Apple Cancels AirPower

Matthew Panzarino, reporting for TechCrunch:

Apple has canceled the AirPower product completely, citing difficulty meeting its own standards.

“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,” said Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering in an emailed statement today.

Here’s how weird this is: the package for the new wireless AirPods case — just released last week — has an illustration of the AirPower mat on the back.

I have long been wondering, if Apple were ever to just give up on this thing, who’d take the blame in the announcement. Looks like it’s Riccio.

Long story short, this is why it’s always dangerous to pre-announce products that aren’t finished. Somebody looked at the technical hurdles AirPower still faced in September 2017 and convinced the executive team that they’d figure it all out, and it was safe to announce. Because they’re Apple, and they always figure these things out. And there were other people who looked at AirPower’s multi-coil design and said it was unlikely to ever work safely.

The wrong side won that argument.

★ Friday, 29 March 2019