There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.
https://twitter.com/rouven81/status/1110980080170340352 https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/12/apple-hey-siri-support-...
There has been something very very wrong with products not getting out the door at Apple over the last few years. How does it take years to update a MacPro, a MacMini, an iPhone SE, Airpower never made it out the door, Airpods delayed by half a year, the iPhone - it’s biggest seller is on a 3year refreshment cycle now instead of 2 years, other peripherals like Airport Wifi cancelled and please let’s not even get started about software which was either cancelled (Aperture) or is being outpaced due to slow release cycles. Apple needs to get a ship / get out the door mentality again!
I remember reading a couple of articles about Bell Labs and how they had a huge cafeteria everyone was encouraged to eat in, thereby promoting cross-communication and "cross-pollination" of ideas and insight. I kinda wonder what the Big Tech companies would be producing now and at what rate if they did that instead of letting or encouraging everyone to sit at their desks all day long (mind you, Google seems to be pretty good about that part.)
Well, there is no way of getting 30W wirelessly (to the device side) without a lot of heat.
I guess someone thought they could solve this with smarter power management (and per the John Gruber article this was an issue last year, or even before) but it frankly it does not seem possible (unless Apple discovered room temperature superconductors).
It seems the design teams might have some people (higher ups) thinking too much about design and too little about if things are really possible given the constraints of a consumer product (typical MBA BS motivational pushes asides).
But it seems they managed to save face before another poor product would hit the shelves.
This isn't the first time that sticking to a design led to a technical hardware/physics problem. This happened originally when Steven was designing the iPhone 4 with his team and took out most of the antenna lines, leaving only a small antenna line at the top and not the noticeable ugly antenna lines you see on every single iPhone today. Steven's antenna design was incredibly simple and aesthetically pleasing - just one of several incredible advances of the iPhone 4 - but Steven's antenna design led to some radio frequency problems I definitely don't understand which caused the entire "you're holding it wrong" scandal.
That is just another example from 2011 or so of designers running the company but running into a technical issue with the laws of physics - there it was just radio frequencies instead of whatever it is here with this AirPower and the the heat or frequencies or something created from the as many as possibly 15 or 32 coils inside of it.
There are so so so many examples of where this design-first approach has definitely worked. One example is how the external aluminum case of the 2-pound MacBook from 2015 was designed first, and then once lithium ion batteries were created which had to be custom and have a custom internal chemistry so that they could be stacked on top of each other in a terraced structure. A second example is in Face ID which is very fast and simple conceptually but technically requires a custom chip running a custom neural network and for PrimeSense to miniaturize their Kinect hardware that they created for the Xbox into a the super small menu bar of the iPhone X. The chip team and the PrimeSense team started with a simple concept/design of a user looking at their iPhone, and then filled in all of the extremely technical and multi-disciplinary practicalities.
When you start doing something that nobody has done before, you absolutely do not know that it can work. You will fail in every way – Jonathan mentioned that when they were creating Face ID, all that they had for such a long time were failed engineering designs that simply put did not work.
Nobody knew that you could miniaturize the Kinect hardware, or that this chip could actually run their custom neural network quickly and with low power consumption to get Face ID. But you can. For MacBook batteries, if you mess the chemistry of these batteries up, the batteries will absolutely explode just like Samsung's did the following year. Nobody knew that you could stack the batteries of a MacBook on top of each other either. But you can. Nobody knew that you could remove most of the ugly antenna lines on an iPhone and just place just one antenna line at the top. Oh wait, but you can't. Nobody knew that you could charge 3 devices at the same time within whatever FCC regulations and still maintain low heat. Oh wait, but you can't (I guess, if that's the problem).
The point is that whenever you're doing something that nobody else in the world has done, you can't know it's going to work and you will fail. You will succeed but you will also fail, if you are truly doing creative work. Here, Apple failed. I guess because what they finished in the lab was possible according to the laws of physics but not safe (coils might overheat and catch fire or melt, might explode, might stop a person's pacemaker, and so on).
They could have sold a Wireless Charger just like others with their mark up. Instead we got nothing.
