What really went wrong with AirPower?

Last Friday, we were surprised by the bomb that a year and a half after its original announcement on the iPhone X keynote, the Airpower Never see the light of day. Apple has officially given up on the project.

The news was first given to TechCrunch, by means of a brief statement of Dan Riccio, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple:

After much effort, we conclude that AirPower will not meet our high standards and have canceled the project. We apologize to customers who were excited about this release. We continue to believe the wireless future and are committed to stimulating the wireless experience.

If Riccio signed it, he who took the blame for the failure at Apple. It was probably he who gave the go-ahead for Phil Schiller to announce the product in September 2017, before it was really ready to hit the market.

And that was, basically, Apple's one and only biggest mistake in this whole story: announcing to the world, and even a keynote of new iPhones, an unfinished product. In fact, if we stop to think, there is no need for the company to announce something in advance; She can always choose the best time to do this, according to the internal progress of each project.

At times, it may be strategically or commercially good for Apple (or other companies) to announce something in advance. The Apple TV + service, for example, is at no risk; It is not dependent on any special technology, contracts have been signed and several of those own productions that we saw on keynote have even been filmed and are now in post-production phase.

But what really went wrong with AirPower anyway?

The product

To say that AirPower would simply be a wireless charging base capable of powering three devices, as several already exist on the market today, is very shallow.

Yes, in practice, roughly speaking, that was it: the AirPower would be an oval-shaped white base capable of recharging a iPhone, one Apple watch it's the AirPods Charging Case simultaneously. But to make its mark on this product, Apple wanted as usual to do something different and, above all, better.

All recharging bases on the market today have one, two or even three electromagnetic coils for wireless recharging using the Qi standard. This means that each device placed on them needs to be positioned exactly in the center of each coil for communication to be established.

Inside AirPower, Apple wanted to put more than 20 (!) of these coils in an arrangement more or less as the patent design shows:

AirPower Patent ApplicationCredit: Patently apple

Intelligently, the base would then detect the device's best positioned coil and activate it. With this, the user would no longer have to worry about the exact position and the order that would "throw" his iPhone, Apple Watch and / or AirPods on top of AirPower; the motto would be Ma's classic, Just works.

As a cake icing, Apple would also implement a communication system between the devices placed on top of the AirPower, so that the iPhone screen could show the charge level of each one. Very nice.

Of course, it is also worth noting here that Apple Watch uses a proprietary induction charging system (and not in Qi, like the iPhone and the new AirPods). That is, the vast majority of these generic recharge bases on the market are not able to power it.

Chances of what went wrong

Riccio's statement, of course, was rather vague. A product that has not met Apple's “high standards” can mean a number of things.

Here are the most obvious assumptions, based on what we've heard in recent months:

  • Even with all the intelligent coil activation engineering and management, the product too hot. Electronics heat up normal, especially those that deal with energy, but only to a certain extent; and in the case of such a product, heat could even negatively interfere with the recharge performance itself.
  • The idea of ​​21-24 internal coils might be fantastic to solve the problem of sometimes devices not recharging because they are misplaced, but that was quite internal interference AirPower once again, damaging its performance.
  • This feature of communication between devices positioned on the base was rather “bugged”, showing inconsistent values ​​on their iPhone's recharge level on the iPhone screen without a satisfactory level of accuracy.

Of the three points above, surely the first would be the most serious. Many people leave these recharging bases on bedside tables next to their beds, and not even to consider the possibility of such a device maybe catching fire and setting a house on fire. The Galaxy Note7 lesson was not given to Samsung only.

So far, we are talking about technical difficulties that in theory should be overcome by Apple, sooner or later. Apparently, if the reason was one or more of these, the laws of physics still have their force. Some products are sometimes designed “ahead of time”.

But these are not the only hypotheses. The folks at iFixit, for example, have looked into the whole case and are pretty sure that Apple was able to make fully functional AirPower units in their labs. The problem, they said, would have to do with electromagnetic interference and the various regulations imposed by American and European bodies.

William Lumpkins, vice president of engineering at O&S Services, explains that the electromagnetic fields emitted by the multiple coils inside AirPower could act as waves when they collide, generating what they call “harmonic frequencies” whose challenge grows in proportion to the number. of interleaved coils.

Over time, these harmonics add up to become really powerful signals in the air. And that can be bad can even disable the pacemaker of some if the level is too high. Or it may short out hearing aids.

There were also those who had bet that the cost of AirPower would be too high and that Apple gave up for it. Rumors ranged from $ 150 to $ 200, but in my opinion even if Apple had to sell it for $ 250 (which would be absurd), that would not be enough reason for her to cancel the project.

And now?

Well As you may notice, I cannot pinpoint an exact answer to ask you in the title of this article; Only Apple could answer that for sure, and she could hardly.

The cancellation of AirPower is a milestone in Apple's history because there is no other recent case of its product, especially such hardware, being announced and then aborted. The only similar example I can now remember was a promise made by Steve Jobs in 2010 to make FaceTime an open standard (which has not been fulfilled to date, probably for legal reasons); but undoubtedly something quite different.

On the other hand, much of the average and all the mass of haters Apple wants and try to make this case something bigger than it really is. Apple's biggest mistake in this whole story, as I said at the beginning of the article, was that it announced the product ahead of time. Canceling a project, for whatever reason, is not uncommon in large companies like Apple. Since the announcement of AirPower, this must have happened a few times inside without us even being aware of such projects. That's how it has to be.

Moreover, even if you, and many of us, were looking forward to the arrival of AirPower, the product itself would simply be a wireless charging base with some improvements and differentiators from what we already have on the market today. It would definitely not be a product that would move some needle in the billions that Apple makes every year. The damage to her here is totally intangible, not financial.

Let this all serve as a lesson for the company and that such a shame will not recur so soon. It is also the crowd, for who knows in a while she will surprise with the launch of a rethought "AirPower 2" and even better than it would be this product that never reach our hands. The work continues.