Mark Gurman has a story at Bloomberg today that examines the now-impressively late AirPower charging mat. It’s an enjoyable read and adds a little more BTS details to how a superficially simple-seeming product that was announced alongside the iPhone X in September 2017 could possibly be taking so very long to release.
The reasoning he outlines is, somewhat obviously, devils in the technical details of the mat, specifically the challenges in charging multiple different devices, with different power requirements, alongside Apple’s ambition for these three devices to have a much larger surface area on which a device can be placed whilst still initiating charging – in contrast to many of the existing, single device wireless chargers currently on the market. Existing wireless mats frequently have a fairly defined ‘sweet spot’ that needs to be hit, meaning a degree of care and precision is required when placing a phone down to charge, lest you be greeted by an unexpectedly empty phone as you start your day.
What I find most interesting about the AirPower delay is not so much the reasoning itself, as clearly the product was experiencing some unexpected technical challenges, but more the way in which Apple was confident enough in the product’s development in September to announce it alongside the iPhone 8 and X, to them now being in a position where they are rapidly staring down the barrel of it being an entire year since the product was pre-announced. It would seem that, in terms of trying to give the product the best consumer attention, we will soon be at a point where it makes a great deal more sense to release AirPower alongside 2018’s fall products than, say, a late-July/August release.
If AirPower is released alongside the new iPhones in (presumably) September, it will be interesting to see how Apple frames the product story and whether they acknowledge the ‘delay’ in any manner. Given that the September 2017 product announcement stated that we were getting a sneak peak at a product to be released in 2018, AirPower technically isn’t late as such – but even the most charitable observer of 2017’s keynote would have to concede that it surely wouldn’t have been Apple’s intention to pre-announce a charging mat an entire year in advance. After all, this isn’t the 2019 Mac Pro, where the absence of a first party wireless charging pad would have signalled a worrying abdication of the company’s responsibilities to its customers.
One has to wonder, with a long series of minor-medium product delays (as Gurman notes, Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, AirPods, HomePod, iPhone X), will it ever reach a point where the company makes a point of returning to its policy of not announcing products until they are all-but-ready to ship, a hardware equivalent to the recent refocusing of Apple’s 2018 software releases on stability and bug fixes? Let’s hope so.
Prominent Haptic 