Also admitting MacBook Pro Keyboard Failure. I believe there is something happening to Hardware Engineering in general.
Samsung just released Wireless PowerShare as a feature in the S10 that allows you to share a charge and reports note this will be coming to the iPhone.
Incidentally and FML ... I was filmed pitching this idea to Intel and Mark Burnett (reality tv mega-producer) for the reality tv show, America's Greatest Makers. They reached out to me as they really needed fledging inventors. Overall we pitched sharing battery power between two phone cases https://ryanspahn.com/GetLeech .
I haven't looked but if Intel has patents that are from Sept 2015 and on then really FML. Otherwise what I thought was potentially a completely unique idea wasn't.
>> Specifically, I’ve heard that they ran too hot because the 3D charging coils in close proximity to one another required very, very cautious power management.
Worth the huge premium it would've sold for? Probably not for a good deal of people, but it would've sold.
(Probably.)
AirPower is a feature that helps sell those AirPods amongst early adopters who would buy AirPods within the first couple of weeks.
If you want to kill AirPower, waiting a bit to grab those sales makes sense. You don’t have much to lose and revenue to gain.
I'm imagining some engineering teem at Apple telling their bosses "yeah, it's almost ready" and the bosses believing them without really caring, because it's just a silly accessory and no big deal, right? And then since the AirPods 2 announcemen, the internet has been rabid with anticipation for AirPower. announcing it is cancelled is a better PR move than letting that internet fanboy frenzy turn into frustration with delays.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see AirPower turn up again in a years time.
Apple is the tech marketing messiah, why would they announce AirPower at a major product demo and think that it somehow wouldn't be hyped? This is a really strange fumble for them.
It was also listed as a major feature for the new AirPods, that doesn't seem like something Apple would slap on a box knowing they probably weren't going to ship, especially if was a "silly accessory."
I can totally see an engineering team BSing leadership on the product readiness, but there had to be internal pressure on this. Apple knows this looks bad after investors weren't super impressed with the News+ demo.
However, good for Apple.
They need to be more willing to say this product isn't good enough, and stop listening to those who say they are too secretive.
They had a good thing going when they didn't comment on products under development (or even acknowledge that they were under development) until they were ready to ship them.
Versus say Google who'll just never mention it again or launch a broken version only to kill it off within two years.
And Mexico will pay for it
Don't trust a companies words at face value. This sounds like PR.
Wasnt profitable enough?
This product cancellation and Apple's general product quality decline is the inevitable result of this short-sighted, penny-wise, pound-foolish strategy to keep payroll down.
Just as a thought experiment ask yourself - of the apps you use daily on your iPhone, how many are made by Apple, other than Safari?
I use all of those regularly and they work well. I also use 3rd party apps for some of the same categories.
I use maps for routing, but google maps for search and points of interest
I spent sometime working on a hardware team at Amazon and we had an expression "hardware is like fruit" meaning the longer it sits unsold, the more stale and obsolete it gets (and it costs an unbelievable amount of money to keep it in storage). A few weeks/months ago, Apple must have decided that AirPower isn't going to happen, and that the AirPods that have been sitting in storage since September need to be sold so that they can actually sell their inventory before the launch of AirPods 3 (whenever that arrives)
The 2016 MBP which had a 500+ day update cycle was apparently supposed to have the terraced battery used in MacBooks. [1]
That got chucked last minute and led to a lot of battery complaints early on. I returned a loaded 13” due to limited battery life.
The company ended up working SW systems to squeeze more out of what it has and it seemed to work.
In that case they also seemed to be trying to meet a holiday release.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...
I can’t find it now. But Apple even had a press release that they were changing to a glass screen.
Is the point just for arbitrary positionability on a flat charging surface?
If so, I feel like there are simpler ways to solve that, just with clever solid-state connector design.
Imagine a BGA processor that could be arbitrarily aligned into a BGA socket (not only rotated, but placed anywhere onto a BGA array larger than the CPU), and would continue working. That's possible, no? It doesn't exist, but it's possible. You could have the motherboard look for known sense pins on the processor by putting its own BGA pins into a sense mode; and then, having found which pins the processor is aligned to, it could "hook up" the rest of the pins appropriately. Any pins the CPU isn't touching would remain powered down or in a low-voltage sense mode, where they're safe to touch.
