I saw a report on twitter with serial numbers showing build dates of September and November, along with old copyright dates on the boxes on the new AirPods. Combine that with the "Hey Siri" being shown in "Gather Round" video in September, I bet they were hoping to ship the AirPods before the holidays, but were holding out hope that Airpower would work.

https://twitter.com/rouven81/status/1110980080170340352 https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/12/apple-hey-siri-support-...

I am sorry to say but that’s what happens when you don’t have a proper product management org. Unbelievable in a large company like Apple but they do not have a Head of Product / CPO and are basically still a Sales and Marketing company with attached Engineering departments.

There has been something very very wrong with products not getting out the door at Apple over the last few years. How does it take years to update a MacPro, a MacMini, an iPhone SE, Airpower never made it out the door, Airpods delayed by half a year, the iPhone - it’s biggest seller is on a 3year refreshment cycle now instead of 2 years, other peripherals like Airport Wifi cancelled and please let’s not even get started about software which was either cancelled (Aperture) or is being outpaced due to slow release cycles. Apple needs to get a ship / get out the door mentality again!

Steve Jobs was their Head of Product :(.

I've heard product managers described as "mini-CEOs" before. I don't think it's a comprehensive description, but it speaks to ownership mentality I think.

Product Managers should never be mini-CEOs. That is a model naive, ego-driven junior PMs adopt.

Good PMs should be servant leaders, doing whatever it takes to ensure their team can have maximum impact and ownership. A big part of that is identifying new opportunities, both within the org and outside of it, and empowering engineers and designers to own what they are working on.

You just described a good CEO. Considering you limited it to engineers and designers, maybe a miniature CEO.

The concept of a servant leader is a contradiction, isn't it. 'empowering to own' is a pretty weird construction too.

Tech companies need people with very clear product visions that inspire their troops to build something excellent, even when those same troops are having their own opinions overridden by those of the visionary. Those people are usually CEOs and often but not always former engineers themselves. It's very hard to create a coherent, interestingly new product when you can't impose your will on a team because invariably to be new or innovative you must be controversial, and it's hard for non-CEOs to manage that internal controversy.

That is exactly right

The vast amount of vendor management makes the scal of PMing apple products rather unwieldy...

> How does it take years to update a MacPro, a MacMini, an iPhone SE

Creating market hunger - these are all lower volume products for Apple, with no real competition, so I guess they are on a slow updates.

Well they will never become high volume if they get updated every five years or more - that’s for sure.

This is exactly what happened. I was super surprised they didn’t realize AirPods 2 before Christmas, but I guess they figured people would buy gen 1 anyway. Then they release the new airpods in combination with their other launches of the iPads etc when they realized that AirPower wasn’t going to happen. Then they dump AirPower after the release so as to not taint sales of AirPods 2 on launch day.

My completely uneducated guess is a behind-the-scenes patent dispute or something along those lines...

IFixit has a good article on it. Basically they couldn't get it to pass wireless emissions standards the way they wanted to do it (put your phone anywhere on the pad to charge not, not directly on the circle, etc).

Link: https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/

Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes. There were a lot of leaks suggesting mass production was due to start. I would bet production did not start, and that early production runs had low yields due to the complexity of the product.

> Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes.

Actually the opposite. Most patent disputes are resolved behind the scenes, long before anyone sues each other.

To my definition that makes it not a dispute! It's a commercial discussion with an agreement at the end of it.

>> Most patent disputes are resolved behind the scenes, long before anyone sues each other

> To my definition that makes it not a dispute! It's a commercial discussion with an agreement at the end of it.

Patent trolls send thousands of companies demands to pay royalties on a technology they never directly used. Fighting the troll costs hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars, but they are only asking for $50k. Most companies begrudgingly pay. To me, that's still a dispute.

If it breaks down to the point a product gets cancelled, that would be a dispute. However yes, usually in such circumstances it tends to go public.

My theory: they couldn't make it past the FCC. Managing overlapping harmonic frequencies is incredibly challenging, and gets harder the more coils that you are integrating. From patent filings, it looks like Apple’s ambitious plan was to use considerably more coils than other charging pads on the market. https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/

Especially weird for Apple, who aren't known for vaporware. And even Google wouldn't come out and say "we can't make this work", they'd just stop talking about it until it was eventually solvable down the line, or let it evaporate altogether. It's very odd to see a tech giant just hit a technological wall.

