 3D/overlapping coils that I imagine were needed to allow for multiple device placement anywhere on the mat. >> Specifically, I’ve heard that they ran too hot because the 3D charging coils in close proximity to one another required very, very cautious power management.
      • Dylan16807 8y ago
        It's not the end of the world if it slows down under multiple devices, and that trivially solves the heat problem. Is it lack of satisfaction with those tradeoffs? Is there a more fundamental flaw somewhere else? It would be nice to know what actually caused this decision.
        • skellera 8y ago
          Selling point is that you can put all your mobile devices on it. So it’s assumed you’re using more than one and it isn’t a quality experience if you have to sacrifice charging speed for regular use.
          • Dylan16807 8y ago
            The phone is the only one that needs a particularly high wattage. If sharing drops the phone speed by a third, that leaves enough spare capacity to do a watch and airpods at the same time (with both of them getting more percent per hour than the phone). That's still a pretty good experience.
            • MBCook 8y ago
              What if they couldn’t get the multi coil design to work charging ANYTHING at high power. Maybe it was capable of charging the watch and the AirPods just fine, it was the phone’s power demands that were the thing killing it.
              • Dylan16807 8y ago
    • sovnade 8y ago
      Apple's plan was to let you place it anywhere on the mat, not on the very small charging sweet-spot. Worth the huge premium it would've sold for? Probably not for a good deal of people, but it would've sold.
  • martin-adams 8y ago
    Makes me wonder if they couldn't get around any patents as wireless charging isn't a new innovation.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • smacktoward 8y ago
    It's probably a huge coincidence that https://isairpoweroutyet.com/ https://isairpoweroutyet.com/ launched a week ago. (Probably.)
  • RobLach 8y ago
    It’s not weird at all. AirPower is a feature that helps sell those AirPods amongst early adopters who would buy AirPods within the first couple of weeks. If you want to kill AirPower, waiting a bit to grab those sales makes sense. You don’t have much to lose and revenue to gain.
  • raverbashing 8y ago
    > There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation. Well, there is no way of getting 30W wirelessly (to the device side) without a lot of heat. I guess someone thought they could solve this with smarter power management (and per the John Gruber article this was an issue last year, or even before) but it frankly it does not seem possible (unless Apple discovered room temperature superconductors). It seems the design teams might have some people (higher ups) thinking too much about design and too little about if things are really possible given the constraints of a consumer product (typical MBA BS motivational pushes asides). But it seems they managed to save face before another poor product would hit the shelves.
    • Tempest1981 8y ago
      Build a Dyson cooling toroid around it? (Said the design team)
    • fogetti 8y ago
      I am not sure why are you downvoted. There is a whole literature on mismanaged software/hardware projects and the culprits of those failures. Not in a small part the reason is often very bad management/design decisions.
    • stephenamills 8y ago
      Yeah, you're almost definitely right. Apple is an extremely design-first company, in the sense that the designers have always run the company. This isn't the first time that sticking to a design led to a technical hardware/physics problem. This happened originally when Steven was designing the iPhone 4 with his team and took out most of the antenna lines, leaving only a small antenna line at the top and not the noticeable ugly antenna lines you see on every single iPhone today. Steven's antenna design was incredibly simple and aesthetically pleasing - just one of several incredible advances of the iPhone 4 - but Steven's antenna design led to some radio frequency problems I definitely don't understand which caused the entire "you're holding it wrong" scandal. That is just another example from 2011 or so of designers running the company but running into a technical issue with the laws of physics - there it was just radio frequencies instead of whatever it is here with this AirPower and the the heat or frequencies or something created from the as many as possibly 15 or 32 coils inside of it. There are so so so many examples of where this design-first approach has definitely worked. One example is how the external aluminum case of the 2-pound MacBook from 2015 was designed first, and then once lithium ion batteries were created which had to be custom and have a custom internal chemistry so that they could be stacked on top of each other in a terraced structure. A second example is in Face ID which is very fast and simple conceptually but technically requires a custom chip running a custom neural network and for PrimeSense to miniaturize their Kinect hardware that they created for the Xbox into a the super small menu bar of the iPhone X. The chip team and the PrimeSense team started with a simple concept/design of a user looking at their iPhone, and then filled in all of the extremely technical and multi-disciplinary practicalities. When you start doing something that nobody has done before, you absolutely do not know that it can work. You will fail in every way – Jonathan mentioned that when they were creating Face ID, all that they had for such a long time were failed engineering designs that simply put did not work. Nobody knew that you could miniaturize the Kinect hardware, or that this chip could actually run their custom neural network quickly and with low power consumption to get Face ID. But you can. For MacBook batteries, if you mess the chemistry of these batteries up, the batteries will absolutely explode just like Samsung's did the following year. Nobody knew that you could stack the batteries of a MacBook on top of each other either. But you can. Nobody knew that you could remove most of the ugly antenna lines on an iPhone and just place just one antenna line at the top. Oh wait, but you can't. Nobody knew that you could charge 3 devices at the same time within whatever FCC regulations and still maintain low heat. Oh wait, but you can't (I guess, if that's the problem). The point is that whenever you're doing something that nobody else in the world has done, you can't know it's going to work and you will fail. You will succeed but you will also fail, if you are truly doing creative work. Here, Apple failed. I guess because what they finished in the lab was possible according to the laws of physics but not safe (coils might overheat and catch fire or melt, might explode, might stop a person's pacemaker, and so on).
  • philwelch 8y ago
    If they were gonna do it after the AirPods 2 release, they would have to do it ASAP, or else they'd either have to do extended refunds (and have extra return inventory of an unwanted product) or face a class-action suit from disgruntled AirPods 2 buyers who were promised compatibility with a now-cancelled product.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    Especially weird for Apple, who aren't known for vaporware. And even Google wouldn't come out and say "we can't make this work", they'd just stop talking about it until it was eventually solvable down the line, or let it evaporate altogether. It's very odd to see a tech giant just hit a technological wall.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • spullara 8y ago
      This sets appropriate expectations. If they don't know when it will reach the quality that they want to ship it is better to cancel it.
