Apple isn’t giving up on its dreams of an AirPower wireless charging mat, according to Jon Prosser of FrontPageTech. In a series of tweets sent Sunday, Prosser said that Apple is in the process of “re-engineering” AirPower from the ground up. “Prototyping is underway,” he wrote.
While that’s still no guarantee that AirPower will make it to market, it’s good news to hear that Cupertino’s not abandoning plans for a product many people were excited about.
AirPower was first announced by Apple at its iPhone X keynote in September 2017. It was designed to charge up to three Qi devices, such as an iPhone, AirPods, and an Apple Watch simultaneously. Unfortunately for Apple, a variety of engineering problems caused Apple to push back (and ultimately cancel) its launch. According to rumors, overheating problems posed the biggest hurdle for bringing AirPower to market.
In March 2019, the company finally threw in the towel. In a statement, Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering said that, “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.”
Apple hasn’t scrapped plans for AirPower
It seems that Apple hasn’t totally scrapped the plans for AirPower, however. “The project is back on, internally,” Prosser wrote. “No guarantee that [Apple will] finalize and release it, but they haven’t given up yet and they’re trying to re-engineer the coils to displace heat more effectively. Prototyping is underway.”
According to Prosser, the “biggest hurdle” is that none of the current prototypes support Apple Watch. He said that Apple “refuse” to release a version that doesn’t work with its smart watches.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a possible new AirPower-type device. Early this year, respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote that Apple is working on a less ambitious AirPower alternative, capable of charging only one device instead of three. No further details have been released, however.
Would you like to see an AirPower wireless charging mat from Apple? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
