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Apple Cancels Long-delayed AirPower Charging Mat (venturebeat.com)
One and a half years after announcing a wireless charging mat for iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods called AirPower, Apple has unexpectedly cancelled the accessory. From a report: It notably missed its expected shipping dates multiple times, including a potential release alongside the second-generation version of AirPods and charging case this week. "After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project," said Apple SVP of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio in a statement today. "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." Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, adds, "This is fairly unprecedented and unbelievable. The AirPods even have a picture of the AirPower on the box."
And here we have a stunning example of the vaporware lifecycle ...
1) Coming real soon now, the super awesomeness
2) Coming a little later than planned, the mostly super awesomeness
3) Coming still further down the road, the almost kinda sorta super awesomeness
4) Coming very far in the future, something which may or may not resemble what we promised as the super awesomeness but with fewer features
5) Well, as it turns out, we have no idea how to build that super awesomeness after all and we're cancelling it
If the product doesn't exist in a demo-able form, it's vaporware, and it may never exists at all.
This sounds like Apple is starting to become a little more prone to vaporware.
Now I think Apple Jump the gun, by showing off a demo a couple years ago, and really is messing up setting expectations. But if they couldn't getting it working well then they should just cancel it. I expect the issue is how sensitive wireless charging it. I actually like wireless charging, as most of the time a failure in my phone is often from strain from the charging connector, wireless charging reduces the stress on the phone.
However while I got it charging if I move the phone slightly it stops charging, or if I put it on the charger too off center it will not charge. It seems to me the physics of a mat wireless charger would be difficult to get it to work as it was advertised, Just a large mat and drop your device(s) on it and they will start charging. Sure I can see something that looks like a mat, but has 2 or 3 chargers in it. But then it is just multiple wireless chargers in one case, and you need to put your phone on the right spot.
Now I know Slashdot love to hate Apple, and will point out every time they didn't do something 100% right. But for the most part they don't produce crap products, and they will often work as advertised. Just the problem is we sometimes think they will do something that isn't advertised.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
âoeAfter much effort, weâ(TM)ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project,â Those are Apple's own words.
They couldn't find find a way to make a stationary device with no battery or mechanical parts last less than two years.
Maybe Apple was better off being secretive and then surprising us? Wait until they get it right, rather than promising and then under delivering.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
ÃoeAfter much effort, weÃ(TM)ve concluded Slashdot will support Unicode before we ship AirPowerÃ
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project," said soon-to-be-ex- Apple SVP of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio in a statement today.
This was different. This could charge multiple devices placed anywhere on the mat. You had a single charge cord and didn't have to worry about where they were placed.
Do other people like and use alternative flat charging surfaces?
Admittedly, my iPhone 6S doesn't support wireless charging (although my Apple Watch does). But, even if I had a newer phone, I'd probably still be plugging it in for several reasons.
- I find wallet cases to be very handy, and the styles I prefer would not work with wireless charging (or, if if I found one that did, it'd probably also fry the various cards in the wallet)
- Wired charging is faster and more efficient
- My phone is my alarm clock... so, like you, I prefer using a stand where the screen is easily seen and reached.
The last item could certainly be met with a wireless charger, of course.
#DeleteChrome
And a Palm Pilot is just a notebook with electronics and a cell phone is a landline with the wire cut.
Apple has been innovative in the sense that they know what people want out of the product and develop it out. There were cell phones and smart phones when the iPhone came out (most notably Windows Mobile) but they sucked and nobody wanted to buy one, they were indeed a Palm Pilot and a Cell Phone in one package but the software treated it as two different modules, no integration, you had to sync contacts manually on and off the SIM card, if you were lucky you got IR to work to transfer data from your computer, but otherwise you had a serial connection (yes a 9-pin D-Sub) to use it.