      • squarefoot 8y ago
        My guess is that it's not about quality but efficiency. Assuming the product works as advertised, someone might have pointed out that the power drawn is a lot more than the power supplied to the devices being charged (which to some extent is true for every wireless charger out there), and in a world where being sensitive to green issues is becoming the norm, this might have brought some bad press to Apple.
        • MBCook 8y ago
          > Assuming the product works as advertised The rumors are that it didn’t work as advertised, or even at all. Or when it did it could get hot and catch on fire. I think Occam’s razor applies here.
    • rickyc091 8y ago
      I appreciate that Apple was honest with their communication. Too often have I seen managers/CEOs employ the strategy of avoiding the hard conversation and letting the topic fade away.
      • Noctem 8y ago
  • duxup 8y ago
    That's what always confused me about this. This was very much an announced thing, not some side research project.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • FPGAhacker 8y ago
    I’m guessing patents.
  • notatoad 8y ago
    I'm guessing the unexpected hype was what caused the "cancellation", and AirPower isn't really any more cancelled than it was yesterday. I'm imagining some engineering teem at Apple telling their bosses "yeah, it's almost ready" and the bosses believing them without really caring, because it's just a silly accessory and no big deal, right? And then since the AirPods 2 announcemen, the internet has been rabid with anticipation for AirPower. announcing it is cancelled is a better PR move than letting that internet fanboy frenzy turn into frustration with delays. I wouldn't be surprised if we see AirPower turn up again in a years time.
    • save_ferris 8y ago
      This doesn't make much sense to me. Apple is the tech marketing messiah, why would they announce AirPower at a major product demo and think that it somehow wouldn't be hyped? This is a really strange fumble for them. It was also listed as a major feature for the new AirPods, that doesn't seem like something Apple would slap on a box knowing they probably weren't going to ship, especially if was a "silly accessory." I can totally see an engineering team BSing leadership on the product readiness, but there had to be internal pressure on this. Apple knows this looks bad after investors weren't super impressed with the News+ demo.
      • chrischen 8y ago
        They overpromised and didn’t deliver, to avoid under delivering.
      • acomjean 8y ago
        I think the mea-culpa announcement "This isn't going to be shipped", is better than stringing it along for months and leaving people in the dark. Your right though, their main problem was announcing it too early. There are probably legal ramifications to this. Back in the day "intelivision" announced a keyboard component for their console in ads. They didn't ship.. It kept slipping. Then the FTC (government) started fining them for false advertising. So they finally released one (It was junk, we had one). "Complaints from consumers who had chosen to buy the Intellivision specifically on the promise of a "coming soon" personal-computer upgrade, eventually caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who started investigating Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision
  • mackey 8y ago
    I saw a report on twitter with serial numbers showing build dates of September and November, along with old copyright dates on the boxes on the new AirPods. Combine that with the "Hey Siri" being shown in "Gather Round" video in September, I bet they were hoping to ship the AirPods before the holidays, but were holding out hope that Airpower would work. https://twitter.com/rouven81/status/1110980080170340352 https://twitter.com/rouven81/status/1110980080170340352 https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/12/apple-hey-siri-support-airpods/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/12/apple-hey-siri-support-...
    • golem14 8y ago
      My completely uneducated guess is a behind-the-scenes patent dispute or something along those lines...
      • sovnade 8y ago
        IFixit has a good article on it. Basically they couldn't get it to pass wireless emissions standards the way they wanted to do it (put your phone anywhere on the pad to charge not, not directly on the circle, etc).
        • Calcite 8y ago
          Link: https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/ https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/
      • georgespencer 8y ago
        Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes. There were a lot of leaks suggesting mass production was due to start. I would bet production did not start, and that early production runs had low yields due to the complexity of the product.
        • speedplane 8y ago
          > Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes. Actually the opposite. Most patent disputes are resolved behind the scenes, long before anyone sues each other.
  • aluminussoma 8y ago
    You are assuming that Apple has great cross-team communication. By many reports, they do not: I've heard that one team does not know what another team is working on, much less the status of that project.
    • HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
      It's a Big Tech Corp with known spies in it. You expect everything to be shared? Inter-team communication is just generally bad these days, and mostly because it tends to be the default human behavior. I remember reading a couple of articles about Bell Labs and how they had a huge cafeteria everyone was encouraged to eat in, thereby promoting cross-communication and "cross-pollination" of ideas and insight. I kinda wonder what the Big Tech companies would be producing now and at what rate if they did that instead of letting or encouraging everyone to sit at their desks all day long (mind you, Google seems to be pretty good about that part.)
      • developer2 8y ago
        > with known spies in it Worse than a simple information "spy" would be having a security engineer with intimate knowledge of Apple's security leave the company to co-found a new company whose entire business model is to sell expensive hardware to law enforcement that bypasses Apple's security. Oh right, that actually happened[1]. An Apple security engineer discovered–or baked in–critical security flaws at one of the world's largest technology companies and instead of disclosing them to the company, co-opted that sensitive insider information to start his own lucrative business. I've been waiting for news of this man's reputation, career, finances, and perhaps even his freedom having been taken away; so far it seems he's gotten away with it. I don't buy the apologist explanation I've heard: "he's likely just so good at his profession that he reverse engineered entirely new vulnerabilities after leaving Apple, without necessarily having exfiltrated knowledge only obtainable from within Apple's own walls". If this man had done this to a bank or the government, he'd be rotting in federal prison. But he "only" expropriated this information from a private corporation, so no big deal. /s [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/07/26/apple-ios-security-boost-not-stopping-cops-hacking-iphones/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/07/26/apple...
  • ksec 8y ago
    >There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation. They could have sold a Wireless Charger just like others with their mark up. Instead we got nothing. Also admitting MacBook Pro Keyboard Failure. I believe there is something happening to Hardware Engineering in general.
    • AceJohnny2 8y ago
      Methinks HWEng made a breach in Industrial Design's north flank, and provoked a rout. The tide is turning!
      • captaincrowbar 8y ago
        “Oh my god! The engineers are revolting!” “You’ve worked here all these years and you only just noticed that?”
