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Apple Cancels AirPower Product

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#401

Post by MBCook »

squarefoot wrote: post #368
spullara wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#402

Post by MBCook »

ehsankia wrote: post #361
_bxg1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#403

Post by altfredd »

threeseed wrote: post #183
Hamuko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But not on purpose. You could argue that after three models with butterfly keyboards, it's pretty purposeful. It's not like no one pointed it out to them.

I had a 2016 MacBook Pro which absolutely had a lot of issues with the butterfly keyboard. It was clearly a bad product. But they definitely fixed the issues with the 2018 one. There definitely isn't the same level of complains on the internet about it.

There are less complaints about 2018 model. They didn't really fix it.

If my (non-Apple) laptop is anything to go by, the keyboards with that crappy low-rise design have average life expectancy of one year. The 2018 modification will not get clogged with dust until the end of 2019, at which point people will be complaining about it too.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#404

Post by kwiens »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

The whole AirPower saga is a weird event in product development. AirPower compatibility was highlighted as a feature in the packaging of the just-released AirPods 2 : https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/11106569269650636... There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.

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/

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#405

Post by sbuk »

Noctem wrote: post #358
rickyc091 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blam…

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.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#406

Post by MBCook »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #343
skellera wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#407

Post by MBCook »

mjsweet wrote: post #319

Is it my understanding that induction rings can't overlap? You can't just plonk a phone, watch and AirPods case anywhere on a charging pad and expect them to start charging right? The coil in each device needs to be fairly well aligned with the coil in the Qi charging pad. The proper way to do this is to have three individual coils with visual location targets for each device to charge. I wonder if Apple was trying t…

> I wonder if Apple was trying to make it a bit too magical (judging by the pre-render shots) allowing the user to throw a device onto the pad anywhere and expect them to charge.

That was exactly the sales pitch.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#408

Post by ulfw »

mackey wrote: post #122
minimaxir wrote: post #2

The whole AirPower saga is a weird event in product development. AirPower compatibility was highlighted as a feature in the packaging of the just-released AirPods 2 : https://twitter.com/itsnicolenguyen/status/11106569269650636... There has to be something that caused this abrupt cancellation.

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://…

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!

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#409

Post by spectramax »

sgustard wrote: post #312
spectramax wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what Apple does, people will be pissed off at something . Contrary to your point: A. They announced the cancellation a week later, you still have time to return your AirPods 2. B. If they had gone with substandard product, then you will still complain, why didn't Apple cancel this product a long time ago!? Why did they release this piece of shit? We will have #AirPowerGate storm on Twitter, armchair special…

They put themselves in that "no-win situation" by pre-announcing the product. If they were profiting by selling products based on future compatability with airpower, that could be fraud.

Literally every major company does this. Tesla announces their cars years ahead of production. Thousands of products are announced at the CES - cameras, phones, laptops, etc.

Things go wrong sometimes after announcing a product.

> that could be fraud

No, it is certainly not.

Re: Apple Cancels AirPower Product

#410

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

darkpuma wrote: post #281
threeseed wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that they had issues with the 2016 and 2017 models. I owned one. But those issues were fixed in the 2018 one. Which is why they haven't needed to extend the warranty at all.

> "I know that they had issues with the 2016 and 2017 models." So it's no longer your belief that the 2017 model was significantly better than the 2016 version? Or was it significantly better, but still shit? In one or two years will the 2018 version in turn be considered significantly better but still shit?

I have both a 2016 and 2017 one. I did not notice any difference in keyboard quality and they both failed after about a year. Keys either stopped picking up input, or would repeat. On one my space bar repeated a lot and just felt wrong.

I won’t be touching the 2018 one until I see reports of people that have had them for over a year. It sounds like based on the new WSJ reporting, the 2018 has problems too though.

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