Computers existed before the Apple II but they were for geeks and curiosity. Nobody knew how to put them in the classroom, living room and make it usable.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
They've always just took existing things, put polish on it, and convinced people they needed it
In a way, that's what innovation is: taking either new ideas, or improvements on existing things, and putting them out there. Innovation is not invention, but application.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's a direct quote from an Apple senior vice president, Dan Riccio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just sayin'. It's not like Apple to miss an opportunity like this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hm. I have a Note 9 and an induction charger. It's a flat, coaster-looking disc. I drop the phone on the charger at night and pick it up in the morning fully charged. Neither the phone nor the charging device get hot to the touch. My only complaint, in fact, is the bright blue LED on the charger that lights up the room to my dark-adjusted eyes. I'm thinking of putting a piece of electrician's tape over it. But other than that, the setup works absolutely as advertised.
Point is, this is a known technology. Competitors are doing it well. I have to wonder what happened to Apple. Did they discover something we don't know about? Like, these things randomly explode? Or the generated field kills bees or something? Attracts aliens? Causes mutation in pets?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hm. That's actually... an interesting idea. I'm sorry now they couldn't get it to work.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It takes courage to cancel a known defective product that fanbois would buy without even think about it. I mean, Apple never balked selling junk before... maybe finally Apple is giving a flying fuck about their consumers?
Or maybe, this one fails so spectacularly that it would be on the news. With videos taken via iphone.
Oooh, now I wish they'd released it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The party's over. Turn out the lights. The days of Apple innovation are long gone. It was buried with Steve Jobs.
Heh. Reminds me of the Onion piece:
Apple Reveals Panicked Man with No Ideas.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
More usable than Microsoft, I agree. That was a very low hurdle. Windows Phone 5 and 6 were debacles, speaking as a (forced by my company) user. If your phone pops up "the audio driver has caused an error and will now close" and the phone WON'T RING until it's rebooted, then you've clearly picked the wrong phone OS.
But more usable than Blackberry? As a former Crackberry addict who was forced onto an iphone at another company, I have to humbly disagree. Apple had better graphics, but you could actually do work on your Crackberry. Admittedly, this was in part due to being able to get on the company intranet via BES, and there are other solutions for that now. But even then, nothing beat the BB keyboard for banging out emails.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The crashed audio drivers happens rarely on my iPhone Se, only without the notification. Roughly once every 4 months. It would be much less annoying with a pop up at that frequency so it doesn't take me a while to realize all audio output is disabled on my phone until I reboot it.
What, seriously? Holy carp! And here, I thought only Microsoft was stupid enough to let that slip through QA. I mean, what's a phone that won't ring? A paperweight. I'm on-call, and a phone that refuses to ring is a seriously career-limiting accessory.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Never innovative??
And yet somehow IBM copied the Apple ]['s slot architecture for expansion peripherals.
Nope, Apple was never innovative! /s
Haha, Industry sources reported that while many loyal Apple customers were largely unenthusiastic about the panicked man, they remained quite happy with the previous model, discontinued in 2011. Too funny/harsh. I missed that article entirely when it was released. Way too spot on.
I suspect a merger with Google is afoot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have three wireless chargers for my phone. All three put the phone in an upright position. One on my nightstand, one on my desk at home and one on my desk at work.
Slower charging via wireless is not an issue since I am in no hurry when it is on the nightstand anyway, and Iâ(TM)m at my desk for long enough periods of time that it just is not an issue. Everywhere else? Sure, Iâ(TM)ll charge with a cord.
I like the wireless because I can just grab the phone and go without futzing with a wire, and I can just drop it on the stand without trying to line up with a connector. I dunno, overall it just seems to work great.
They probably tampered with the election too.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
A mere four years after GRiDPad, so innovative
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yep, I know it could do multiple devices - the thing is though, I'm not sure when I'd have need of multiple device charging! The only time I can think of, is charging the phone and AirPods at the same time, which would be mildly handy... I can see maybe putting it in the kitchen to put a few phones down while you made dinner or something I guess.
To me a flat mat always feels like a secondary charging device at best in any scenario I can think of where I am charging today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Apple II used a proprietary bus.
[[Citation]] That Apple copied the S-100 bus.
I don't see Apple being concerned about hams... Oooh oooh... Maybe the RF it sprays prevented one or more of the Apple devices from working properly. For instance, perhaps the phone wouldn't receive calls while it was on the mat.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Having a job where you are on call is career limiting.
This was my thought too. I've been using wireless charging for at least 2 years now, and it works flawlessly on the Galaxies I have. It's just so convenient, and if I need a faster charge, I can just plug the phone in.