        • dvtrn 8y ago
          Why does this feel (in a fun and positively humorous way) like something pulled straight out of Douglas Coupland's "J-Pod"?
          • crooked-v 8y ago
            https://www.amazon.com/Peasants-Are-Revolting-Wizard-ID/dp/0449124037 https://www.amazon.com/Peasants-Are-Revolting-Wizard-ID/dp/0...
      • usrusr 8y ago
        Love the picture, but I think it's the opposite: engineering's defence of the announce-o-tron went down for a moment, design pushed into the breach and gained a brief moment of unsupervised access. Now they face the consequences.
        • AceJohnny2 8y ago
          You're giving me flashbacks of Tesla's beleaguered engineering team.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    That's not even on the box it's on a sticker on the box. Buy some new stickers and bin the old rolls!
  • kwiens 8y ago
    My theory: they couldn't make it past the FCC. Managing overlapping harmonic frequencies is incredibly challenging, and gets harder the more coils that you are integrating. From patent filings, it looks like Apple’s ambitious plan was to use considerably more coils than other charging pads on the market. https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/ https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/
  • samstave 8y ago
    How would you compare AirPower with Cue::cat?
  • paul7986 7y ago
    They canceled it because the iPhone is going to become a wireless charging pad for your AirPods, watch and even another iPhone. Samsung just released Wireless PowerShare as a feature in the S10 that allows you to share a charge and reports note this will be coming to the iPhone. Incidentally and FML ... I was filmed pitching this idea to Intel and Mark Burnett (reality tv mega-producer) for the reality tv show, America's Greatest Makers. They reached out to me as they really needed fledging inventors. Overall we pitched sharing battery power between two phone cases https://ryanspahn.com/GetLeech https://ryanspahn.com/GetLeech . I haven't looked but if Intel has patents that are from Sept 2015 and on then really FML. Otherwise what I thought was potentially a completely unique idea wasn't.
• ithinkinstereo 8y ago
  For anyone interested in the challenges of true wireless charging (i.e., actual wireless, not induction-based), I highly recommend this blog from Paul Reynolds, who formerly led engineering at ubeam: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com
  • unethical_ban 8y ago
    Could you explain how charging without cables, via induction, is not wireless? I can't click that link at work (uncategorized by proxy).
    • Swizec 8y ago
      It’s wireless but not touchless. Some (many?) people conflate “wireless” and “over-the-air” charging. You can do OTA charging but that’s a tesla coil and not very safe.
      • Hamuko 8y ago
        >Some (many?) people conflate “wireless” and “over-the-air” charging. Probably doesn't help to name your product "AirPower".
      • penagwin 8y ago
        Induction doesn't require any contact what so ever. It works through cases, and will work even if you hold your device over the charger with air in between. Now induction certainly has it's own set of compromises, orientation being a big one, not to mention many implementations don't have great ranges. But yes, induction itself is "contactless" and is OTA.
    • txcwpalpha 8y ago
      When most people think "wireless", they probably associate it with things like wireless phones, wireless headphones, wireless speakers, etc. Things that can be carried around freely and their usability isn't restricted by not being connected to a wire. Imagine if to use "wireless" headphones, you had to hold them within 1 cm of an induction loop that transmitted the audio, otherwise they just played static. I wouldn't really consider those to be wireless in the same sense as a set of AirPods. At least that's the impression I got when I read "true wireless" in GP's comment.
• slg 8y ago
  It is a slimy move to wait a week after the wireless charging Airpods were released before announcing this. You can't tell me that Apple didn't know this was coming. What percentage of people who have bought new Airpods in the last week wouldn't have made that purchase if they knew AirPower was never going to be released? EDIT: Several people are responding that other manufactures make wireless chargers, so what is the big deal? Sure, you are right other options exist. There are also a wide variety of USB-C laptop chargers available that could charge your Macbook. There would still be plenty of complaints if Apple stopped selling their USB-C power brick. Two of the primary reasons people buy Apple products are because of the ecosystem and their standard of quality. Now people are forced out of the Apple ecosystem and must buy a product from 3rd parties that don't have the same quality requirements. What happens when that $5 Qi charge from some noname brand fries your devices battery?
  • blueberry_47 8y ago
    0%
  • deminature 8y ago
    Wireless chargers are cheaply available from many other manufacturers (much cheaper than Airpower was going to be). Selling on the basis of wireless charging is not slimy or underhanded.
    • danpalmer 8y ago
      Exactly. I bought the wireless charging case for Qi compatibility. No way I was spending £200 on an Apple branded charger, but wireless charging is a great UX and makes the AirPods feel like a nicer product.
  • thamer 8y ago
    The new AirPods can be charged on Qi chargers, that are available on Amazon for $10. No one bought wireless charging AirPods because of AirPower.
    • 8y ago
• andyfleming 8y ago
  It seems like they could have cancelled the multi-device charger and just released a single-device charger branded as AirPower.
  • Isamu 8y ago
    Well, except the bait-and-switch would also cause outrage.
    • andyfleming 8y ago
      That might be true, but they could at least acknowledge that the multi-device version is not ready and provide a first-party option in the meantime.
  • bluthru 8y ago
    I'm not sure why Apple thought people were willing to spend $100 more just so they wouldn't need to be precise with how products were placed on the charging pad. Just make some indentations for the watch and airpods and be done with it.
    • andyfleming 8y ago
      Yeah, I agree that would be fine. It's not quite as elegant, but I think consumers would have been ok with it. There are also similar solutions already out there. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Bestand-H05-Grey-Aluminum-Charging-Qi-Enabled/dp/B071W4XB76 https://www.amazon.com/Bestand-H05-Grey-Aluminum-Charging-Qi...
      • ninkendo 8y ago
        I fail to see how using that is any more convenient than a dock-style stand that plugs into the lightning port. What's "wireless" really doing for you if you have to position it just the right way on a dock anyway?
