Here’s a Brief Glimpse of What AirPower Could Have Been

The AirPower charging mat was an ambitious undertaking by Apple that promised to give us one wireless charger to rule them all. Sadly, it turned out to be one of Apple’s most public failures in recent history.

Some of us still mourn its demise; it seemed to be an elegant charging solution the likes of which only Apple could come up with. However, in the end, it was too much for even the talented engineers in Cupertino to figure out.

To be clear, Apple has had its share of failed projects. This year alone, we’ve seen the end of the long-rumored Apple Car and the microLED Apple Watch. Some of these projects may have been Apple’s worst-kept secrets, but the company never publicly acknowledged them.

AirPower was different. Shown off alongside the iPhone 8 and iPhone X in September 2017, it was a rare moment when Apple was confident enough to announce a product that wouldn’t be ready to ship for several months.

Such occasions are rare, but more often than not, Apple succeeds in pulling the necessary rabbits out of its hat. The original iPhone was a barely functioning demo unit when Steve Jobs showed it off on stage at Macworld in January 2007, but it landed on time as a fully functional product six months later. Ditto for the Apple Watch in 2014–15 and the HomePod in 2017.

Although the original HomePod was delayed by a few months, it still ultimately arrived as promised. That delay helped stoke our hopes that AirPower was still coming, even after it missed its 2018 release deadline.

Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall long before that. References to AirPower had been gradually vanishing from Apple’s website, and Apple officially pulled the plug in March 2019, stating that “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project.”

It turns out that what Apple was trying to accomplish was simply too ambitious. The dream was to have enough overlapping coils that you could drop any Apple device on the charging mat in any orientation, and it would just magically charge. On top of that, devices would be able to communicate with each other to provide charging status and battery power levels.

Perhaps even more magical than simply being able to charge an iPhone or a set of AirPods was that AirPower also promised to charge an Apple Watch at the same time. Considering that even today’s Apple Watch models aren’t compatible with Qi chargers — they still require a special wireless charging puck — that would have been quite a feat.

Well, it turns out that Apple got far enough to accomplish at least this aspect of AirPower. A video clip shared on X/Twitter today by Apple Demo shows a prototype AirPower mat successfully charging an Apple Watch Series 4.

Apple Demo has shown off other Apple prototypes before. While we’ve seen leaked photos of AirPower prototypes, this is one of the few videos that have surfaced to show the charging mat in action since most of the prototypes that have been snuck out of Apple Park to make the rounds among collectors have turned out to be non-functional.

As the comments with the video note, the Apple Watch prototype “gets quite warm” on AirPower, which highlights one of the reported problems that plagued the charging mat since the beginning. Even Apple’s engineers can’t change the laws of physics, and packing that many inductive charging coils together is guaranteed to generate a fair amount of heat.

For about a year after AirPower was cancelled, rumors persisted that Apple might still be working on a solution, but even one of the most prolific sources of those reports was forced to confirm in late 2020 that AirPower was indeed dead for good. Instead, Apple’s engineering teams threw their efforts into MagSafe, which delivered excellent wireless charging efficiency by ensuring proper coil alignment without the need for a dozen or more overlapping coils.

Nevertheless, reliable sources suggest Apple is still working on clever multi-device charging solutions, but there’s no word on what those might look like and certainly no guarantee that it will still aim for something like AirPower. Apple is believed to be exploring other creative ways to exchange power between iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and there’s little doubt its engineers have a lot of ideas. However, it’s also learned its lesson from AirPower and isn’t likely to share any of those with us until it’s absolutely certain it will be able to make them happen.