Slashdot Mirror
Apple's AirPower Wireless Charger Is Facing Overheating Issues, Says Reports (cnbc.com)
Two separate reports are saying Apple's yet-to-be-released AirPower charger is facing overheating issues. The product, designed to simultaneously charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, was announced more than a year ago at Apple's 2017 iPhone event. Apple has yet to provide any additional information on AirPower, even during its iPhone event last week. The company even appears to have wiped all mention of it from its website. CNBC reports: Tech writer Sonny Dickson, who has a track record of accurately reporting on Apple, said over the weekend that Apple has struggled with heat management, which affects accuracy and charging speed. Dickson thinks it's unlikely Apple will make its end-of-year release deadline. Daring Fireball's John Gruber said something similar. Gruber said the charging pad, which uses a multi-coil design, is "getting too hot -- way too hot."
"There are engineers who looked at AirPower's design and said it could never work, thermally. ... 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," Gruber said. Apple gave a broad timeline for AirPower's launch, saying it would go on sale in 2018. So it is still possible it can work out any issues before the end of the year.
"There are engineers who looked at AirPower's design and said it could never work, thermally. ... 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," Gruber said. Apple gave a broad timeline for AirPower's launch, saying it would go on sale in 2018. So it is still possible it can work out any issues before the end of the year.
They have become so utterly fucking obsessed with building unservicable "thin" devices, that they literally cannot make a simple charging mat work properly- something numerous companies have already done.
Furthermore, their entire engineering department has to know exactly why this thing is failing- I'm willing to bet a few people said "uh, this isn't going to work" while they were building it, but for some reason they were forced to continue regardless. That means upper management is absolutely dead set on having the device fit inside some arbitrary physical volume, but the laws of physics aren't playing game so the device simply will not work.
Rather than making the device a bit bigger or even including a small cooling fan- they'd rather scrap it all together, because it doesn't fit into their current design philosophy of form over function.
This is not news, its situation normal.
Samsung is the only company to ever have misconceived a product so badly that they had to recall it twice and it was banned from airlines.
Apple-disciples are used to pay a lot. Just add a chiller to cool it and make the thing $1000 or so.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hi, I'm trying to install the new Social JustOS on my My Little Pony Book. I keep getting a "too much privilege" error.
Any ideas?
Plug it in, it gets hot, then poof! comes the cloud of smoke. It's Apple vaporware.
I won't be so bold as to crow "Oh, they should have seen this coming." Still, this should not be a surprise, as anyone who has used wireless charging has experienced.
I worked on a product some years ago that was using a competitor to the Qi standard. Our product had a receiver coil that captured the alternating magnetic field, rectified it, and delivered that bulk power to the Li-Ion charge circuit. Worked great, except when you realize that the entire device is immersed in this alternating magnetic field. Every conductor, and in particular every ferromagnetic component (screws, the metal housing of the Li-Ion cell, a metallic portion of the housing, everything) was heating up due to eddy currents. As a stopgap we ended up sticking a ferrite shield over the mat, to isolate only that area where we wanted the charge power to emit. That worked to limit the heating, mostly. But that made it not all that different from most wireless charging cradles before and since, where you have to align the product to the charger. Needing that alignment drastically reduced the utility of the wireless charging, which was one reason why we scrapped it.
Oh, and while we were delivering about 2 W of charge power to the Li-Ion battery, the mat was drawing about 18 W from the wall. Even when the device wasn't present and not charging, the mat drew 10 W. This experience has made me highly skeptical of the prospect of widespread wireless charging anytime soon.
when apple actually tries to make things themselves. FAILURE.
apple should stick with what has always worked for them, wait until someone else does the difficult engineering part and real innovation. Then apple can come along and buy the company or steal their design and claim they invented it.
This had worked for apple so far; why change now.
So what is this? apple saying "hold my beer"?
Apple is clearly a company who designs products and then tries to engineer them into reality. Most companies try and balance design with engineering but Apple tilt towards design and being thin has hurt their products of late. The MacBook comes to mind as being too thin to properly cool a more robust CPU/GPU so its rather handicapped in performance. Yeah its thin, but who cares if you need something that actually does computing work other then run a few browser tabs?
Yes a prime example of a corporation putting doing the right thing over their profit margins. Something you could never accuse apple of doing.
Samsung is the only company to ever have misconceived a product so badly that they had to recall it twice and it was banned from airlines.
Who said anything about samsung? If your best defence for a product is worse things have existed that's not a great position.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Statements like this should be disregarded. Do it or walk away, don't hamster your way out of it.