        • 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Shivetya 8y ago
  to be honest I was never onboard. I have phone chargers that hold the phone upright and this orientation made it easy to just glance over when texts and notifications popped. If I owned a watch I would want something similar; think how many watches are displayed in a stand up case; to keep the dial easily visible. plus in the end, the predictions of price were all elevated and in a world of ten and twenty dollar chargers the idea of a product near a hundred or over just doesn't make sense. edit: will be interesting for those who bought the wireless charging version of the airpods or the case seprately.
  • rconti 8y ago
    Belkin produces a thing like this; "Valet Phone Dock", which holds an iPhone and watch in view. I have one by my bedside. It's convenient with the watch because a slight tap causes it to wake up and show the time. Everything's at the 'right' angle.
• ProAm 8y ago
  Will these devices charge on a normal Qi charging pad?
  • brycethornton 8y ago
    Yes
    • ProAm 8y ago
      Interesting. I wonder what the high standard hang up was for apple then? It's an older technology (Qi), or I wonder if the hardware team was pulled off of new products to go back and fix the keyboards they are still having issues? Or maybe it was wasnt going to sell at a price point to bring in enough margin?
      • rhodysurf 8y ago
        Its not true. Apple Watches dont use Qi charging so that was at least one hurdle.
      • ihuman 8y ago
        They were trying to use multiple overlapping "3D" charging coils so you could place multiple devices in any orientation, but supposedly it was causing overheating issues
  • ptmcc 8y ago
    My iPhone 8 works on a regular fast-charging Qi pad, I'd hope that the Airpods are the same way.
    • MBCook 8y ago
      They do. The Apple Watch is the only thing that doesn’t use Qi.
  • favorited 8y ago
    Yes. The concept behind AirPower was multi-device charging on a single mat.
• Despegar 8y ago
  Guess the WSJ got their reporting wrong. They said it was in production.
  • eugeniub 8y ago
    I wonder if it really did go into production, only to be cancelled after Apple executives decided they weren't content with the current iteration after all.
  • bdcravens 8y ago
    Perhaps they had started a limited run, and QC found too many units out of spec.
• blhack 8y ago
  I feel like I'm living in a bizzare-o-world here or something with this whole wireless charging thing. I had wireless charging in my Nexus 5 almost 6 years ago. Even back then, I bought a cheap wireless charger off of amazon for like $20, and thought it was a relatively interesting novelty. 6 years is an absolute eternity in tech, but for some reason this is being touted as some new innovative tech. I honestly thought when apple was announcing "wireless charging" that they meant something like your entire house would be a charger while you inside of it. Basically: no wifi, less space than a nomad. Lame. Seriously though, wireless charging even being mentioned in the marketing as though it matters seems on par with a laptop advertising that it also has WiFi. No kidding it should have wireless charging; it's 2019!
  • gumby 8y ago
    iphones have had this feature for a while too (though not six years ago). This mat was supposed to be super-wizzy but that's not to be.
  • pwinnski 8y ago
    The point wasn't wireless charging. They've supported Qi charging for a while. The point was wirelessly charging several devices simultaneously with no need to consider the orientation the devices being charged. That's what turns out to be so hard to deliver well that they're giving up. And no, nobody else is doing it either. Yet.
• Animats 8y ago
  This is a good thing. There were three competing wireless charging schemes. They got together and agreed on Qi as the charging mat standard.[1] Then Apple had to go off in their own incompatible direction. This delayed charging mat deployment in hotels and such. With Apple's scheme out of the picture, everybody can go with Qi. [1] https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/ https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/
  • sgjohnson 8y ago
    All the Apple devices that support wireless charging use Qi.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      Well, they kind of have to since it's the only standard that that has products you can actually buy. It's great that they avoided fragmenting the market. Even if AirPower was great at this point it's way late to the market, and compatibility would be a constant headache for years. I'm ok with Apple throwing in the towel here and just using the damn standard.
      • hinkley 8y ago
        Apple can show up late to a market and steal market share. Or at least they used to know how to do that...
    • badwolf 8y ago
      Except for the Watch :(
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • ihuman 8y ago
    Apple said they were going to work with the Qi standards team to integrate what they invented into future versions of the standard.
• veryworried 8y ago
  I don't even know why they bothered making the AirPower so complicated, especially for its first version. Do people even care about device orientation or communication of charge levels? 90% of the purchase decision is based on just having an Apple branded power mat.
  • s17n 8y ago
    Product decisions like this one are the whole reason why people base their purchase decisions on the Apple brand.
  • ihuman 8y ago
    People don't care about device orientation, which is why the mat was supposed to work regardless of the orientation.
  • pkamb 8y ago
    Seriously. Apple, just release a nicely-designed normal Qi charger. Upgrade it to the fancy version if/when you can. Same with a USB-C hub/dock for the laptops.
• tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Why does this thing need to be so thin you have to cancel it over heating issues!? It's the perfect shape and size to mount a heat sink on the bottom; no one's going to give up apple products forever because there's an extra centimeter of aluminum on the bottom of their phone charger
  • hinkley 8y ago
    Where are you moving the heat by putting aluminum on the bottom? Into the surface it's on? That won't be very conductive. Also heat issues with a power supply means losses. Thermodynamics might be keeping them from hitting numbers they wanted to reach. It's quite easy for an executive with some clout and bad listening skills to insist on a feature set that violates the laws of physics. I've worked on a few of those projects.
• tambourine_man 8y ago
  Instead of reliable WiFi routers and induction chargers, Mac Pros and you know, laptop keyboards that you can actually type on… We get a credit card, news and streaming service that no one wants or understands. I really don’t get Apple's priorities recently. Which is a shame, since few companies step to the chalange of serving the expensive high quality tech stuff market. And what happened to the company that wouldn’t pre announce stuff, under promise and over deliver? I just hope they don’t also cancel whatever it is they are doing with the Mac Pro.
  • fetus8 8y ago
    I mean, it's abundantly clear where their priorities are right now...and that's Services. I suppose Services make more money and please the stockholders, but damn if it ain't disappointing to their user-base.
    • jeromegv 8y ago
      Your argument would make sense if services were not something paid by.... that same user base. If customers don’t buy into the services, you think this will bring money?
