Tech YouTuber Luke Miani was able to obtain three Apple AirPower prototypes, and he briefly showed them functioning. The 91Tech channel followed suit.
The movies offer a very vivid illustration of the reasons Apple was compelled to publicly abandon the project.
The AirPower narrative
It took Apple more than a year after the initial September 2017 announcement to eventually concede defeat and release the product, which was originally scheduled for delivery in early 2018. Not only was AirPower behind schedule, but it was also ostensibly nonexistent.
It’s unlikely that we’ll ever fully understand why Apple made a promise for a product that it ultimately couldn’t fulfil. It worked in a lab setting, at which time Apple thought it was okay to disclose it, but was later thwarted by real-world issues, we may reasonably assume.
Many stories claimed that overheating was the issue, although you would have assumed it would have been found out during testing.
Another hypothesis is that the company’s inability to maintain RF exposure within FCC limitations was caused by having so many coils. That seems more realistic to me because it’s something that probably wouldn’t have been discovered until later in the development process.
Whatever the case, it left Apple in the extremely awkward position of having released a product with a lot of hoopla, advertised it on its website, made allusions to it in other goods, and as a result, delayed the release of its second-generation AirPods. and finally be forced to acknowledge that it had formally given up.
“After much work, we’ve come to the conclusion that AirPower won’t meet our high standards, thus we’ve cancelled the project. We are sorry to the customers who were anticipating this launch. “We still think that wireless is the way of the future, and we’re committed to improving the wireless experience,” said Dan Riccio, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple.
model AirPower aircraft
This is not the first time that an AirPower prototype has been obtained; we originally saw one two years ago.
The video that was posted to bilibili provides a thorough breakdown of the various layers of the purported AirPower.
The device was designed to charge Apple devices wherever they were placed on the mat, and in the video, we can see what appear to be 14 wireless charging coils in total, tightly packed and layered across its surface.
The metal frame that resembles a keyboard and divides the extensive quantity of circuitry packed into the wireless charger is another intriguing feature of the design.
Three prototypes were obtained by DongleBook Pro, which loaned them to Miani. One was a very early model that was released a year before Apple officially unveiled the product. That one featured 16 coils with corresponding circuitry. It has 22 coils and is a later model.
The complete video that was posted on Miani’s website after that can be viewed below. Sadly, the prototypes only function for a little period of time before needing to be restarted.
91Tech has also posted a similar video in what appear to be synchronised uploads, but they are unable to make it work.
