The whole AirPower saga is a <i>weird</i> event in product development. AirPower compatibility was highlighted as a feature <i>in the packaging of the just-released AirPods 2</i>: <a href="https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/1110656926965063680" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/11106569269650636...</a><p>There has to be <i>something</i> that caused this abrupt cancellation.
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.<p>However, good for Apple.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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)<p>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)
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)?<p>Is the point just for arbitrary positionability on a flat charging surface?<p>If so, I feel like there are simpler ways to solve that, just with clever solid-state connector design.<p>Imagine a BGA processor that could be arbitrarily aligned into a BGA socket (not only rotated, but placed anywhere onto a BGA array <i>larger</i> 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 <i>sense pins</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Other than the copper being exposed to the elements, I don't see why this isn't workable.<p>(And before you say "my phone is in a case"—your case would just need a pair of pass-through conductor pads.)
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.
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?<p>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?
Is it my understanding that induction rings can't overlap?<p>You can't just plonk a phone, watch and AirPods case anywhere on a charging pad and expect them to start charging right?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Do the laws of physics apply here?
Instead of reliable WiFi routers and induction chargers, Mac Pros and you know, laptop keyboards that you can actually type on…<p>We get a credit card, news and streaming service that no one wants or understands.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>It takes a lot of guts to admit you can't do something; a little more corporate humility might just be a good thing.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
<i>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.</i><p>Source: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/apple-cancels-anticipated-airpower-wireless-charging-accessory" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/apple-can...</a>
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.
For anyone looking for an alternative, now that the Apple charger didn't materialize, I can recommend the IKEA charger.<p>Works well and is reasonably priced (I've got Nordmärke).<p><a href="https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/home_electronics/41069/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/ho...</a>
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.<p>"Doesn't meet our standards" sounds like "we have something vastly superior to Qi charging but it isn't <i>quite ready yet</i>" which will get eaten up by Apple stans.
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?
<i>“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.”</i><p>"Over time, these harmonics add up?" Huh?
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)?
Qi charging used to be a useful thing, but much less available now.<p>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...
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.<p>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.<p>edit: will be interesting for those who bought the wireless charging version of the airpods or the case seprately.
Been waiting for this for a long time because I always forgot to recharge something every day...<p>Hope this does not happen to Mac Pro.<p>Thinking about the subscription stuff recently it seems they do have some strategy shifting recently.
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!
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/</a>
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.
I don't even know why they bothered making the AirPower so complicated, especially for its first version.<p>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.
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.
"Apple cancels AirPower product, citing inability to meet its high standards for hardware"<p>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.
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
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: <a href="https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com</a>
It seems Elon Musk companies such as Space X is what Apple would've evolved if it had a visionary leading it.<p>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.
I feel like I'm living in a bizzare-o-world here or something with this whole wireless charging thing.<p>I had wireless charging in my <i>Nexus 5</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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!
<i>"Everything I’ve personally heard... about the AirPower delay has been related to tough engineering problems related to the laws of physics."</i><p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...</a>), 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.