      • fetus8 8y ago
        If users don't pay for a service, the service provider doesn't make money...What's your point? Enough of Apple's user-base subscribe to their current service offerings, and will possibly subscribe to at least one of the new services as well. Unless the entire user-base protests and unsubscribes to every service on offer, they're most likely going to continue to make a profit off of these services, hence the focus on them. (The HN crowd is definitely not the target audience for these services, I am well aware.)
      • threeseed 8y ago
        Except consumers are buying these services. Apple isn't stupid you know. They wouldn't double down on this space if there wasn't money to be made. And given their huge success with Apple Music it's not unreasonable to assume they can do well in other areas.
• Hamuko 8y ago
  Should Apple stop announcing products before they're sure they can ship them?
  • Angostura 8y ago
    Is this a frequent thing?
    • Hamuko 8y ago
      AirPower AirPods White iPhone 4
      • minimaxir 8y ago
        AirPods/White iPhone 4 were both heavily supply-constrained; it wasn't an announcement then never shipping the product.
    • MBCook 8y ago
      No. It’s EXTREMELY rare for Apple to announce something with more than about a week of lead time unless it’s likely to be leaked by a 3rd party (iPhone and FCC, media companies and Apple News/TV).
• midnightdiesel 8y ago
  Are there any official announcements about this? It seems odd for Apple’s leadership team to make statements about unreleased products to reporters like that without any other context.
  • theNJR 8y ago
    More offical than a statement from Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering?
  • cududa 8y ago
    It’s called a “Friday news dump” - toss it out with the trash to some outlet. TechCrunch wouldn’t just make up a story.
• aj7 8y ago
  From the article: “This is a very, very rare public mis-step for Apple.” Not a mis-step at all.
  • gumby 8y ago
    It is given their usual M.O. which is not to preannounce at all.
• gigatexal 8y ago
  Daaaaaamn This is going to be Apple’s HL3
  • ihuman 8y ago
    At least this was explicitly cancelled. IIRC Valve never came out and said development stopped; they just stopped talking about it.
    • phinnaeus 8y ago
      HL2: Episode 3... coming soon. That was the last we heard, IIRC.
• Aardwolf 8y ago
  Qi charging used to be a useful thing, but much less available now. It doesn't need to fast charge with risk of heat, it's already very useful if it charges at a regular speed whenever you put the device on it, e.g. on your desk...
• GeekyBear 8y ago
  Apparently, even the Chinese supply chain thought this product was going to go into production, according to Ming-Chi Kuo, whose sources inside Apple's supply chain are impeccable. However, good for Apple. They need to be more willing to say this product isn't good enough, and stop listening to those who say they are too secretive. They had a good thing going when they didn't comment on products under development (or even acknowledge that they were under development) until they were ready to ship them.
  • urda 8y ago
    Agreed. I much rather have a company like Apple just flat out say "we can't make this work to our standards, to our customer standards, and we're not comfortable with releasing this product this way." Versus say Google who'll just never mention it again or launch a broken version only to kill it off within two years.
    • dustindiamond 8y ago
      but it has a hidden microphone, so it is upgradeable.
    • ianai 8y ago
      I hope it’s a sign of change to come. Their hardware has been actively moving from what users want to what their designers want (thinner is always better, ne legacy ports, no finger I’d, etc).
      • umanwizard 8y ago
        What makes you think you know better than Apple what most of their users want? I suspect you just know what you want, and why you want it, and are extrapolating from that to everyone else.
        • ianai 8y ago
          Well there’s a healthy demand for the SE. It’s needed a serious update for quite a while and substantially from their current offerings. There’s similar preferences with the older MBPs as well. All widely commented on user forums.
• imandride 8y ago
  "Apple cancels AirPower product, citing inability to meet its high standards for hardware" Apple claiming high quality standards for their hardware doesn't feel right; When I can't trust buying a laptop from them, in fear that it was won't "just work" for the next six months.
• PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I wish we could get some kind of writeup or interview from the RF engineers who worked on Airpower. Overlapping charging coils have been dreamed of pretty much since the origin of induction charging but there must be tons and tons of issues we can't even think of. I'd love to hear their stories.
  • cogman10 8y ago
    I wonder how you could do it without seeing some pretty big losses. Wireless charging is already pretty lossy, Dynamic coils though? I mean, I guess you could do it mechanically, but that would still result in less than ideal coils and a noisy device. If you did it through transistors, somehow, then you'd end up with a lot of loss at each transistor. Too few and you don't make a good field. Too many and the losses would be really high. The cost would be crazy as well. For the transistor approach, I don't know, maybe a big silicon wafer? Maybe just a load of transistors and wires. Who knows.
    • kdot 8y ago
      One thing about wireless charging is the gap created by phone cases, what does a case do to charging efficiency?
      • PascLeRasc 8y ago
        In practice Qi chargers have just one operating power, either "within range" or "not within range", so whether you have a case or not won't affect charging rate, but in theory RF power does scale with 1/distance². So you could argue that Qi standards engineers did have to limit our usable charging power because they knew cases would be used.
    • PascLeRasc 8y ago
      There could be a Qi 2 standard that calls for many tiny coils instead of one big one, and pass much smaller amounts of current in parallel that way. Then you could cover the back of the phone with them and be able to place it anywhere on the mat.
• pfortuny 8y ago
  Will they cancel the Macbook Pro?
  • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    No, they'll continue beta testing new versions of the same junk on people willing to spend $2K for the privilege. Keeping my 2014 until they figure it all out.
• hartator 8y ago
  Stupid question. I have an iPhone, the watch, and now the wireless AirPods. What will be the best charging pad out there?
  • geddy 8y ago
    This is a great question, not stupid at all! There are tons of people with devices reading for wireless charging that are now going to be looking elsewhere, now that this has officially been declared dead. Just got my wife an Apple Watch and I was telling her about how cool the AirPower product would be... yesterday. Gotta break the news to her when she gets home.