There are many times an employer has asked me to do something difficult, that I didn't want to do for other reasons (usually involving training my overseas buddies) and I happily said it couldn't be done, when I knew full well it could. My reasons for saying things might not relate to the efficacy of the thing, I just knew my bosses were too stupid to know the difference.
Things have either been done, or they have yet to be done. Unless its over unity energy/perpetual motion, or tax evasion, no one should rule them out.
If they do that they'll be far more successful as people will be more free to express their ideas for solving these problems.
I wonder if Apple should consider spinning off divisions (similar to FileMaker), so the company can solely focus on gadgets. That way, Macs get a dedicated company with engineering teams keeping those products refreshed and up to date, as opposed to letting models languish for many years.
What would be nice is a spin-off company dedicated for everyday computing. In the past, one could have everything they worked on done by Apple, be it the router, printer, external hard drives, and so on. Apple also had applications, so for a lot of things, a user just needed one number to call should something break, no trying to figure out if it is the hardware/app vendor/OS vendor's fault. This company would focus on Macs, headless NAS devices, routers, printers, and stuff that may not be glitzy, but used at home or the office. It also would be more enterprise friendly, offering known product release cycles (given the NDA, of course). By separating it from Apple, it can be a predictable company. It may not have the crazy profits that iDevices have, but it would be something that will always bring in revenue, especially if Apple created (or rebranded) some cloud solutions for offsite backups, virtualization, mail, and directory services.
Most multifunction copier/printers don't use "lamps" to heat things anymore. They use inductive coils. One coil is mounted inside the machine. The other, is mounted inside the heat roller. When the two are brought together, the eddy currents generate heat. 120 volts, 15 or 20 amp, to get the heat roller up to around 250-400 degrees (F) so it will melt the power toner onto the page, and with the pressure between it and the silicone rubber roller melt it into the paper fiber. It generates a LOT of heat, on purpose. So, I could see where a coil or coils, to charge a phone, watch, ipad or whatever, given a 5-10 amp load could generate a lot of heat, to the point it would be a safety concern. I had an update hit my samsung G3 watch in July, that fixed an overheat/not charging issue as the watch when it would get to around 90% charge, would stop charging due to excess heat. That update fixed that. Perhaps if Apple dropped the current, increased the charging time, it would lower the heat generated. But, the "users" probably wouldn't like an increased charge time. Or, have it "fast" charge if ONE device was detected, and increase the charge time, if more than one device was detected. That shouldn't be hard to do. Increased impedance load should be able to be detected.
A while back, Apple bought out a wireless charging company, and for a while - they were registering patents on ways to wirelessly power all sorts of Apple products. (I recall one diagram showing a typical room with an iMac set up, where it looked like they were proposing making the iMac so it doubled as the wireless charging base for peripherals sitting near it. The keyboard, the mouse and your iPhone, for example, would all charge if they were in proximity of the iMac.)
So to go from experimenting with ideas for all of that to struggling to get a simple QI charging mat to function? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
I've seen problems with several other wireless charging mats on the market, where they overheat and shut down while trying to recharge iPhones. I suspect there may be some inherent design problems with the phones themselves when it comes to their ability to charge at higher rates? As long as a given charging mat only provides a lower charging power level, they seem to work just fine. (I have a Belkin I use to charge my iPhone X every night on my nightstand and it works flawlessly. A second charging mat built into a tray that fits in my car seems to work ok with it too.)
Apple was probably trying to release a charger that could charge the devices faster than competing products on the market already, and that's where they're hitting difficulties. Maybe they've experimented with charging in on/off bursts or something, thinking they could still make that work in some manner to charge their phones faster than competing devices charge -- but that isn't panning out for them? IMO, it's not a bad idea at all to refuse to go with active cooling (fans, etc.) just to make one work without overheating. Fans are prone to failure over time, including getting noisy if they don't stop spinning, outright. It's more of a lazy, band-aid way to deal with excessive heat than a "best solution". (Many people don't know that Apple put fans in the Airport Extreme wireless routers, and guess what tends to fail on them and cause overheating errors and issues? Older models that didn't have fans just keep on working and working. I've seen people still using the original flying saucer shaped Airport wi-fi routers, despite them being so outdated, technology wise, it's kind of ridiculous.)
It's also the basis for the induction stovetop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_cooking
My MS Lumia wireless charger does not have a fan
Ah, the hubris of people whose greatest demonstrated skill is taking ideas from other people and applying polish, then pretending they invented something, trying to succeed where even Tesla himself failed... trying to send meaningful amounts of current through the air! As IF! Hehehehe but all kidding aside, I cannot but smile at problems a company has throwing perfectly good designs in the trash in favor of untested nonsense.
And even more fail with a childish, playground level response.
Says the guy who had just responded "Hahahahaha, fail."