Apple has killed the AirPower project after months - almost years - of speculation. In a statement released to Tech Crunch, Dan Riccio - SVP of Hardware Engineering at Apple - said:
“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward.”
Apple announced AirPower alongside iPhone X in September 2017 with a ship date of 2018. Of course, that never happened, and conflicting reports of progress and setbacks swirled around rumour sites. Most recently, it was generally believed AirPower went into production in January and the launch was imminent, following the release of the 2nd-Generation AirPods last week.
Whilst AirPower was an incredibly complicated product, this comes across as Apple being unable to deliver a charging mat - something many other companies sell for little expense. Of course - AirPower was far more than that, and nobody else has been able to pull off a similar product to date, but this can’t be anything but bad publicity for Apple.
At the end of the day, I’m very disappointed, and Apple will hopefully go back to announcing products when they are ready rather than being unable to deliver. I’m very glad, however, that rather than ship a broken and potentially dangerous product, Apple instead called it quits on this one.