AirPower Cancelled Four Years Ago, But Remains on Apple's Long-Term Roadmap
Apple cancelled its planned AirPower accessory four years ago this week, but a similar solution is said to remain on the company's long-term roadmap.
Announced at the iPhone X event in 2017, AirPower was a wireless charging mat designed to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods case simultaneously, regardless of each device's position on the mat. Apple said the accessory would be available in 2018, but it never launched and was ultimately cancelled in a rare move by Apple.
"After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project," said Apple's former hardware engineering chief Dan Riccio, in a statement shared on March 29, 2019. "We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward."
Apple never provided a specific reason for the cancellation, but it is believed that the overlapping charging coils inside the AirPower led to overheating.
In his newsletter last October, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said he still believes that an AirPower-like accessory will "eventually come to fruition," but it might be years away. In the meantime, the only multi-device charging mat sold by Apple is the MagSafe Duo Charger, which only works with two devices at once and has fixed charging positioning.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
From this:
To this:
And with Apple adding magnets to the Qi standard, it really kills the whole random placement charging concept, as each device is effectively self-aligned with the charging coils.
What I think remains strange for Apple to be doing is pushing wireless charging in the first place. It is far less efficient than a wired connection and that loss of energy is costing us (and the environment) money for almost zero benefit. It’s also not saving us time, as wired connections can offer much faster charging speeds. Imagine forgetting to charge your iPhone and in the morning having 8% battery left. You plug it into your fast charger and in 20 minutes (while you shower and get ready for work/school) your iPhone is fully charged. To me, that would be far more convenient than having to remember to set your iPhone onto the magnetic charging puck.
It was cancelled 4 years ago. Why are we still talking about it? Because Gurman thinks it's still years away?
If it hasn't shipped by now and we're still hearing it might ship 10 years after it was announced, it's because some engineer somewhere in the bowels of Apple Park refuses to let go of his dreams...
"I work for Apple and a lot of us think the visor is a waste of time and we should really put that energy into finishing Air Power-- we're only one or two prototypes from getting it right, I'm sure of it." ?