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Apple Officially Cancels AirPower

alextu said:
yes we all know apple is not going to go
out of business because of this but for such a big and reputable company like apple to do this is unheard of. what went wrong? was it communication? how can a big company such as apple allow this to happen?
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the issue is not about the charging mat. it could have been any product. the key issue is you dont announce products that you can not come through with
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Vaporware has a long and colorful history in the computer industry. Non-issue.

It simply wasn't an important product. The world won't care.

Apple is screwing up some important products these days. This isn't one of them.
 
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Victor Mortimer said:
Vaporware has a long and colorful history in the computer industry. Non-issue.

It simply wasn't an important product. The world won't care.

Apple is screwing up some important products these days. This isn't one of them.
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apple talked about the charging mat in 2017 at the 10 year anniversary iphone x and even have diagram of it on the packaging of earpods 2. what company has done this?

and even if vaporware has a long history, it does not make it right
 
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Regarding all the keyboard comments which seems to polarise so many people. I have a 2017 MBP and it is awful even when its working (not only do I have to carry dongles around but also have a can of air!!, and if mission critical a BT Keyboard - ridiculous) I would buy a new laptop if there was a 2015 like keyboard in a heartbeat, I am holding off buying anything now and I feel Apple have lost peoples trust over this issue. The store people are quite resigned – bring it in - we'll change it etc

Third party 'Airpower' for the phone work very well and I cannot imagine how expensive the Apple version would have been. Apple is a company that charges £129 for a leather case for a phone after all (https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MVFU2/iphone-xs-max-leather-folio-sunset?fnode=42). A 3rd party 'Airpower' charger is about £50. An Apple version would have been three times this - but thinner!
 
Chazz08 said:
And your inability to admit when something is wrong is part of why they won’t rise again. And Tim didn’t build anything. He’s been riding the coattails of Jobs. You can see Tim’s lack of leadership all over the place. It saddens me, but this is a huge mistake and it’s hoing to cost them. And me. Also, you judge me without knowing me. I myself am a fanboy. I’ve loved Apple ever since I first discovered them from the I’m a Mac commercials. I’m not a “critic”, but I certainly agree with most of them. Now if you could just stop defending Apple’s mistakes so they can be fixed, that’d be great.
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The bolded is a symptom of the confirmational bias I was referring to. Whether he is riding the coattails of Jobs is irrelevant. I'm buying products today (bigger phone, watch, airpods, etc) that I couldn't get under Jobs and that Jobs (re: bigger phone) would have never produced.

You can't see Tim's lack of leadership all over the place, in fact you can't see it, unless you focus on what is you believe are the negatives (that bias again), and then it becomes abundantly clear.

Now if you want me to stop "defending" Apple's mistakes, I'll ask you to stop with the blatantly, hyperbolic over-generalizations.

Again, the airpower has become a metaphor in an attempt to sling whatever against the wall and see what, if any, sticks.
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neutralguy said:
When companies like Apple fall, you don't see an instant crash It will slowly wither away. The failure of this hardware itself is a testament that Tim Cook is not a product guy. One of the reason Apple always has worked under secrecy that they had the flexibility of cancelling the product if it didn't work out. Correct me, if I am wrong, Steve Jobs never announced a product with a promise for future .that's why people always wanted to hear "one more thing".. and that always led to a surprise product or service announcement that you could use in a couple of weeks, not like in future someday.

How do you measure the success of apple? The revenue? That is on it's path of decline. With iPhone revenue going down, and that made apple to shake up its management, completely orienting itself as a service company from hardware company, itself tells you that it's no more hinky dory at Apple.
Is stock price a measure of success? Then why is Facebook rising so high? What's the success of Facebook? Delusional investors running after money without any understanding of the companies future can't be a justification of company's success.

How do you know the board is supporting Tim Cook? If you are one of the board members, what are
your options? None! Apples board has never been a proactive board. It's much like a board that always supported what Steve wanted to do. And without him, they have no other option, but to support Tim. That does not mean they agree with Tim or the way it's going. With lack of an innovator or a disrupter, they have no options to choose from. Look at Facebook board of directors. After all the fiascos, do they have a backbone to do anything? You have very high hope of board of directors. They are actually the most sheepish group of people.

Given all that, I am not losing hope. Hopefully, Apple will be successful in it's path. We know, very soon, Iphone will be a thing of past. The TV service or the news service is not something radical. It all seems like Apple has become a follower. But you never know. So let's wait and watch. But at this point, if you ask me, it does not look good for Apple!
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Companies continually realign themselves, they would be foolish not to. As far as the board, we will see as they may not have the backbone to kill the goose that layed the golden egg. But what do I (just another armchair CEO know). I'm just voicing my opinion like everyone else.

The airpower has become a metaphor meme of apple failure in some eyes.
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trifid said:
Only one product cancellation in the same grand scale as Airpower was Copland, Apple had shown demos, even made a full book of documentation for developers, only to have it cancelled.

And that was pre-Jobs, nothing like this happened under Jobs.
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You don't know what happened under Jobs that was never disclosed to the public. And while some (as I said above) view the airpower as a meme metaphor of apples "failures", in my eyes it means nothing, just a cancelled product.

This entire airpower timeline is suspicious and there may be more to this. How can rumors of Apple giving the go-ahead to produce the airpower be surfaced, and just a short while later the product was cancelled...that makes no sense. Either the company changed it's mind at the last minute, there was a last minute technical issue, or the product really never existed except as a artists render and plastic mockup. We may never know, but this to me is a tempest in a teapot.

There may never have been a grand scale to airpower, but we will probably never know.
 