  • jzl 8y ago
    Almost impossible to answer due to the rapidly evolving space. But in short: something on Amazon probably made in China that has good reviews that don't seem faked (or at least less faked than others!). What's especially confusing are all the different supported wattages between iPhone and Android models. iPhones started at 5W, but upped to 7.5W with iOS 11. Some big Android phones support 10. Some chargers support 5 & 10 but not 7.5. So for an iPhone you want to be sure to get one that explicitly supports 7.5. I bought one about 6 months ago that I've been very happy with. As described, a no-name Chinese brand on Amazon. There are a ton of dual Qi + Watch chargers (or at least with a bracket for the watch charger), but not sure how Airpods will fit into the mix. I'm sure a ton will be coming soon.
  • recov 8y ago
    This has generally good reviews, https://hellonomad.com/products/base-station-apple-watch https://hellonomad.com/products/base-station-apple-watch , although a little expensive.
  • sandstrom 8y ago
    I have an IKEA charger (Nordmärke) that works really well: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/home_electronics/41069/ https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/ho...
• notadoc 8y ago
  Great, can they cancel the horrible keyboard on the MacBook line next?
• eugeniub 8y ago
  My guess is that an AirPower-like mat will come back in late 2019 or 2020, after Apple updates the Apple Watch to use the same wireless charging technology as iPhones.
  • skiman10 8y ago
    It technically already does use the Qi standard, just locked down to Apple approved devices [1]. This AirPower cancelation was supposedly canceled because 3D layered coils generate too much heat and they could not figure it out. [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/398423/apple-forces-you-to-buy-its-own-apple-watch-wireless-chargers/ https://www.cultofmac.com/398423/apple-forces-you-to-buy-its...
    • cududa 8y ago
      So the issue was on the receiving device, not the mat?
      • skiman10 8y ago
        The issue with AirPower was the mat generating too much heat. Supposedly. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/17/airpower-delay-due-to-overheating-reports.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/17/airpower-delay-due-to-overhe... The issue with the Apple Watch not charging on all Qi pads is Apple locking it down to only approved devices.
• omarish 8y ago
  Revenue loss from not releasing a faulty product is infinitely better than the customer trust lost from releasing something faulty.
• cprayingmantis 8y ago
  So they’ll cancel AirPower but they won’t revert their laptop keyboard? Come on guys my 2014 MPB can’t last forever!
• randomacct3847 8y ago
  I haven’t found a situation where wireless charging is superior to wired charging, especially for my iPhone w wireless charging. The only situation is if you’re out and about and don’t have your cable with you, and in that case the only public wireless charging I’ve ever come across is at a certain Starbucks places, but it wouldn’t make sense in that situation why your own wirelessly mat would help since you probably wouldn’t haul that everywhere with you. If you wirelessly charge then you have to lay your phone flat on the charging surface, whereas if you use a cable you can hold it and use it normally near the outlet.
  • FireBeyond 8y ago
    My bed stand alarm clock. Just drop the phone on it (it sits vertical, at a slight angle). No need for rapid charging overnight, and if I need to fumble for my phone in a sleepy haze at 3am I don't risk breaking the connector, pulling and yanking at things awkwardly.
  • vbezhenar 8y ago
    I have charger on my table and I just put phone there. It's not THAT MUCH better, but it's more convenient. Also I don't put lightning port to stress which is hopefully will prolong device life. I liked it so much that I recently ordered wireless charger even for my car, so I don't have to tinker with cables.
  • aurailious 8y ago
    Two places I have them: at my desk, on my nightstand. But both are the standing up kind, not the mat.
  • fredifrum 8y ago
    It's perfect for a bedside table. Instead of needing to fumble around for a cable when I'm tired, I just place it on the mat. It's handy to have several pads around the house and office so your phone can always been juiced up. My phone rarely goes below 50% anymore, and I basically only bother with cables when I'm traveling. It's awesome.
  • sib 8y ago
• derefr 8y ago
  Something I don't understand about induction charging: why is it even necessary if the device and charger are still expected to be in flat contact with one another (with at most a few millimeters of separation)? Is the point just for arbitrary positionability on a flat charging surface? If so, I feel like there are simpler ways to solve that, just with clever solid-state connector design. Imagine a BGA processor that could be arbitrarily aligned into a BGA socket (not only rotated, but placed anywhere onto a BGA array larger than the CPU), and would continue working. That's possible, no? It doesn't exist, but it's possible. You could have the motherboard look for known sense pins on the processor by putting its own BGA pins into a sense mode; and then, having found which pins the processor is aligned to, it could "hook up" the rest of the pins appropriately. Any pins the CPU isn't touching would remain powered down or in a low-voltage sense mode, where they're safe to touch. Well, if you can imagine that, then just reduce the number of pads on the device side from hundreds to two, while keeping all the pads on the socket side. But lose the "socket" part. Imagine a charger that's just a big flat matrix of tiny copper pads, where each copper pad is actually four quadrants: two for sense, one for power, one for ground. The power and ground are normally powered down. If you have a device (a phone, say) with two large flat charging pads on the back, and you lay it onto the BGA matrix—then the phone's pads will activate (a number of!) the charger's sense pads; the charger will have an "image" of which pins to power, and discretize that image into two clusters (like discretizing touch-points on a digitizer); and then one cluster of activated sense-pins will have their sibling power pins activated; and the other cluster will have their sibling ground pins activated. Other than the copper being exposed to the elements, I don't see why this isn't workable. (And before you say "my phone is in a case"—your case would just need a pair of pass-through conductor pads.)
  • dkokelley 8y ago
    I wirelessly charge my iPhone through its case.
    • rconti 8y ago
      Hell, I charge my X through a Quad Lock case which is about as thick as you can get (it has a bulge on the back to handle the connection to the Quad Lock mounting devices). It doesn't work with everything, but it works with my cheapo Qi charger and my Nomad charger in my Tesla. I'm sure it charges more slowly than with no case, but it does what I need.
• m3kw9 8y ago
  Is a very good sign that Apple is willing to cancel shitty products. Still got that culture
  • minikites 8y ago
    If only they cancelled their laptop keyboards.
    • seppin 8y ago
      I love their keyboards, and have never met anyone IRL that has complained about them.
