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.

Comments

This highlights a critical issue within Apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This highlights a critical issue within Apple.

[Viol8]

There is that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the smart engineers (both hardware and software) are slowly leaving apple to move on to more interesting things. There have been more fuckups than you'd expect from them in the last few years especially on the software side, and the level of innovation has been pretty much zero since jobs died.

Re:This highlights a critical issue within Apple.

[Luthair]

I dunno but Apple has always had this issue, one only need to look at the ways their cables fray or their poor antennas in phones for years to realize at Apple design is the priority over function.

Known Problem

[necro81]

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.