AirPower

Apple announced AirPower in September 2017 and cancelled it in March 2019 without ever putting it on sale. The company said the charging mat wouldn't meet its high standards, and reports at the time said its overlapping coils ran too hot.

What it was

AirPower was a wireless charging mat Apple designed to charge an iPhone, an Apple Watch and AirPods at the same time, wherever you put them on it.

Apple gave a "sneak peek" of it on September 12, 2017, alongside the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Its press release called AirPower "an Apple-designed wireless charging accessory coming in 2018" with "a generous active charging area" for up to three devices.

The iPhone 8 and iPhone X were the first Apple phones to support wireless charging, CNBC noted. Apple said they worked "with the established Qi ecosystem," including mats from Belkin and mophie.

Other multi-device chargers put two or three coils side by side, so you have to move your phone around to find the spot over a coil, iFixit explained. Apple wanted overlapping coils, so a device would charge anywhere on the surface.

No price was announced, and no date more specific than 2018, MacRumors wrote on the day.

What happened

A year after the preview, Apple made no mention of AirPower at its iPhone event on September 12, 2018. That day Apple seemed to have removed every mention of it from its website except a picture on the AirPods page of what appeared to be the mat, 9to5Mac reported.

The year ended without it. "Apple has officially failed to deliver on its promise of releasing the AirPower mat in 2018," MacRumors wrote on January 2, 2019.

On March 20, 2019, Apple announced new AirPods with a choice of the standard charging case or a new Wireless Charging Case. Apple said the case worked "with Qi-compatible charging solutions." Its box had an illustration of the AirPower mat on the back, John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out.

iFixit reported that an iOS 12.2 beta released ten days before the cancellation included support for the mat.

Nine days after the AirPods announcement, on March 29, Apple cancelled AirPower. Dan Riccio, its senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, said in a statement to TechCrunch that Apple had "cancelled the project," and apologized "to those customers who were looking forward to this launch."

CNBC quoted Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives calling it "a major black eye for Apple," a hit to the brand rather than to its finances.

Why it failed

Apple said only that AirPower would not meet its high standards, and reporting at the time blamed heat from the mat's overlapping charging coils.

What Apple said

Riccio's statement is the only explanation from Apple I found. "After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards," he said, adding that Apple still believed "the future is wireless."

It didn't say which standard the mat missed. iFixit noted the same day that Apple "wasn't specific as to why."

Before that, Apple was "saying nothing officially" about the delay, TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino wrote. On the day of the September 2018 event, Gruber wrote that the people he'd spoken to at Apple had "nothing to say about it today."

What reporting showed

On September 15, 2018, Gruber wrote that he'd heard, "third-hand but from multiple little birdies," that the problem was "the multi-coil design getting too hot." Some engineers had looked at the design "and said it could never work, thermally," he added.

Two days later, MacRumors relayed a report by Sonny Dickson that cited multiple internal sources. It listed heat, buggy communication between the mat and the devices on it, and interference between the coils. Many people on the project thought it might be "doomed to failure" unless those problems were solved, the report said.

The report put the coils at between 21 and 24, packed so tightly that they interfered with each other, 9to5Mac wrote.

The real mistake, Gruber wrote that day, might be "the decision to announce it when they did, before those problems were solved."

When Apple cancelled it, Panzarino wrote that he'd heard the mats "ran too hot because the 3D charging coils in close proximity to one another required very, very cautious power management."

iFixit offered what it called "an informed guess." William Lumpkins, an engineer it consulted, said the harmonics from overlapping coils "become really powerful signals in the air." iFixit wrote that AirPower possibly "couldn't pass muster with US or EU regulations."

On the day of the cancellation, Gruber wrote in Daring Fireball that someone had convinced Apple's executives it was safe to announce, while others said the multi-coil design "was unlikely to ever work safely." He added, "The wrong side won that argument."

What later analysis found

The later evidence I found comes from a prototype, not from Apple. In December 2023, MacRumors reported on an early AirPower with 15 coils, obtained by a prototype collector known as Kosutami. Data read off the prototype gave a firmware install date of March 17, 2017, about six months before Apple announced the product.

Kosutami found that with a device lined up exactly over a coil, it charged steadily with no noticeable heat problems. With the device out of place, Kosutami told MacRumors, it got "extremely hot" and could leave scorch marks, and an AirPods Pro case began to melt on it.

MacRumors said needing exact placement "defeats much of the purpose" of the mat, and that adding more coils "only made overheating worse."

Apple addressed the placement problem "with a different technology: MagSafe," MacRumors wrote. The MagSafe announcement in October 2020 described "an array of magnets around the wireless charging coil, optimized for alignment and efficiency."

In March 2023, MacRumors said the only multi-device mat Apple sold, the MagSafe Duo Charger, "only works with two devices at once and has fixed charging positioning."

The stage it reached

AirPower never went on sale, so it never reached the introduction stage in the usual sense, when a product has just launched or is taking orders.

I've filed it there anyway, because the announcement did part of a launch's job. It set a year, and some buyers waited. In September 2018 Gruber wrote that a bunch of people had replied to him that they were putting off AirPods purchases while waiting for the AirPower-compatible case.

Apple apologized for AirPower, as Tim Cook had for the Apple Maps launch in 2012. Samsung's mobile chief said he pushed the first Galaxy Fold through before it was ready, and its launch slipped in April 2019, the month after AirPower died.

The lesson

I think AirPower's mistake was the announcement, not the cancellation.

Apple put a year on AirPower while, by the reports above, heat from its overlapping coils was still unsolved. The cancellation came more than 18 months later, and by then an AirPods box carried a picture of the mat.

Before you announce, ask what has to be true for the date to hold. If the answer is an engineering breakthrough, the date doesn't belong in public. A now, next, later roadmap puts dates only on committed work, under now. AirPower belonged under next, with no date, until the physics worked.

I'd copy the cancellation. Apple apologized and walked away instead of shipping a mat that missed its own standards.