I returned my new AirPods yesterday. When my Nomad base station arrives next month I'll probably just pick up the wireless charging case and keep the "old" AirPods I have (they're not even a month old-yes, I knew new ones were coming out but I couldn't wait-yes I bought the new ones having just bought the "old" ones). lol
 
It was going to be a hideously overpriced charging mat anyway. My wireless charger and watch dock is perfectly adequate to be fair and I likely wouldn’t have spend upwards of £100 just so my iPhone and Apple Watch could charge side by side on the same mat anyway.

Apple shot themselves in the foot announcing something that was in the very early R&D stages and now they’ve failed to deliver it we can have a bit of a chuckle and hope they are spending some of those billions instead coming up with decent iPhones that aren’t the price of my yearly council tax.
 
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netdoc66 said:
They really wanted to gouge people, charging a premium for this thing then realizing people are selling wireless chargers for $10. Sorry Apple, you missed this one. Greedy bastards.
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Yea, a premium pad like Nomad costs $130, and it has 3 coils and a straight forward design.

Airpower with 30-coils, NASA-grade engineering to turn them on/off to prevent heating etc, would have cost something like $200-300, at which point the entire thing is way outside its "accessory-level" price range. Apple either would have needed to severely undercut profit margins or sell it at a loss. It seems it took Apple 2-3 years to realize that just by price range the device was doomed from the start.
 
cmaier said:
I have a MacBook and a pro. Both with broken keyboards. One has been fixed once already. I can’t afford to lose them for a week so I use an external keyboard.

They suck.
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We have many 1st gen at work and none failed so far.
 
Crzyrio said:
It was demoed after the keynote, there were working prototypes.
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This guy was at the keynote event, he says there were Airpower demo units, but no one was getting any power, so I guess they weren't working, see video at 1:35

 
Heineken said:

Tell me if its charging?
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It's not.

Zero indications of the power charging icon.

D22qwSPXgAEARxT.jpg
 
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Abazigal said:
This video perhaps best explains what I have been trying to say all along. Specifically at T=3 min.
Apple is slow to update their desktops because that's the furthest from what they feel a computer ought to be.

The same design-led process which let to Apple creating the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods and (currently working on) AR glasses. Even the much-maligned Apple Watch band is an example of Apple "getting it". While it doesn't improve the functionality of your apple watch, it helps improve the aesthetics, which in turn leads to more people being willing to buy one.

When you focus only on technology in a vacuum, you get smartphones with hardware keyboards, netbooks, circular smartwatches and folding phones.

The reason why Apple hasn't done any of the above, and are instead focusing on creating what they are, is design.

Apple Glasses vs foldable phones is the latest example of Apple's design culture leading to an entirely different product than what engineering-led companies are doing.

If you don't like or want the vision of technology that Apple is promising, then the best option is probably to get out of the Apple ecosystem now. Apple is never going to stop being Apple, and that means not listening to their customers and continuing to give them what Apple thinks they want, rather than they say they want.

For better and for worse.
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Thank you for posting a link to that video. I think the video is 100% on target regarding Apple's strategy. Apple has their technology / product roadmap and they are herding their customers down that path. Some won't like that direction and will "stray away" to other platforms such as Android while other will like the path and join the herd along the way. The point is, Apple does have a plan and they routinely make decisions consistent with that plan. And I do not mean to imply Apple customers are sheep, I am using the term "herding" purely in the metaphoric sense.

I happen to like the direction so even if I don't like every decision Apple makes, I do trust that overall, they know what they are doing and I plan to stick with their products. Just this week I tried leaving my iPhone at home and going out with just my AW S4 and my AirPods. I was very happy with the capabilities I still had even without my phone with me. I am really looking forward to Apple's AR Glasses whenever they are released.
 
Chytin said:
I guess a lot of people will be refreshing their favorite Apple site this Monday.
If it is a April Fools joke, it is not a good one. You don't make jokes about devices with overheating issues.
If it goes on sale tomorrow, there will be lot of people holding off for a while just to wait and see if Apple really has solved those issues.
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It won't

It's dead
 
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ooToineoo said:
I used to be a HUGE Apple fan. I mean, I still use a whole lineup of Apple products daily but one must be delusional not to admit that Apple has lost it for good.

Ditching a MAT!!! Those guys invented the modern computer, the modern phone... and now they can't even gather the right team to cope with making a charging mat! How pathetic is that? All this, of course, AFTER they announced AirPods whose only innovative feature is wireless charging, and after picturing the ma ton the box.

From the iPhone 5's ugly upper and lower bands, to those silly plastic antenna lines on the 6, to the notch on iPhone X... I mean, Samsung has been doing better designs for years. It feels like each time there's a decision to make, noone at Apple is able to demand something better. Saying that those choices are good would be a comment from a brainwashed person. Yes, we've put up with those designs, because the products are good, because the ecosystem is excellent, and because the computers and still amazing to use and look at... But seriously... ANd what's with this square camera bump pictured in the latest leaks. This is plain UGLY. Nobody in their right mind, a tiny bit interested in design, would think this choice makes sense. What the hell is going on at the headquarters?

People around me are starting to switch, and I must say I'm actually starting to look at how bad it would be going out of the ecosystem for the phone... Other options look so much better now. And the OS difference not an actual problem anymore.

Wake up Apple.
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I so side and agree with you on this. I have an iPad 10.5 w/ Apple Pencil, Apple Watch Series 3, iPhone SE and an Apple TV. I’m basically trapped because I love all the products I have but if the iPhone XI leaks are spot on, I’m still not upgrading. The lack of the Qualcomm modem is a huge turnoff for iPhones.

I like the Android OS but I don’t feel like it’s efficient enough for my needs. Battery life is a big deal to me.
 
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