I appreciate that Apple was honest with their communication. Too often have I seen managers/CEOs employ the strategy of avoiding the hard conversation and letting the topic fade away.

I appreciate it too, unfortunately Apple is not always so transparent. One example that comes to mind is their 2010 promise to make FaceTime an open standard. It was Steve Jobs that made that promise in 2010 (one year before his death), and apparently a patent dispute with VirnetX may be to blame, but to my knowledge they haven't made any public statements about it since the initial promise.

If legalities are to blame it seems like that would be all the more reason to come out and say something along the lines of: "sorry everyone, we want to keep our promise but stupid software patents have made that impossible." Instead they've (to my knowledge—please correct me if I'm wrong) chosen to remain silent and hoped that people would forget.

I think to your point, that was how Steve Jobs use to run the company. Under Tim Cook's leadership, things have changed. When Steve Jobs was still around, I attended WWDC under the student scholarship, but he never greeted any of the students or ran any events. On occasion, there would be the "job fair." These past few years, Tim Cook has taken the time to greet the students, chat with them, and take photos with them. There's a softer side to the company now, and it's starting with admitting to failure and making mistakes.

I don’t have the source to hand, but I’ve read (or heard on a podcast) that Job’s made that decision on stage. It surprised everybody, including the dev team behind facetime. So it’s less a case of Apple remaining silent, and more Steve being Steve.

I don't know who made the decision (or when), but he did have a slide prepared that said "OPEN" [1] in big letters next to a FaceTime screenshot, which I'd assume means the decision was made at least before taking the stage.

[1] https://youtu.be/AmXc1Mjr5J4?t=5816

Attorneys usually advice against discussing ongoing legal matters.

When there is a dispute, sure.

If it's just "we don't have all the rights, sorry", there is no legal matter to worry about.

> I appreciate that Apple was honest with their communication.

why do you assume it was honest? they sold products based upon the impending release of this product, even including it on the packaging of products according to another comment. that was like two years ago? if i remember correctly, it even featured in one of their keynotes.

the excuse "it doesn't meet our standards" sounds like a nice cover for the actual answer.

anyway, i also don't understand their comment that wireless is the "future" for power transfer. i don't see how a significant loss of efficiency where power is just thrown away is the future.

Honest after the announcement you mean? So, thats, not honest.

They knew about it then and announced airpods with support for it, on stage...

Maybe not as notable as the AirPower, but, in addition to the Nexus Q, Google also promised object removal in Photos (demoed by erasing a fence between the camera and a little league player). That was at I/O 2017.

This sets appropriate expectations. If they don't know when it will reach the quality that they want to ship it is better to cancel it.

My guess is that it's not about quality but efficiency. Assuming the product works as advertised, someone might have pointed out that the power drawn is a lot more than the power supplied to the devices being charged (which to some extent is true for every wireless charger out there), and in a world where being sensitive to green issues is becoming the norm, this might have brought some bad press to Apple.

> Assuming the product works as advertised

The rumors are that it didn’t work as advertised, or even at all. Or when it did it could get hot and catch on fire.

I think Occam’s razor applies here.

Google had the curious case of the Nexus Q. It was announced at Google I/O and they took orders. Within a few days it was canceled. Those who ordered were refunded AND got their Nexus Q.

They usually only announce things that are being released in a week, or at most in a month or two. They've been breaking that rule a lot recently though. The whole services keynote was very strange for that reason.

Not anymore lately. There are a ton of pre-announcements under Cook (Airpower, Mac Pro announced years in advance, but also most of iOS 10 and 11 were announced 6-8 months before it made it - e.g. wireless fast charging). This whole odd services keynote had really nothing to launch besides their "News" (i.e. it's only magazines) product. The rest is coming 6+ months later

Apple has a history with the entertainment industry. They know that their cooperation means leaks. We already knew about the updated Apple news, there were rumors about the game subscription thing. We knew something was coming for a TV service because they’ve been buying content.