From what I read they were trying to drop 3 coils in the mat, so that 3 things could charge at once. This, of course, caused interference, and the lead engineers said it wouldn't work. Management persisted, and years later guess what? That doesn't work.
What i don't understand is why they didn't make a couple of single-device charging stand/mat/posts in the interim, and put them on the market. That's what I find the most baffling.
They put all their eggs in a basket with "charge 3 devices", and now have nothing. It should have been pretty trivial for a couple of engineers to make apple-branded wireless chargers and get them on the market.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It was a LOT more than three coils
It's actually a large array of inductors, which needed to operate without any parasitic losses.
Tim Cook brought it back
Leadership has limits. Tim has found his finally.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
A mere four years after GRiDPad, so innovative
As far as I can tell, the only thing they had in common was a stylus. But the stylus as a computing peripheral dates back to the late 1950s. It wasn't new when GRiDPad did it in 1989, much less two years earlier, when Apple's engineers came up with the idea for a stylus-driven tablet.
The GRiDPad was just a hardware platform — no operating system. It was essentially a 386 laptop without the keyboard, and with a stylus bolted on. It initially ran MS-DOS or Windows. A fairer comparison might have been GRiDPad with the PenPoint OS, but that didn't come out until 1991, and was developed by an entirely different company. It just happened to run on GRiDPad because it was a PC. So if anyone was really innovative there, IMO, it was AT&T.
That said, PenPoint seems like a very different user paradigm to me, with the whole "notebook" concept versus more of an app-like approach. (Mind you, I haven't spent significant time with either platform, so I could be wrong.) So arguing that Apple's design wasn't innovative seems odd to me, given that Apple's design is still in use almost three decades later, and PenPoint's isn't.
The other thing you're missing is that Newton was the first system in which a single company built an integrated solution that combined tablet hardware with an operating system that was actually designed for touchscreen devices from the ground up. It was also probably Apple's first foray into CPU design; Apple's engineering team worked with Acorn to tweak the design to meet their needs for the Newton, and shortly thereafter, ARM Holdings was spun off from the now-defunct Acorn as a joint venture involving Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. All those iOS and Android devices you're using now probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for Apple's work on the Newton, or at least would be running on very different hardware, because Acorn would have died, and ARM along with it.
So yeah, Apple Computer and Grid Systems Corporation were both trying to drive computing in roughly the same direction at about the same time. The difference is that the GRiDPad took a small incremental step towards the abyss, whereas Apple took a giant leap off the cliff. A lot of modern tablet and cell phone computing features made their first appearance way back then. And I'd say that Apple's role in that was pretty darn innovative.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
But well within the bounds of "never". I'd also suggest that, despite the slashdot delusion, that the iPhone was rather innovative. And how long before all credit cards start sporting the features of the Apple Card? (I included that last one to make sure that each slashdotter has a reason to "explain" why I'm an idiot fanboi.)
Yes, the Newton was innovative. It also didn't work very well (a co-worker had one back in the day) and was a commercial failure. Apple does better when they can put a shiny patina and world class marketing on someone else's idea. Once others established what a pad *should* do, and what people really wanted, Apple came back with the ipad and did quite well.
On the Apple card, I don't know, how long? According to this, it's not a card, it's an app that lives on your iphone and does things similar to google pay or samsung pay. In point of fact, it appear to be a rebranding of Apple Pay with a few new features. Of course, being Apple, there will be a portion of the population who have never owned anything but an iphone who will immediately jump to the conclusion that Apple invented the concept. And that's fine. It makes Slashdot entertaining.
And, although I have access to the latter two money apps, (got rid of my iphone 6 over a year ago, currently carrying a Samsung note 9) I have no interest in using them. A physical credit card never runs out of battery, and it doesn't need cell service.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Actually what's great on gridpad is GEOS. It supports the hardware (with the penmouse driver, anyway) and you can install Graffiti for Zoomer on it. I've got a unit set up that way, still. Needs new batteries, though. And the backlight inverters are fragile AF, in the bargain. These days though the display is just painfully bad compared to a cheap tablet or cellphone, so I should probably just give it away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"