Apple AirPower

» see apple.com/airpower as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ how it landed ~

Phil Schiller introduced AirPower on September 12, 2017, at the iPhone X event. The slide showed an iPhone on a soft white mat with an Apple Watch beside it and AirPods between them, all charging from any position. It looked like the next phase of charging. Apple said it was coming in 2018, and the crowd applauded. Apple's website got an AirPower product page with the marketing copy already written.

The product never shipped. Through 2018 the rumors got louder about why. John Gruber wrote that he had heard the issue was thermal: with twenty-plus coils packed together so that you could drop a device anywhere on the mat, the heat from neighboring coils could not be controlled. The Apple Watch had its own charging hardware that did not play well with what AirPower was trying to do. Several engineers reportedly said the design could not work at all.

I missed AirPower because AirPower never existed. By 2017 i was deep in linux laptops and android phones, watching the apple keynote cycle the way you watch a weather report for a city you do not live in. The interesting thing about AirPower was always the announcement gap. Apple usually does not show products it cannot ship. AirPower sat on the apple.com product menu for 18 months as a thing you could read about but not buy.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cancellation ~

On March 29, 2019, Dan Riccio sent a one-paragraph statement to TechCrunch and a few other outlets. "After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward." That was the whole obituary. The marketing page came down. The accessory was deleted from the AirPods 2 announcement materials that had been published days earlier.

~ the long tail ~

The interesting thing AirPower was promising was free positioning. Most Qi chargers require you to land the phone within a couple of centimeters of a specific spot. AirPower's pitch was that you could throw the device on the mat at any angle and it would find the coils to use. To do that physically meant overlapping coils and a smart power-management chip that knew how to route current. The thermal cost of that design is also why no third-party manufacturer has built a successful free-position pad in the years since. MagSafe in 2020 went in the opposite direction: a precise magnetic ring that snaps the phone onto exactly the right spot.

~ the funny part ~

AirPower was a marketing promise that survived 18 months without a product behind it. The renders kept showing up in iPhone XS marketing for a while after the original announcement, because the assets had been built into the product family photography. When the cancellation came, retroactively scrubbing AirPower from old keynote photos was its own small project. The product page was deleted while the keynote video stayed up. The demo footage on the Steve Jobs Theater screen is now the only place you can see AirPower actually working.

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