Apple has hit a bit of a roadblock. The upcoming Apple AirPower has been canceled by the company after it failed to “achieve our high standards,” a statement read. It is a major black eye for the company and brings a temporary halt to its wireless charging strategy.
“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have canceled 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,” Apple SVP of hardware engineering Dan Riccio said in a statement.
Tech Crunch was first to report the news.
The AirPower was announced back in September 2017 with the promise of being shipped in 2018. However, the device never shipped and few updates were available. Now, we know why.
The idea of the AirPower charger was to allow users the opportunity to charge up to three devices at the same time — iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch, and/or iPad. However, reports indicate that the AirPower charging mat was causing devices to overheat to the point of damage, so it was the right call to pull the plug on the project.
Rumors of the problems regarding the AirPower have been floating around the internet for months.
From DaringFireball:
What I’ve heard, third-hand but from multiple little birdies, is that AirPower really is well and truly fucked. Something about the multi-coil design getting too hot — way too hot. There are engineers who looked at AirPower’s design and said it could never work, thermally, and now those same engineers have that “told you so” smug look on their faces. Last year Apple was apparently swayed by arguments that they could figure out a way to make it not get hot. They were, clearly, wrong. I think they’ve either had to go completely back to the drawing board and start over with an entirely different design, or they’ve decided to give up and they just don’t want to say so.
It’s not often that Apple has such a major misstep in the public eye, but this is obviously not the kind of publicity the company is looking for. At the same time, it does show that Apple takes the quality of their devices very seriously.