Basically they might as well have announced things because they were rumors about all of it and if they kept trying to keep it secret for months and months the chances are their partners would end up leaking it purposefully/by mistake.

You are assuming that Apple has great cross-team communication. By many reports, they do not: I've heard that one team does not know what another team is working on, much less the status of that project.

It's a Big Tech Corp with known spies in it. You expect everything to be shared? Inter-team communication is just generally bad these days, and mostly because it tends to be the default human behavior.

I remember reading a couple of articles about Bell Labs and how they had a huge cafeteria everyone was encouraged to eat in, thereby promoting cross-communication and "cross-pollination" of ideas and insight. I kinda wonder what the Big Tech companies would be producing now and at what rate if they did that instead of letting or encouraging everyone to sit at their desks all day long (mind you, Google seems to be pretty good about that part.)

> with known spies in it

Worse than a simple information "spy" would be having a security engineer with intimate knowledge of Apple's security leave the company to co-found a new company whose entire business model is to sell expensive hardware to law enforcement that bypasses Apple's security. Oh right, that actually happened[1].

An Apple security engineer discovered–or baked in–critical security flaws at one of the world's largest technology companies and instead of disclosing them to the company, co-opted that sensitive insider information to start his own lucrative business. I've been waiting for news of this man's reputation, career, finances, and perhaps even his freedom having been taken away; so far it seems he's gotten away with it. I don't buy the apologist explanation I've heard: "he's likely just so good at his profession that he reverse engineered entirely new vulnerabilities after leaving Apple, without necessarily having exfiltrated knowledge only obtainable from within Apple's own walls".

If this man had done this to a bank or the government, he'd be rotting in federal prison. But he "only" expropriated this information from a private corporation, so no big deal. /s

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/07/26/apple...

The company does not own your brain; using experience with a system for hacking that system (on devices you own) is not illegal, nor should it be.

Remember also that the entire concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction created to prop up revenue streams, as well.

> The company does not own your brain; using experience with a system for hacking that system (on devices you own) is not illegal, nor should it be.

Okay? But that's not what that company does at all.

If you're going to accuse someone of IP theft then please provide actual evidence.

> There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.

Well, there is no way of getting 30W wirelessly (to the device side) without a lot of heat.

I guess someone thought they could solve this with smarter power management (and per the John Gruber article this was an issue last year, or even before) but it frankly it does not seem possible (unless Apple discovered room temperature superconductors).

It seems the design teams might have some people (higher ups) thinking too much about design and too little about if things are really possible given the constraints of a consumer product (typical MBA BS motivational pushes asides).

But it seems they managed to save face before another poor product would hit the shelves.

I am not sure why are you downvoted. There is a whole literature on mismanaged software/hardware projects and the culprits of those failures. Not in a small part the reason is often very bad management/design decisions.

Yeah, you're almost definitely right. Apple is an extremely design-first company, in the sense that the designers have always run the company.

This isn't the first time that sticking to a design led to a technical hardware/physics problem. This happened originally when Steven was designing the iPhone 4 with his team and took out most of the antenna lines, leaving only a small antenna line at the top and not the noticeable ugly antenna lines you see on every single iPhone today. Steven's antenna design was incredibly simple and aesthetically pleasing - just one of several incredible advances of the iPhone 4 - but Steven's antenna design led to some radio frequency problems I definitely don't understand which caused the entire "you're holding it wrong" scandal.

That is just another example from 2011 or so of designers running the company but running into a technical issue with the laws of physics - there it was just radio frequencies instead of whatever it is here with this AirPower and the the heat or frequencies or something created from the as many as possibly 15 or 32 coils inside of it.

There are so so so many examples of where this design-first approach has definitely worked. One example is how the external aluminum case of the 2-pound MacBook from 2015 was designed first, and then once lithium ion batteries were created which had to be custom and have a custom internal chemistry so that they could be stacked on top of each other in a terraced structure. A second example is in Face ID which is very fast and simple conceptually but technically requires a custom chip running a custom neural network and for PrimeSense to miniaturize their Kinect hardware that they created for the Xbox into a the super small menu bar of the iPhone X. The chip team and the PrimeSense team started with a simple concept/design of a user looking at their iPhone, and then filled in all of the extremely technical and multi-disciplinary practicalities.