Well, if you can imagine that, then just reduce the number of pads on the device side from hundreds to two, while keeping all the pads on the socket side. But lose the "socket" part.
Imagine a charger that's just a big flat matrix of tiny copper pads, where each copper pad is actually four quadrants: two for sense, one for power, one for ground. The power and ground are normally powered down.
If you have a device (a phone, say) with two large flat charging pads on the back, and you lay it onto the BGA matrix—then the phone's pads will activate (a number of!) the charger's sense pads; the charger will have an "image" of which pins to power, and discretize that image into two clusters (like discretizing touch-points on a digitizer); and then one cluster of activated sense-pins will have their sibling power pins activated; and the other cluster will have their sibling ground pins activated.
Other than the copper being exposed to the elements, I don't see why this isn't workable.
(And before you say "my phone is in a case"—your case would just need a pair of pass-through conductor pads.)
Solved for decades. Gold-plated stops corrosion and resists contamination of most any sort.
But once I got used to it, it was subtly very nice. No fiddling with cables at all. Nothing to wear out. Pick the phone up and go.
It feels a little like a technology of ten or twenty years from now that is not technically necessary but will be nice & convenient. Think of WiFi compared to Ethernet. Right now we can see the future & taste it just a little, but we haven't quite got there yet.
Lemme know when we construct additional pylons and can charge things remotely (without cancer).
I'm sure it charges more slowly than with no case, but it does what I need.
If you did it through transistors, somehow, then you'd end up with a lot of loss at each transistor. Too few and you don't make a good field. Too many and the losses would be really high. The cost would be crazy as well. For the transistor approach, I don't know, maybe a big silicon wafer? Maybe just a load of transistors and wires. Who knows.
EDIT: Several people are responding that other manufactures make wireless chargers, so what is the big deal? Sure, you are right other options exist. There are also a wide variety of USB-C laptop chargers available that could charge your Macbook. There would still be plenty of complaints if Apple stopped selling their USB-C power brick. Two of the primary reasons people buy Apple products are because of the ecosystem and their standard of quality. Now people are forced out of the Apple ecosystem and must buy a product from 3rd parties that don't have the same quality requirements. What happens when that $5 Qi charge from some noname brand fries your devices battery?
That is unless they were trying to make it look sudden, but I don't think we have good enough reason to be that cynical about it.
It does seem like this is the very latest date such an announcement could have been made, though.
Additionally your edit doesn’t hold because apple sells iPhones without an official wireless charger either. The AirPods can also be charged with a wire, not to mention any compatible qi charger.
If you’re going to call out apple for making the charging standard based on USB power delivery (an open standard), well then I think you’ve lost everyone. The whole point of Qi, and USB PD is that you can use any charger, even non Apple ones.
I'd have a hard time arguing that the AirPods are defective because the non-bundled mat on the box didn't ship.
AirPower was supposed to be that official wireless charger. So is your argument that my point doesn't matter because cancelling AirPower is actually worse than I initially mentioned? Either way, the new AirPods are a little different than iPhones. The primary difference between AirPods 1 and AirPods 2 was the wireless charging. The wireless charging was never the top-line feature of any new iPhones.
>If you’re going to call out apple for making the charging standard based on USB power delivery
That is not why I am calling Apple out. I am calling them out because they are refusing to offer a first party solution for a product's primary feature and "it is just an open standard" is not a valid excuse for that fact.
Yeah, but how many people are actually going to go through the hassle of returning them?
And then I said, meh, I'll buy some when I see the announcement for AirPower, given the problems they've obviously had bringing to market. How many others are less skeptical than me, I do not know. But for the time being, I'm content to plug my stuff in if I still have to use separate mats for phone and headphones.
Nomad has a new Base Station that can change multiple Qi devices plus an Apple Watch as well.
Basically at this point there are a lot of alternatives on the market, and some of them are actually nicer because they hold the Watch up in the right orientation for Nightstand mode and work with loop style bands.
Like, zero?
