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.