Apple cancels AirPower, its wireless charging tray

The reason for its cancellation, according to several sources, is that the different charge induction coils generated too much heat and could damage the devices.

A year and a half of waiting with an outcome that nobody had foreseen. Apple has finally canceled the launch of AirPower, a wireless charging tray presented next to the iPhone X in September 2017 but that the company has been unable to realize. "After many efforts, we have concluded that AirPower will not reach our high standards and we have canceled the project and we apologize to the customers who were waiting for the launch," Dan Riccio, vice president of hardware at the company, wrote in a brief e-mail.

AirPower was a wireless charging tray capable of combining the Qi charging standard with the proprietary system used by the Apple Watch. In principle, it was going to allow loading up to three devices simultaneously (an iPhone, an Apple Watch and the new AirPods headphones) without having to precisely align them on the surface and with the advantage of displaying on the iPhone screen the load levels of each of them.

Attendees at the presentation of the iPhone X could see prototypes of this tray in operation as early as 2017 and Apple expected to have the first units on the street in 2018.

In the mail, Riccio company does not explain the reasons that have prevented Apple convert those prototypes into commercially viable products. The reason, according to several sources close to the company, is that the different charge induction coils generated too much heat and could damage the devices.

There is evidence that Apple has tried until the last moment to solve these problems. The page intended to provide information about AirPower could still be found on the company's website until recently. The new AirPod headphones with wireless charging case, released this week, also refer to the existence of this hypothetical accessory in the manuals of use, a detail that had led many users to wait for an announcement throughout these days. References and drawings of the AirPower tray also appear in the manuals and boxes of the latest iPhone.

The cancellation is another blow to the image of the company, which links several problems related to hardware in recent years. The AirPods headphones, for example, had to be delayed several months after its announcement because of the complexity of its manufacture and its availability has been very limited until recently ; his Mac Pro, presented in 2013 as an example of the innovative power of the brand, was unable to evolve in benefits due to fundamental design problems; and the keyboards of your MacBook computers are also causing more than one headache in Cupertino. The jump on their laptops to a slimmer key mechanism, dubbed "butterfly" for its design, has caused several reliability problems and forced the company to extend the warranty of some equipment because users sometimes find keys that do not work or write characters twice on screen due to small specks of dust and dirt that remain trapped inside.

AirPower is the first product in Apple's recent history that the company cancels after announcing officially but not the only one that has been on the verge of not seeing the light. The iPhone 4 in white, presented in June 2010, came to stores almost a year later than expected and a few months before the departure of its replacement, the iPhone 4s, for problems not foreseen in the manufacturing process.