When you start doing something that nobody has done before, you absolutely do not know that it can work. You will fail in every way – Jonathan mentioned that when they were creating Face ID, all that they had for such a long time were failed engineering designs that simply put did not work.

Nobody knew that you could miniaturize the Kinect hardware, or that this chip could actually run their custom neural network quickly and with low power consumption to get Face ID. But you can. For MacBook batteries, if you mess the chemistry of these batteries up, the batteries will absolutely explode just like Samsung's did the following year. Nobody knew that you could stack the batteries of a MacBook on top of each other either. But you can. Nobody knew that you could remove most of the ugly antenna lines on an iPhone and just place just one antenna line at the top. Oh wait, but you can't. Nobody knew that you could charge 3 devices at the same time within whatever FCC regulations and still maintain low heat. Oh wait, but you can't (I guess, if that's the problem).

The point is that whenever you're doing something that nobody else in the world has done, you can't know it's going to work and you will fail. You will succeed but you will also fail, if you are truly doing creative work. Here, Apple failed. I guess because what they finished in the lab was possible according to the laws of physics but not safe (coils might overheat and catch fire or melt, might explode, might stop a person's pacemaker, and so on).

Thanks for the wonderful explanation! The idea of a charging mat with multiple overlapping coils seems to be a hard wall.

Build a Dyson cooling toroid around it? (Said the design team)

That's what always confused me about this. This was very much an announced thing, not some side research project.

That's not even on the box it's on a sticker on the box. Buy some new stickers and bin the old rolls!

>There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.

They could have sold a Wireless Charger just like others with their mark up. Instead we got nothing.

Also admitting MacBook Pro Keyboard Failure. I believe there is something happening to Hardware Engineering in general.

Methinks HWEng made a breach in Industrial Design's north flank, and provoked a rout. The tide is turning!

“Oh my god! The engineers are revolting!”

“You’ve worked here all these years and you only just noticed that?”

Why does this feel (in a fun and positively humorous way) like something pulled straight out of Douglas Coupland's "J-Pod"?

Love the picture, but I think it's the opposite: engineering's defence of the announce-o-tron went down for a moment, design pushed into the breach and gained a brief moment of unsupervised access. Now they face the consequences.

You're giving me flashbacks of Tesla's beleaguered engineering team.

Were it "just like others with their markup", why would people pay more for the same thing?

Quality materials, nicer fit and finish, no obnoxious blue LEDs...

> no obnoxious blue LEDs...

:) True! But for $10 I'll live with it.

Then again, not everyone wants the same thing, just like some people value their annoyance much higher than others (making a more expensive purchase actually turn out less expensive).

People are weird. But that is fine.

To me, the AirPower mat seems like a really hard thing to make. Qi charging needs concentric coils, but AirPower as a Mat needs a reconfigurable matrix to do what it needs to do.

A piece of color matching electrical tape does wonders.

well yeah but applying electrical tape to a product does kinda ruin its aesthetic in almost all cases don’t ya think

Another option is nail polish. It comes in plenty of colors and you can add a thin layer of polish to make the LED dimmer but not totally blacked out.

There's a reason you find a matching color and cut the smallest piece that covers the LED, I haven't seen any aesthetics ruined by tape if they already have an ungodly bright blue LED indicator.

I have a set of various colors of electrical tape. If the color is even close to the same, you can't even tell it was there unless you are looking for it.

Quality, QA, Design, Branding.

That is like asking why are people buying lightning connector from Apple where there are cheaper options.

That's branding 101. Conspicuous consumption, perceived quality due to marketing, brand loyalty ... quite a few reasons.

Same reason people buy $1500 plastic Louis Vuitton handbags and belts.

Apple doesn't release products that have no distinguishing features other than "made by Apple in Cupertino". Accessories without distinguishing features they prefer to just work with third parties on (such as Belkin). In fact, I'd wager that this particular Belkin charger was done in cooperation with Apple: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HLZ42/belkin-boost-up-spe...

What is the differentiator for the $39 silicone iPhone cases?

I bought a cheaply iPhone case for my XR. Fell apart after a few months. Bought another. The edge around the screen and camera was not raised enough. I got the one I have now on sale, but it retails for like $30 plus. It’s also the best one so far.