They were probably more concerned about negative headlines and media coverage leading up to the event when choosing to reveal this information a week after.
Slimey? Really? Slimey is opening a factory along side a river and then dumping the waste chemicals in the river while touting the number of jobs added to the local economy.
In Apple's case, they announced a product early, turns out they couldn't deliver on it. No harm, no foul... okay maybe reputational foul, but nothing of real consequence.
The lather the Apple tech pundit crowd has worked itself up over the Airpower nonsense (you can't call it anything more than that at this point) is bewildering. If Apple would have delivered I probably would have bought it, my stuff still charges the legacy way, I'll probably buy more Apple stuff in the future, the world moves on.
Then, on a whim when I ordered my Pixel 3, I put the stand in my cart. I didn't even realize it was wireless. I just like the nice look of a well-thought-out phone stand, and the feel of it in the dark when I read myself to sleep.
I then remembered that I replaced my old Pixel because the port had problems. Less wear on the ports is important.
Wireless is a huge deal for devices that require frequent charging.
Saying "hey, buy the new version of AirPods at a $50 premium because it's compatible with this new thing that's about to come out" and then fumbling on that product you just marketed to drive sales of AirPods isn't kosher.
Contrary to your point:
A. They announced the cancellation a week later, you still have time to return your AirPods 2.
B. If they had gone with substandard product, then you will still complain, why didn't Apple cancel this product a long time ago!? Why did they release this piece of shit? We will have #AirPowerGate storm on Twitter, armchair specialists would start analyzing and delivering nasty analysis about Apple, Louis Rossman would make a new angry video, etc... Jeez guys.
See, Apple is in a no-win situation here. No matter what they do, people complain obsessively without understanding and putting yourself in their shoes.
Qi has been out a long time. Is there any indication whatsoever that Qi spec devices are doing this?
Of all the examples you could give, I actually think just about nobody would care about the USB-C power brick. To be honest, its kind of stupid already to buy a first party charger. It';s throwing $50+ into the wind.
The bricks are reconfigurable to use different outputs and different inputs, and the cables roll up neatly with the help of a simple hook and loop cable tie.
I have other (single-device, of course) charging pads and they work great, so it isn't a big deal.
Me personally, I've built up a mental "queue" of things that need to line up before I invest in a 1) new phone (that supports wireless charging, 2) an Apple Watch, and 3) AirPods (the new ones). And all of those I planned on getting around the time of AirPower. Now that it's been nixed? I mean, I still dig the Watch but I'll probably keep my current phone and headphones for years, at least while they all still work just fine.
Pretty bummed for the people that got them expecting AirPower, though.
This isn't the first time that Apple have decided that ecosystem didn't matter - some of the USB-C dongles (the Ethernet adapter for one) that Apple sell are branded Belkin, they ceded the Thunderbolt display to LG (that LG really Just Worked [1]) and they've abandoned Airport.
1: https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/13/lg-ultrafine-5k-display-apple...
I did. I don't want to add another cable to my nightstand, I wanted to replace my Apple Watch puck with Airpower and gain the ability to charge my headphones there too, and then if I ever get a wireless charging iPhone be able to get rid of the lightning cable as well. I don't mind trading the lightning cable between my phone and Airpods, but I imagined I wouldn't have to for long with the AirPower releasing seeming so imminent.
I feel like a sucker today.
You can't just plonk a phone, watch and AirPods case anywhere on a charging pad and expect them to start charging right?
The coil in each device needs to be fairly well aligned with the coil in the Qi charging pad. The proper way to do this is to have three individual coils with visual location targets for each device to charge.
I wonder if Apple was trying to make it a bit too magical (judging by the pre-render shots) allowing the user to throw a device onto the pad anywhere and expect them to charge.
Do the laws of physics apply here?
Or "Fig 5" on this page: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/19/airpods-wireless-...
P.S. Glad to finally find a technical comment, after scrolling through 200 marketing/business comments. :)
That was exactly the sales pitch.
They technically can and that is what Apple was trying to do but the overlap creates a lot of weird RF noise and makes stable induction difficult.
> Do the laws of physics apply here?
Yes, it's just a much harder physics problem.
