Apple has officially canceled AirPower, saying that there were difficulties meeting its high hardware standards (via TechCrunch).
[Whatever Happened to AirPower?]
AirPower Canceled
First introduced in September 2017, Apple delayed the product for over a year. In an emailed statement, Apple senior vice president of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio said:
After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward.
Speculation says that problems arose because of the laws of physics. The charging mat was too hot when it ran because the wireless charging coils were too close to each other and the power management couldn’t be figured out.
The promise of AirPower was that you could set your device down in any direction—and use multiple devices—to charge.
I’ve been waiting for the actual reason for cancellation of AirPower to gain any traction, but alas, it’s not any of the reasons you’ve heard discussed.
The Mac Show on British Tech Network had a ‘little birdie’ report from an Apple employee brought in to test AirPower that it worked perfectly, but a join in the white plastic was getting so dirty with normal use that Apple decided they couldn’t deal with people bringing their AirPower back complaining it collected (and distributed) grime. No other reason. It didn’t meet their standards… as stated by Apple.
There were no technical issues with the device, all the problems had been solved, but a design/manufacturing flaw was its downfall.
You can argue, well they could fix that easily, use space grey plastic or change the join, but this is supposed to be the actual problem that prevented if from shipping. Dumb as it sounds, it more adequately explains why all signs pointed to AirPower ready to ship. It was. Technical and manufacturing issues were all solved. BUT Support issues, not to mention the bad publicity over such a simple problem killed it.
You’d think this should just amount to just another delay. Time will tell. Floating all the unconfirmed technical issues, like physics, heat, RF interference etc. may just be a way of hiding the embarrassment.
Physics doth ruthlessly lay waste to even the most beautiful of unicorns.
Called it. When the market was flooded with Qi compatible chargers last fall I guessed it was done. Glad though, to see Apple step up and make it official, rather than letting it fade away from neglect.