AirPower has become one of the most famous products Apple never shipped. Almost nine years after it was first shown alongside the iPhone X, however, the idea behind Apple’s abandoned wireless charging mat arguably makes more sense today than it did in 2017.
Apple originally designed AirPower as a single place to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods at the same time. Unlike a conventional charging pad, users were supposed to be able to place their devices almost anywhere across its surface rather than carefully lining them up with individual charging points.
The concept proved considerably harder to turn into a reliable product. The Apple Post looked at what went wrong with AirPower following its cancellation in 2019, when Apple acknowledged that the accessory had failed to meet its hardware standards after a lengthy and unusually public development struggle.
But wireless charging has changed dramatically since then. MagSafe now gives Apple a reliable way of magnetically aligning an iPhone with a charger, while AirPods charging cases can also use MagSafe and Apple Watch continues to rely on its own magnetic charging puck. The wider industry has also moved towards magnetic alignment through newer Qi standards.
That raises an interesting question: does a modern AirPower actually need to recreate the technically ambitious product Apple attempted to build nearly a decade ago?
Probably not. Apple could revisit the basic promise rather than the original engineering. A larger charging surface combining MagSafe with dedicated Apple Watch charging could provide one Apple-designed place for the three devices many customers charge every night, without necessarily requiring the dense overlapping coil arrangement that made the original AirPower so difficult to perfect.
There is already plenty of evidence that customers want something along those lines. Apple’s accessory ecosystem now includes MagSafe chargers, Apple Watch chargers and numerous third-party multi-device stands, yet Apple itself still doesn’t offer a single first-party charging station designed around an iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods together.
Third-party manufacturers have effectively spent years filling the space AirPower was intended to occupy. In 2022, The Apple Post reported on Tesla’s AirPower-like Wireless Charging Platform, which demonstrated that the appeal of dropping multiple devices onto one large charging surface had not disappeared with Apple’s project.
Apple hasn’t completely abandoned the broader idea either. Bloomberg previously reported that Apple continued exploring an AirPower-style wireless charger after the original product was cancelled, although no direct successor has reached the market.
The timing would also be interesting. Apple’s current MagSafe accessory range shows how central magnetic charging has become to the iPhone ecosystem, while users increasingly own several Apple devices that need charging at the end of the day.
An AirPower revival wouldn’t need to carry the same name, and it wouldn’t need to fulfil every promise made on stage in 2017. In fact, trying to reproduce the original product exactly could miss the point.
What Apple showed nearly nine years ago was ultimately a vision of making the nightly ritual of charging several devices less messy. MagSafe and the technology that has arrived since could now give Apple a much simpler route to achieving it.
AirPower failed as a product, but the problem Apple was trying to solve never really went away. Perhaps it’s finally time to try again.