So question: could an inverse signal be applied to adjacent coils to cancel out the interference (from induction)?
We get a credit card, news and streaming service that no one wants or understands.
I really don’t get Apple's priorities recently. Which is a shame, since few companies step to the chalange of serving the expensive high quality tech stuff market.
And what happened to the company that wouldn’t pre announce stuff, under promise and over deliver? I just hope they don’t also cancel whatever it is they are doing with the Mac Pro.
Can't tell you what this phrase does to me. It's so prevalent in tech and gaming discussions and it'd be tough for me to think of a more holier-than-thou thing to say. There are people in the world who are different then you!
That being said, I didn't really understand the streaming service either, and I do agree that their priorities have seemed all over the place lately. I only learned of the upcoming AirPower product about 6 months ago, and having kept my ear lightly to the ground, I've heard all kinds of mixed things about it. I'm honestly not surprised it didn't work out - once I heard the main issue was heat, I knew there were going to be serious issues.
Even if it made it to shelves, anything that inherently generates heat, but one that also accepts variable devices, is just asking for trouble. I'm also not an electrical engineer, so maybe it's misguided.
Be careful, just because you don't want this doesn't mean no one wants it. The HN crowd isn't Apple's target demographic with this stuff.
Apple's move towards services makes perfect sense. Apple now has a grip from the silicon to the end service. The entire stack. That's with the new move towards service starting in 2016 with Apple Music. That's a way to grow for a giant behemoth that Apple is.
I don't understand HN sometimes. We live in a tiny bubble and complain without understanding business, market and investor perspectives.
Not that Apple's streaming service will compete with YouTube TV, but I wish it would. Also, YouTube TV doesn't work all that great on Apple TV and I'd hope Apple could get that right too.
They also released a major iPad mini update, spec-bumped machines and 2nd gen AirPods.
At WWDC, they'll introduce a bunch of software updates for September release. I'm guessing there will be a laptop update, and the Mac Pros as well. Not to mention there will certainly be new iPhones in the fall.
Just because they're _also_ trying to build up a more substantial services business doesn't mean that they're not working to push the other areas forward.
Better that they didn't ship AirPower than to ship something crappy.
Also Apple never added any value to the WiFi routing space. It's almost like complaining that Apple doesn't make printers or digital cameras again.
And I’d buy a new Apple router on launch day if they re-entered the market. Frankly speaking, I do not trust any extant vendors to not somehow sell my browsing history to advertisers.
Not pre announce stuff they can’t deliver.
>Also Apple never added any value to the WiFi routing space
Not true. The setup experience is on par with what you’d expect from them. No 192.168… crap. So was signal coverage.
This comment always comes up in one form or another on tech forums and then Apple proceeds to make more money than it ever has.
Even small innovations can end up being a big deal. And the ability to identity the source of transactions based on geolocation is pretty cool.
We already have Netflix, HBO, etc. There's no one making pretty Unix that runs Adobe and Office natively. And keyboards aside, the hardware is usually unmatched when they want to.
Besides, and I may have to bite my tongue but, I really doubt Apple can create the breadth and quality of shows that the competition offers, Spielberg and JJ notwithstanding.
Since most power users/HN users still see Apple as a company that makes good laptops, we don't get what's going on.
The truth is that Apple is not nor want to be a computer company anymore, and even if it does sell computers it doesn't make good ones anymore.
I bought a Surface Book, and it's about 100 times better than the last laptop I bought from Apple (Late-2016 MacBook Pro): it has an AWESOME keyboard (no repeating characters or keys getting stuck unless my old MBP), touchscreen, you can detach the screen to change its form factor, or have a huge tablet to draw on with the pen. As a plus, the resolution is 3:2--which is awesome for programmers as you get 25% more vertical space.
What can I say? Apple will not get another dime for me, and it's only a matter of time until most power users/developers will do the same.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying another fuckup from Apple which people will brush off.
So even if Microsoft has made better hardware recently, there are still a lot of people like me that buy Mac for MacOS. And I don't see most power users abandoning that for a touch screen.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/ho...
I bought one about 6 months ago that I've been very happy with. As described, a no-name Chinese brand on Amazon.
