Apple officially cancels plans to release AirPower
Apple has officially announced it has cancelled the release of AirPower, the highly anticipated charging mat first announced in 2017, due to an ongoing inability to meet its high standards for hardware, reports TechCrunch.
In a statement Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering apologized to customers that had been waiting for the product since the iPhone X was announced back over 560 days ago, saying Apple continues to believe that the future is wireless and is committed to pushing the wireless experience forward.
Reports have long suggested that Apple engineers had been struggling to produce AirPower mainly due to complications with prototypes overheating during testing, although most recently it appeared a launch was on the horizon, with supply chain sources claiming they were on the brink of ramping up component production, and mentioning of the unreleased accessory appearing on the box of the second-generation AirPods.
Speaking with TechCrunch, Riccio said after much effort, Apple has concluded AirPower will not achieve the high standards it expects, and therefore has cancelled the project.
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.
The decision to cancel AirPower appears to have been a very last minute one. Asides from packaging for the newly released AirPods mentioning AirPower support, a previously unseen image uncovered on Apple.com last week showed AirPower was secretly being displayed online, and late last year when Apple released the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR the paper documentation bundled with the devices again mentioned AirPower support.
Riccio unsurprisingly hasn’t gone into detail to explain what exactly are the main complications Apple is facing, but the intricate coil layout needed to charge three devices at once are believed to have always been an uphill battle for Apple engineers.
The announcement today that Apple has cancelled AirPower, a product that has already been publicly revealed and so highly anticipated is fairly unprecedented and rather unbelievable.