      • setquk 8y ago
        Everyone I know who bought a 2018 MBA, me included, has returned it due to keyboard issues. Which is a shame because I loved the damn thing apart from that.
        • luxuryballs 8y ago
          I didn’t think I would like it but after a few months I love it. Did you return it within the 14 days because of a defect or because you just didn’t like the feel?
          • setquk 8y ago
            I returned it because of duplicate keypresses being registered. Same problem my friends faced with their machines. The keyboard feel was fine. Takes a couple of days to get used to it but I prefer it. I had it for three weeks. They had extended return times around Christmas which was handy or I’d have to have fought the repair/replace process. I’d just sold my old 15” MBP before it failed so I am now using an old thinkpad T440 running xubuntu. I’m more glad I have £1630 of cash in the bank than having the MBA if I’m honest.
    • m3kw9 8y ago
• rdiddly 8y ago
  "Everything I’ve personally heard... about the AirPower delay has been related to tough engineering problems related to the laws of physics." I had to LOL at that. Not in a cruel way, but the statement makes it sound like they're working with insane complicated stuff at the frontiers of particles and quarks and whatnot, whereas the "laws of physics" they're talking about really just revolve around the fact that a piece of copper is always going to be something like 20 orders of magnitude more electrically-conductive than air. It would be cool if they could get something like this to work without frying all our brains, but right now I guess it's basically still science fiction. Edit: No, huh? 3 people disagree and think inductance can transmit power just as efficiently as a wire? OK granted maybe my mentioning the conductivity of air wasn't that relevant (although FYI it is indeed a difference of about 20 orders of magnitude - source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...), but don't ignore the obvious: all it says is that copper is very good at conducting. And that's actual electrons mind you, not electrons moved around and converted to something else and back again, which is part of where the inefficiency (a.k.a. "heat") comes from. Another source of inefficiency is the fact that the field isn't contained very well... you are somewhat "broadcasting" that energy, unlike a wire which leads exactly to where you want it to go. Yes, you can transfer power that way, but because of the inefficiencies, you have to run it at a level that generates an amount of heat that they are saying is excessive.
• rock_artist 8y ago
  It seems Elon Musk companies such as Space X is what Apple would've evolved if it had a visionary leading it. I'm not sure how much time Cook can keep his position. He's great at supply chain and operation but product quality and innovation has been degraded for many years now.
• draw_down 8y ago
  Pathetic.
• donohoe 8y ago
  For people like myself who just bought AirPods for wireless charging, what wireless chargers are you using that you would highly recommend?
• eappleby 8y ago
  What is the implication for all the other wireless charging mats on the market? Are charging mats by other manufacturers smaller than the mat that Apple wanted to introduce so the other mats won't run into overheating issues, or is it likely that the other mats will also run into overheating issues, but their standards are lower than Apple's so they are ok with it?
  • vbezhenar 8y ago
    Apple charging mat was unique because it allowed multiple devices with arbitrary placement. I did not see any other similar charging mats. I'm using Xiaomi charger and it's barely producing any heat with iPhone 8, definitely not something that could run into overheating issues.
• tonmoy 8y ago
  Could it be that they may have found a unfixable serious bug (maybe in some extreme corner cases)?
• ineedasername 8y ago
  I'm just surprised they announced a product at all when, especially that long ago, they must have known there were issues that could be potential show stoppers. Whatever his faults, I can't imagine that ever would have happened under Steve Jobs.
• sandstrom 8y ago
  For anyone looking for an alternative, now that the Apple charger didn't materialize, I can recommend the IKEA charger. Works well and is reasonably priced (I've got Nordmärke). https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/home_electronics/41069/ https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/ho...
• julianozen 8y ago
  I suspect Apple's launch plan was to ship last week's AirPods with the new mat for last holiday, and that as of ~Sept 2018, Apple assumed AirPower was possible (which is why last weeks AirPods were manufactured with AirPower documentation placed into the box) I spent sometime working on a hardware team at Amazon and we had an expression "hardware is like fruit" meaning the longer it sits unsold, the more stale and obsolete it gets (and it costs an unbelievable amount of money to keep it in storage). A few weeks/months ago, Apple must have decided that AirPower isn't going to happen, and that the AirPods that have been sitting in storage since September need to be sold so that they can actually sell their inventory before the launch of AirPods 3 (whenever that arrives)
  • bredren 8y ago
    Apple has pulled off some reported last minute hardware changes while stretching timelines. The 2016 MBP which had a 500+ day update cycle was apparently supposed to have the terraced battery used in MacBooks. [1] That got chucked last minute and led to a lot of battery complaints early on. I returned a loaded 13” due to limited battery life. The company ended up working SW systems to squeeze more out of what it has and it seemed to work. In that case they also seemed to be trying to meet a holiday release. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-alienated-mac-loyalists https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...
    • scarface74 8y ago
      The most famous example has to be that the iPhone was introduced with a plastic screen, but after Steve Jobs noticed how easily it scratched, they changed to a glass screen. I can’t find it now. But Apple even had a press release that they were changing to a glass screen.
      • julianozen 8y ago
        Still, the plastic iPhone was never made and put into boxes before the switch was made. It's surprising how late in the game this product was canceled
• beager 8y ago
  Sounds like a production issue to me, and they're taking an opportunity to throw shade on the existing induction-charge market in anticipation of fixing issues and launching something bigger later. "Doesn't meet our standards" sounds like "we have something vastly superior to Qi charging but it isn't quite ready yet" which will get eaten up by Apple stans.
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• brokencoder 8y ago
  Apple's management has enacted a policy of not offering competitive compensation for top engineering talent. I've had multiple Apple managers express frustration with the company's inability to attract and retain top talent. I myself got an offer from Apple for less than half what three other top companies offered, and Apple was unwilling to negotiate. This product cancellation and Apple's general product quality decline is the inevitable result of this short-sighted, penny-wise, pound-foolish strategy to keep payroll down.
  • ldrndll 8y ago
    For a company like Apple who a) tries to differentiate on engineering and b) has ridiculous amounts of money this is an entirely unforgivable policy.
