Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Death of AirPower: Explained!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here and in a strange series of events in an odd timeline. Apple has now officially canceled the airpower wireless charging mat it’s totally dead. The project is over. There is no replacement, it’s done, and it’s so bizarre. Just because i mean it didn’t have to be a big deal at all. It’S just a wireless charging mat in theory, but it became this big deal and it became very strange because of the way things played out and because of what air power was supposed to be so air power was originally announced way back with the iphone 10 back. Two years ago, in 2017 – and it was supposed to be a wireless charging – mat in white you’ve probably seen pictures of it. That would charge the iphone the air pods and your apple watch all at the same time and because it was made by apple other third-party stuff couldn’t do this. But it would have this sweet ios integration, where it would show the charging percentage of all the things on the mat all on ios on the iphone. So it would have been this pretty nifty solution for people who owned all three things.
This is not possible with current standards, but our team knows how to do this. We call it air power, so look for the air power charger next year, so that was september 2017.. They said next year, which would have been 2018 all of 2018 passed.
We kind of held our breaths and obviously nothing happened now, apparently interesting fact. At these apple events, you know, there’s typically a hands-on area where, if they announce new products, that’s where you can get your first time to get footage of it. I was there at that event.
I spent all my time with the new iphones air power was also in that hands-on area. But if you go back and look at those videos from 2017 people were in there, people were recording it, but nobody was actually able to get anything to work. People using air power in their videos were putting things on the mat and they just weren’t charging.
So that was maybe the first sign things weren’t exactly going to plan. So a couple weeks go by a couple months: go by and eventually we’re getting into 2018 and people start to wonder. As we don’t hear anything when air power is coming out, is it going to be with a new product alongside something else? Is it going to be its own separate thing? Are they just going to silently put it on sale and then slowly, one by one piece by piece, apple started to remove air power from their site? They removed the official listing they removed references to it from other listings. They just slowly started to erase air power from the internet, but, as you know, you can’t really erase something from the internet. It kind of has the opposite effect. So when that started happening, everyone started finding that and writing articles about any last traces of anywhere.
You could find air power all the way up until a couple days ago, when they just started shipping airpods 2 and those wireless charging cases. Air power was still mentioned on the box and, if you buy even to this day, airpods wireless charging case there’s a diagram of air power on the back of it. So every time someone found something like this or some updated code in ios, that mentioned air power. There would be some little glimmer of hope that maybe we’re actually going to see this product, but also hopes, were kind of dashed every time, then, in september of 2018, so a whole year after the announcement, uh people still wondering where it was john gruber.
Who is awesome and a noted apple, insider and a very reliable source? All the time wrote on his site what i’ve heard third hand but for multiple little birdies is that air power really is well and truly something about the multi-coil design getting too hot way too hot. So there are engineers who looked at airpower’s original design, who said it could never work thermally, and now those engineers have a 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 work without getting hot and they were clearly wrong. So that was one of many reports that seemed to point to engineering problems with air power.
So what is this multi-coil design? Why is this such a problem? So apparently, the big feature of air power was not just that it’s a wireless charging mat for three things, but that you could place any one of these three things down anywhere on the mat and it would detect what it was and just start charging now. If you’re like me and you’ve used a typical wireless charger before that process, with one coil in the mat and one coil in the phone can kind of be this like awkward process of lining it up and getting it just right for it to start charging. And if it’s off or if you bump it and you wake up the next morning and you bumped it off the coil, it wouldn’t have charged and some larger mats have had up to three coils. For you know three different hotspots for charging three different things at once, but generally apple just wanted to basically reinvent this way of wireless charging. They wanted to add their own magic touch to it. So there are comments now from people in this industry saying that air power was rumored to have anywhere from 20 to 30 plus coils, in that one mat that allowed for total xy freedom. So you could put it anywhere on the mat and it would pick the nearest coil and be close enough to charge but 20 to 30 coils in in one mat, so clearly thermal issues through that whole process and with that whole idea had it not working. It’S just too small of a space man, just apple and thermals, just don’t seem to get along, especially lately, so basically apple then had two options at that point, and this was last year, but at this point they could either change air power like you can’t have 20 to 30 coils on this small space, so you can change it or you can just cancel it and now, in march 2019.
Finally, apple’s admitted this isn’t going to work they’re not going to rebrand it they’re not going to restructure this project. They canceled it and i guess that’s pretty apple like that. They would rather cancel the whole project than make a different wireless charging map, speaking of which there are plenty of other qi. Wireless charging pads all over the internet. Nomads sent me this one, but i’ve had it for a while and used it at home. It’S their wireless charging hub. You can charge all three things at once. The apple watch kind of goes up top, but you know same thing: it works.
It’S not like a white orb or anything, but apparently they went immediately out of stock of these as soon as that sort of news hit that air power wasn’t happening, so it’s backordered on their site, but i’ll leave an amazon link below for stuff. Like this, i don’t think that many people were actually going to buy air power. It’S not like a game changer for them, it’s not like.
They cancel the iphone 11 or something or cancel the mac pro wow. Please don’t cancel the mac pro by the way. Oh, my god they could cancel the mac.
Pro apple is cancelling unannounced products. The the mac pro is unannounced. They could cancel the macbook they’re. Not gon na cancel the mac pro. It’S too important. Nobody buys the mac pro, though please don’t.
Oh, my god. Anyway. Bottom line, it wasn’t a huge deal because of how small of a product it was.
I think it would have been – maybe 180 bucks, maybe around 200 bucks, but we could be either mad at apple for not shipping a product that they promised to ship. That’S pretty weird, not a good look at all, but also we can be glad that they didn’t ship, something that would have been dangerous for thermal reasons, like maybe a samsung maybe has in the past. Maybe let me know which camp you’re in if you’re kind of bummed, that air power is not happening or if you’re just having a laugh at apple for not shipping, something they promised they would um. But there you go now. You know way too much about a product that doesn’t exist in the timeline and the history and everything that went into it, but that’s been it hope you enjoyed thanks for watching catch.
You guys in the next one peace over here nervous about this mac pro the pre-announced mac pro. Imagine they cancel it for thermal reasons. Oh my god. .