During Apple’s iPhone X launch event in September 2017, the company had also announced AirPower — a wireless charging pad. At that time, Apple had said that it will be made available in 2018 but the company went silent for about 18 months.
Now, Apple has officially canceled the AirPower citing difficulty in achieving the company’s “high standards” for the product. In a statement, Dan Riccio, Apple’s Senior VP of Hardware Engineering, said: “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards, and we have canceled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch.”
This news comes as a serious disappointment to users who were waiting for the product launch as the AirPower promised to do something that no other charging mat on the market can do — charge three different products simultaneously with free-form placement on the surface.
AirPower is one of the prime examples of Apple’s habit of announcing new products and not actually shipping them on time. Another example is AirPods, which had a bit of delay before becoming widely available and were shipped in limited quantities initially. The launch of AirPods 2 also seems to have been delayed as all material has 2018 written all over it while the product was actually launched in 2019. Many other products from the company also bear explicit references to AirPower.
Apple has been pushing the idea of wireless charging. The iPhone has had wireless charging capabilities since the iPhone 8 in September 2017, and the Apple Watch always had wireless charging. Last week, Apple released a new version of its AirPods wireless earbuds with support for wireless charging capabilities.
The development comes just days after Apple announced a few subscription-based services, which now seems to be the company’s focus. It announced four major services — Apple News+, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple Card.