Cases are like cables. You need to have them available, and the only way to guarantee that they're available is to make them yourself (given that they're not based on industry standards). If case you bought 2 years ago still fit on the new phone today, then there's not much pressure for Apple to have a case, but since cases are tied to specific phone designs and form-factors, the only way to guarantee high-quality cases available at launch is to make them.

It occurs to me, cases are also like chargers. Nobody questions why apple sells their own USB-C charger even though you could in theory use a generic USB-C charger.

They've been going 2 generations with each form factor. 7/8 were identical, X and XS are identical. I do appreciate that, even though I don't update every gen anyway (or even every two).

Or a credit card ;)

Designed by Apple in Cupertino

Made in China

Not sure I agree. AirPods really have almost no distinguishing features from other earphones. They’re generally worse. The only “feature” is seeing their charge on your phone, which is a pretty lousy differentiator.

You are, in all seriousness, the only person I have ever seen declare that AirPods are worse than other competing earphones. AirPods have one of the higher consumer satisfaction ratings ever, and anecdotally everybody I've ever seen talk about them absolutely loves them, even people who are normally very critical of Apple.

I never tried the AirPods so I can't comment on their quality, though I'm all for wired ones so it won't happen anytime soon. Quality aside, psychology can explain a things or two on why people absolutely love what they spend money on.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/19/fanboyism-and-brand-...

But then everybody who bought anything (that at least worked) would love it. This theory has no explanatory power to distinguish why any particular company has higher that average satisfaction ratings.

I shouldn't post replies when in a hurry (just like now:). I left out some important details: the point was why sometimes people end up loving stuff they spend a lot of money on, to the point they become fanboys even when the item purchased albeit good doesn't deserve that. I'm not bashing Apple, this happens in a lot of contexts, take for example the audiophool world. Are those hundreds €/$ per meter audio cables good? Yes, definitely! So are they worth that price then? Asbolutely not, but people keep shoveling money at them although neither the best instruments in the world nor the best ears could tell the difference when conducting a proper blind test (aka: the famous "coat hangers cable" experiment). This is where psychology plays an important part. Back to the Airpods, they could give the best audio experience in the world -I trust Apple on this, they for sure know a few things about music- but I'm also someone who doesn't like being forced by marketing to accept excessive compromises. The Airpods batteries aren't replaceable so once they fail (a few years max) one is forced to throw them away. To me it seems a price too high to pay for eliminating the headphone port, which I use and like to have on every device. I have no doubt Apple users love their Airpods, but it's a fact that those devices are not perfect. If users accept criticism for iPhones with no user replaceable batteries I would expect the same open mindset about the Airpods.

disclaimer: always in a hurry... girlfriend getting out of the train in 35 minutes and I have to drive to get there.

> The only “feature” is seeing their charge on your phone

FWIW there are many Bluetooth headphones that show their charge on your phone, it's a standard Bluetooth feature.

>AirPods really have almost no distinguishing features from other earphones.

You've got to be kidding. The kind of pairing made possible by Apple's W1 chip, and the completely cordless design, was absolutely and undeniably groundbreaking when the AirPods were first released. Even now you'd be hardpressed to find a pair of earphones that work as smoothly and seamlessly as AirPods do.

Is there another brand that pauses your music/audiobook when you take them out? If so I'd like to try it; AirPods don't fit my ears well (fall out when I bend forward.)

The iCloud pairing and tap-controls are nice, but I guess I could live without them.

Jabra Elite 65t does that and they are absolutely amazing.

I don't know what it's called but someone sells a silicone attachment for the AirPods that anchors it inside your ear. I know this because one of my coworkers has it.

There were at most 1 or 2 semi-equivalent products when they came out. Some have caught up with the specs, but fewer with the easy switching between devices.

They canceled it because the iPhone is going to become a wireless charging pad for your AirPods, watch and even another iPhone.

Samsung just released Wireless PowerShare as a feature in the S10 that allows you to share a charge and reports note this will be coming to the iPhone.

Incidentally and FML ... I was filmed pitching this idea to Intel and Mark Burnett (reality tv mega-producer) for the reality tv show, America's Greatest Makers. They reached out to me as they really needed fledging inventors. Overall we pitched sharing battery power between two phone cases https://ryanspahn.com/GetLeech .