  • ForrestN 8y ago
    Source beyond your own experience? Would love to read more about the fact that Apple is offering people 40% and refusing to negotiate. That would be huge news.
    • spectramax 8y ago
      Yep, need source. www.levels.fyi and Glassdoor shows comparable compensation.
  • robertAngst 8y ago
    What self respecting Nerd would work for Apple? serious question
  • cageface 8y ago
    Across the board Apple just seems to be struggling to execute on software. What they do offer is incomplete and buggy and they're falling farther and farther behind on new features. If they're serious about pivoting to being a services company they need to fix this ASAP. There's a deep-seated arrogance at Apple that I think they inherited from Jobs that isn't serving them well now that their competition has gotten its act together. Just as a thought experiment ask yourself - of the apps you use daily on your iPhone, how many are made by Apple, other than Safari?
• thothamon 8y ago
  So the thing here is Apple would never have announced the product and pumped it the way they have unless someone who at the time was highly respected said with very high confidence that it could be done. Not only that, but a lot of other experienced and respected people would also, almost certainly, have looked at it and also agreed it was doable. For Apple to say now it can't be done in a timely manner means those people either got a serious black eye, or they're out of the company and the remaining people don't think it's doable.
• InTheArena 8y ago
  There's a non-trivial chance that part of the problem here was safety related. I for one, therefore, am happy they didn;'t ship it.
• namelosw 8y ago
  Been waiting for this for a long time because I always forgot to recharge something every day... Hope this does not happen to Mac Pro. Thinking about the subscription stuff recently it seems they do have some strategy shifting recently.
• mises 8y ago
  This kind of stinks, but it's good to see Apple doing right by its customers. Telling them something will come that won't isn't right. And if they simply can't deliver a product, then they shouldn't make a half-baked attempt. They've recently caught flack for the problems with their keyboard, which is a hard thing to get right. This time, they chose not to deliver a marked-up, fiddly, overheating mess to their users, and we ought to credit them for it. It takes a lot of guts to admit you can't do something; a little more corporate humility might just be a good thing.
  • trimbo 8y ago
    > problems with their keyboard, which is a hard thing to get right Not sure what you mean here. They got the old keyboard right, and made it worse!
    • mises 8y ago
      Whether or not you agree with the direction in which they are taking their product, making a keyboard so thin that types as well as it does is quite difficult. The problem they have is literally because of stray dust specks.
      • sofaofthedamned 8y ago
        So test it, and if it doesn't work then don't sell it? As opposed to users of the last 3 years of Macs being beta testers for their current flavour of stupid keyboard of the month?
        • mises 8y ago
          Yes, pretty much exactly as opposed to that. That's why I'm giving them credit for it; maybe they've realized their users want a really high-quality product. This might even indicate that they're going to actually get the next macbook keyboard right (though that's still unlikely).
    • drexlspivey 8y ago
• m0zg 8y ago
  That is a truly "magical" example of "courage". To promise (on stage!), a magical multi-charger, then continue to promise it for 2 years, and then cancel it without any explanation.
• mjsweet 8y ago
  Is it my understanding that induction rings can't overlap? You can't just plonk a phone, watch and AirPods case anywhere on a charging pad and expect them to start charging right? The coil in each device needs to be fairly well aligned with the coil in the Qi charging pad. The proper way to do this is to have three individual coils with visual location targets for each device to charge. I wonder if Apple was trying to make it a bit too magical (judging by the pre-render shots) allowing the user to throw a device onto the pad anywhere and expect them to charge. Do the laws of physics apply here?
  • adtac 8y ago
    Following up on this, why is it impossible to use just one coil that's more powerful? IIUC To transmit power, you just need a temporally varying EM field to induce current on the other end, so why not have one that produces enough power? (My Electromagnetics course was 2-3 years ago, so forgive me if I'm missing something basic.)
    • kickopotomus 8y ago
      A larger (diameter) coil would require much more power to create a magnetic field capable of inducing a (useful) current in the device's battery charger. Also remember that induction requires AC. A high-power AC circuit creates a lot of RF noise.
    • kalleboo 8y ago
      Qi includes communications between the charger and the charged device, it's not just a "dumb" magnetic field. I'm not sure what it's negotiating, but if it's something like the power level that could cause conflicts between multiple devices.
  • MBCook 8y ago
    > I wonder if Apple was trying to make it a bit too magical (judging by the pre-render shots) allowing the user to throw a device onto the pad anywhere and expect them to charge. That was exactly the sales pitch.
  • 8y ago
• lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Gather as we witness a coup d'état in the making, as Engineering rises up against Design. Who will end up on top? Find out next time, on Dragon Ball Z!
• aheilbut 8y ago
  Why didn't they just buy uBeam??
  • resonantcharger 8y ago
    Or better yet, buy WiTricity instead of buying PowerByProxi. Apple placed its bet on the non-resonant Qi standard instead of “thinking different” with the newer emerging resonance based alternatives.
• odyssey7 8y ago
  My guess is they looked at what they had, and thought about their hard-learned lessons from the Maps release.
• kd22 8y ago
  This is so unexpected coming from a company like Apple, I am thinking this is Apple's version of April fool's this year.
• spondyl 8y ago
  Apple didn’t say why exactly the product was canceled, but people familiar with its development told Bloomberg News last year that the company faced challenges with the software, overheating and the ability to charge multiple devices on any spot on the mat. Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/apple-cancels-anticipated-airpower-wireless-charging-accessory https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/apple-can...
• makecheck 8y ago
  Sounded like a ton of complexity for minimal gain. If they could for instance create a “magnet disc” phone charger that works like the watch charger, wouldn’t that be basically as convenient (drop your phone close enough to mag-snap to the charger and walk away)?
• Animats 8y ago
  “Over time, these harmonics add up and they become really powerful signals in the air,” explains William Lumpkins, VP of Engineering at O & S Services. “And that can be difficult—that can stop someone’s pacemaker if it’s too high of a level. Or it could short circuit someone’s hearing aid.” "Over time, these harmonics add up?" Huh?
• lilfatbitch 8y ago
  "we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project" lmao take some responsibility for once. You tried, you failed, say it. Don't blame the product.