There are a ton of dual Qi + Watch chargers (or at least with a bracket for the watch charger), but not sure how Airpods will fit into the mix. I'm sure a ton will be coming soon.
Just got my wife an Apple Watch and I was telling her about how cool the AirPower product would be... yesterday. Gotta break the news to her when she gets home.
They've recently caught flack for the problems with their keyboard, which is a hard thing to get right. This time, they chose not to deliver a marked-up, fiddly, overheating mess to their users, and we ought to credit them for it.
It takes a lot of guts to admit you can't do something; a little more corporate humility might just be a good thing.
Not sure what you mean here. They got the old keyboard right, and made it worse!
If you wirelessly charge then you have to lay your phone flat on the charging surface, whereas if you use a cable you can hold it and use it normally near the outlet.
For Apple to say now it can't be done in a timely manner means those people either got a serious black eye, or they're out of the company and the remaining people don't think it's doable.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/apple-can...
Works well and is reasonably priced (I've got Nordmärke).
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/ho...
"Doesn't meet our standards" sounds like "we have something vastly superior to Qi charging but it isn't quite ready yet" which will get eaten up by Apple stans.
"Over time, these harmonics add up?" Huh?
It doesn't need to fast charge with risk of heat, it's already very useful if it charges at a regular speed whenever you put the device on it, e.g. on your desk...
plus in the end, the predictions of price were all elevated and in a world of ten and twenty dollar chargers the idea of a product near a hundred or over just doesn't make sense.
edit: will be interesting for those who bought the wireless charging version of the airpods or the case seprately.
Hope this does not happen to Mac Pro.
Thinking about the subscription stuff recently it seems they do have some strategy shifting recently.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/398423/apple-forces-you-to-buy-its...
This is going to be Apple’s HL3
Do people even care about device orientation or communication of charge levels? 90% of the purchase decision is based on just having an Apple branded power mat.
Apple claiming high quality standards for their hardware doesn't feel right; When I can't trust buying a laptop from them, in fear that it was won't "just work" for the next six months.
Also heat issues with a power supply means losses. Thermodynamics might be keeping them from hitting numbers they wanted to reach. It's quite easy for an executive with some clout and bad listening skills to insist on a feature set that violates the laws of physics. I've worked on a few of those projects.
I'm not sure how much time Cook can keep his position. He's great at supply chain and operation but product quality and innovation has been degraded for many years now.
I had wireless charging in my Nexus 5 almost 6 years ago. Even back then, I bought a cheap wireless charger off of amazon for like $20, and thought it was a relatively interesting novelty. 6 years is an absolute eternity in tech, but for some reason this is being touted as some new innovative tech.
I honestly thought when apple was announcing "wireless charging" that they meant something like your entire house would be a charger while you inside of it.
Basically: no wifi, less space than a nomad. Lame. Seriously though, wireless charging even being mentioned in the marketing as though it matters seems on par with a laptop advertising that it also has WiFi. No kidding it should have wireless charging; it's 2019!
I had to LOL at that. Not in a cruel way, but the statement makes it sound like they're working with insane complicated stuff at the frontiers of particles and quarks and whatnot, whereas the "laws of physics" they're talking about really just revolve around the fact that a piece of copper is always going to be something like 20 orders of magnitude more electrically-conductive than air. It would be cool if they could get something like this to work without frying all our brains, but right now I guess it's basically still science fiction.
Edit: No, huh? 3 people disagree and think inductance can transmit power just as efficiently as a wire? OK granted maybe my mentioning the conductivity of air wasn't that relevant (although FYI it is indeed a difference of about 20 orders of magnitude - source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...), but don't ignore the obvious: all it says is that copper is very good at conducting. And that's actual electrons mind you, not electrons moved around and converted to something else and back again, which is part of where the inefficiency (a.k.a. "heat") comes from. Another source of inefficiency is the fact that the field isn't contained very well... you are somewhat "broadcasting" that energy, unlike a wire which leads exactly to where you want it to go. Yes, you can transfer power that way, but because of the inefficiencies, you have to run it at a level that generates an amount of heat that they are saying is excessive.