I haven't looked but if Intel has patents that are from Sept 2015 and on then really FML. Otherwise what I thought was potentially a completely unique idea wasn't.

If they were gonna do it after the AirPods 2 release, they would have to do it ASAP, or else they'd either have to do extended refunds (and have extra return inventory of an unwanted product) or face a class-action suit from disgruntled AirPods 2 buyers who were promised compatibility with a now-cancelled product.

How would you compare AirPower with Cue::cat?

Makes me wonder if they couldn't get around any patents as wireless charging isn't a new innovation.

I’m guessing patents.

Something indeed. I don't understand what the issue could be. I have a few $20 wireless chargers that work just fine. I expected Apple to put one in premium packaging and sell it for $150.

The article mentions (rumored) issues with 3D/overlapping coils that I imagine were needed to allow for multiple device placement anywhere on the mat.

>> Specifically, I’ve heard that they ran too hot because the 3D charging coils in close proximity to one another required very, very cautious power management.

It's not the end of the world if it slows down under multiple devices, and that trivially solves the heat problem.

Is it lack of satisfaction with those tradeoffs? Is there a more fundamental flaw somewhere else? It would be nice to know what actually caused this decision.

Selling point is that you can put all your mobile devices on it. So it’s assumed you’re using more than one and it isn’t a quality experience if you have to sacrifice charging speed for regular use.

The phone is the only one that needs a particularly high wattage. If sharing drops the phone speed by a third, that leaves enough spare capacity to do a watch and airpods at the same time (with both of them getting more percent per hour than the phone). That's still a pretty good experience.

What if they couldn’t get the multi coil design to work charging ANYTHING at high power.

Maybe it was capable of charging the watch and the AirPods just fine, it was the phone’s power demands that were the thing killing it.

Definitely one possibility of many! That's why it's so hard to guess which one or two aspects really tanked it.

Fire? Like, GS Note 7 fire? That would do the trick!

Their design had many overlapping coils which dynamically could be activated. This design would allow you to place the multiple devices on the mat in any orientation.

Apple's plan was to let you place it anywhere on the mat, not on the very small charging sweet-spot.

Worth the huge premium it would've sold for? Probably not for a good deal of people, but it would've sold.

Kinja posted a deal on a dual powered mat for $35 yesterday. Crazy to think that Apple couldnt crack this to reach some level of product that consumers would find attractive.

They wanted you to just toss some devices arbitrarily on the mat and have it "just work". The one you discuss requires alignment, like all others -- for a reason! There's a reason the watch has a magnetic alignment setup.

I thought you might be able to use a 2D array of small loops but a little bit of modeling shows that to be a pretty dumb idea.

That’s what you really want to get too. A big charging mat you just toss everything on.

TBH I don’t find wireless charging today a particularly big win. It’s a bit easier than plugging in a cable. Of course, in the watch, it eliminates a port which is a win for other reasons.

I find Anker 24w fast charging bricks and 10’ lightening cables are a pretty reasonable way to quickly charge Apple devices while still using them. I bought a cheap 5w wireless charging pad to throw my phone on while I sleep.

My problem is that every charging cable I get seems to fail eventually. Either the charging port in the phone gets loose, filled with lint, or the cable mysteriously stops working. Even expensive Ankers. Meanwhile my no-name QI charger that I bought for my LG G3 like 5 years ago is still working perfectly. No parts to loosen or clog.

I don’t even bring my wireless charging when I travel. One more piece of gear to pack and keep track of.

I wouldn't either but now that I have one one my desk, nightstand, and coffee table; I could never go back.

yeah no thx. With how long devices last me now and days the only thing that will accelerate my trade in would be the extra battery wear from wireless charging.

Unless it's a particularly hot charger, a slower wireless charge is actually better for your battery.

In retrospect, I wonder if a motorized device that moves the coils to match the location of your device would have been a better approach.

I had the same thought.

I l suspect that Apple has so little in house experience with moving parts these days that they’d have a hard time shipping a good one that worked this way.

I am curious what you discovered during your modelling.

From a first principles point of view it seems to me like it might just work.

