Apple AirPower cancelled

[steelyman]

I just saw an article about this and was quite surprised, don’t know what it says about the direction.

It doesn’t currently affect me as I have no devices that support wireless charging. Strangely, I bought a Samsung charger on a whim while at the beach (salty splurge, matey?).

The article mentioned AirPods too, which I don’t own and know nothing about how well they work and sound. I use a different brand of ear buds that charge in a case.

[ADDED] Link to CNBC article:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/apple-cancels-airpower.html

 

[Scuba]

Probably because they can’t get it to work well. I bought a wireless charging pad from a company called Hard Cider Labs and it didn’t work at all with my Apple Watch, and was slow with my phone. DH has the AirPods and loves them.

 

[audreyh1]

Got too hot. Not good.

 

[WestUniversity]

Probably because they can’t get it to work well.

I would agree. I scoured the internet looking for an all in one charger to charge my iPhone and my Apple Watch. After reading tons of reviews I finally decided to try one particular charger. It did not work well at all, so I returned it.

I figured an all in one charger would be a great solution for travel, but have found nothing yet, so I’ll keep bringing the different chargers for the watch and the phone...

 

[steelyman]

Here’s a follow up article, also through the CNBC feed:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/reu...rsal-pulls-plug-on-wireless-charging-mat.html

Gotta admit, I wonder about the Samsung charger I have. It’s pretty lonely without something to charge. But it looks cool!

 

[JoeWras]

I feel bad for the engineers working on it. There's nothing worse than having pressure to pre-announce something not near complete. The pressure from marketing becomes unbearable.

Products get cancelled all the time before announce. We just never hear of them. Ask any engineer who survives a career. There's a good chance they worked on multiple failed projects. I actually knew one guy at Megacorp #1 who worked 20 years before he got a project out the door. Perhaps that's why MC #1 was entering a crisis at that time, and why I left.

 

[NW-Bound]

I wonder what technical difficulties they faced. Were they trying for a much higher rate of charging than other makers have done? Something caused them to hit the immutable laws of physics.

 

[braumeister]

Macrumors had the best explanation I've seen:

There were, however, continual rumors of production, engineering, and manufacturing difficulties. Rumors suggested that there were problems with heat management, inter-device communication, and interference because Apple wanted to design a charging device where you could put an iPhone, Apple Watch, or AirPods anywhere on the mat to charge.

This required layering multiple charging coils, resulting in a device that ran too hot, which turned out to be an engineering issue Apple couldn't solve.