It's hard (very lossy) to try to couple the B fields when the rings are different sizes.

But what if they’re all small and all the same size? In a Grid pattern, like streets between city blocks?

That is not remotely related. Having a mat with two or three separated coils for phones is really easy to do. You basically just glue a few of these together.

AirPower was intended to have basically an entire surface of charging pixels. You could place phones, watches, AirPods, and combos of those on the mat in any orientation. There was also no sweetspot.

By attemping to make inductive charging mats work really well, Apple ran into some big tech contraints.

It's probably a huge coincidence that https://isairpoweroutyet.com/ launched a week ago.

(Probably.)

It’s not weird at all.

AirPower is a feature that helps sell those AirPods amongst early adopters who would buy AirPods within the first couple of weeks.

If you want to kill AirPower, waiting a bit to grab those sales makes sense. You don’t have much to lose and revenue to gain.

I'm guessing the unexpected hype was what caused the "cancellation", and AirPower isn't really any more cancelled than it was yesterday.

I'm imagining some engineering teem at Apple telling their bosses "yeah, it's almost ready" and the bosses believing them without really caring, because it's just a silly accessory and no big deal, right? And then since the AirPods 2 announcemen, the internet has been rabid with anticipation for AirPower. announcing it is cancelled is a better PR move than letting that internet fanboy frenzy turn into frustration with delays.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see AirPower turn up again in a years time.

This doesn't make much sense to me.

Apple is the tech marketing messiah, why would they announce AirPower at a major product demo and think that it somehow wouldn't be hyped? This is a really strange fumble for them.

It was also listed as a major feature for the new AirPods, that doesn't seem like something Apple would slap on a box knowing they probably weren't going to ship, especially if was a "silly accessory."

I can totally see an engineering team BSing leadership on the product readiness, but there had to be internal pressure on this. Apple knows this looks bad after investors weren't super impressed with the News+ demo.

I think the mea-culpa announcement "This isn't going to be shipped", is better than stringing it along for months and leaving people in the dark.

Your right though, their main problem was announcing it too early. There are probably legal ramifications to this.

Back in the day "intelivision" announced a keyboard component for their console in ads. They didn't ship.. It kept slipping. Then the FTC (government) started fining them for false advertising. So they finally released one (It was junk, we had one).

"Complaints from consumers who had chosen to buy the Intellivision specifically on the promise of a "coming soon" personal-computer upgrade, eventually caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who started investigating Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision

I enjoyed the Intellivison II with the voice synthesis module. I have fond memories of playing B-17 bomber and burgertime.

I did love that console. Football, armor battle, pitfall,burger time etc. The keyboard adapter however wasn’t good for programming. I think it had like 2kb of memory. The keyboard adapter only game “mindstrike” game was pretty fun.

They overpromised and didn’t deliver, to avoid under delivering.

Or maybe it was working but then yesterday one burst into flames during testing which was the final straw. They don’t want to pull a Samsungs now do they?

Why did they cancel the product rather than delay it? If they are cancelling the product, either the issues are unfixable and it means that something is very wrong with their engineering, because they are expected to understand whether the product is possible a little bit earlier than some months before production. Or managers are just acting impulsively which is as wrong.

I think if it were delayed, it would still come up from time to time in tech blogs, giving them bad PR, kinda like Duke Nukem Forever. If they announce that it’s cancelled, they take a bad hit now, but they also have indefinite time to work on the product with no PR penalty on delays. The announcement leaves the door open on a future wireless product release anyway, with zero promises.

If they end up releasing the product, say, a year from now, nobody’s going to say “but you cancelled it before!!! how dare you!!”

If they announce in 2017, cancel in 2019, and launch in 2020, people will mock them and will be correct to do so. Maybe if they need three years up to indefinite the cancellation could make sense.

I could imagine something like the project manager had successfully swept all the problems under the rug to that point, despite the fact that the engineering manager was sending emails to compliance and risk management. When it caught on fire, an exec is like "WTF?" and gets a dump of all the data, and cancelling is easy.

Because they've already delayed it a whole lot.

Odd that you'd jump to Samsung as the example and not Apple's own exploding Macbook batteries from a few years back...

You are a True Believer.