Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Report: AirPower Has Entered Production and Coming Soon
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Actually 22 coils, if the rumors from September and yesterday are correct. That’s how you can place your devices anywhere on the pad.
You’re getting worked up posting a paragraph over a small post I made. Go outside man
I upvoted your post yesterday
Got this one instead
I wasn't quite sure why at the time; but I thought about it a bit and I prefer Belkin's design because it's obvious what it is and how you use it (i.e., it offers good affordance).
The problem with Apple's industrial design is that everything is becoming a featureless slab. In a few years it'll be hard to tell what does what (or if it's just a piece of cardboard packaging that does nothing at all)
Actually you can completely flatten the Milanese loop (the magnetic latch come out at the other end) but you will still be out of luck with the link bracelet without removing it unless Apple Watch can charge face down or on its side.
I’ve got exactly the same set up and it does exactly what I need for less than £50. It also works with all my watch bands which isn’t the case with the AirPower.
Shoot us all a link to one of the MANY other wireless charging pads of this size in the marketplace that also has 3 separate overlapping induction coils & supports 3 devices at once and negotiates them dynamically... where they solved all the thermal issues surrounding such a feat, that took Apple engineers so long.
We’ll be waiting over here for that link...
*listens to crickets chirping*
Side note:
Anyone else think that the sheer size of this thing may support a stealth addition to the 2019 iPad lineup to support wireless charging?
I know that’s the one thing that would make me consider it, even north of a $150 price point.
You do realize Apple were the first to release a high resolution "Retina" display on mobile devices years ago with the iPhone 4, right?
I have no idea if you are being sardonic or not.
A few interesting things I have come to realised over the years I have spent here at Macrumours.
What gets the people here excited, such as new Macs, I really have little enthusiasm in. I have a 5k iMac, just upgraded to a 11” iPad Pro, and am complementing this with a HP elite windows tablet issued from work. My 11” MBA is collecting dust in a drawer somewhere.
The things that the people here like to criticise, I happen to like. I am fine with the placement of the charging port on the Apple mouse, the design of the iPhone battery case, and have no issues with the charging method of the previous Apple Pencil (that’s how I charged it for close to three years and I honestly find it convenient and intuitive). I just don’t understand the vitriol being levelled at them.
While the iPad gets much flak for lacking access to a file system or mouse support, that hasn’t support me from using it to help me teach since 2012. I love that it runs ios, amongst other things.
I ordered the Airpods the day they were a announced and 2 years later, it’s pretty much the only pair of earphones I have used.
I am also loving my Apple Watch and can’t wait to see where Apple goes with their wearables foray.
And am I the only one excited by Apple’s rumoured foray into transportation?
So there seems to be a very consistent trend where I just am not interested in what the rest here are excited over, while also being enthused over what the posters here appeared to dislike. What the critics seem pessimistic over, I am hopeful.
It does make me wonder at time. Whether it is indeed Apple who has lost the plot, or if it is the long timers here who are the ones unable / unwilling to keep up with the times, and they either just don’t realise it, or don’t want to admit it.
Of course I do. Obviously "retina" moniker was misleading otherwise they would not neet to increase resolution later (which they did). I also realize that iPhone 4 simply used the tech developed by the industry at the time. It was one of the high resolution displays used for smartphones. For example, Sharp 936SH (released in 2009, one year before iPhone 4) had display with 327 ppi - same ppi as iPhone 4. So, no, Apple was not the first to relase high resolution display on mobile devices. Apple rarely are the first at anything. They are mostly software company. When it comes to hardware, they mostly buy it from others so it's difficult for them to be the first or exclusive.
Lots of people also saying that Apple must be incompetent, both in this thread and earlier ones, because they hadn't released it yet. There is a reason that all of the multi-charging pads have very specific areas for specific devices. Heat buildup and over-all power draw are probably just 2 of them, but they are pretty big, and if it had been an easy (and affordable) fix then one of the 3rd party suppliers or a competing smartphone company would have done so. Especially now, with Apple being so late getting theirs out: Imagine the bragging rights. But how many are out there? None.
I still think Apple should announce, and actually should have announced a while ago, a status update on the product. And I did complain in the earlier threads and I still don't think their wall of silence on issues like this is helping them.
The things that the people here like to criticise, I happen to like. I am fine with the placement of the charging port on the Apple mouse, the design of the iPhone battery case, and have no issues with the charging method of the previous Apple Pencil (that’s how I charged it for close to three years and I honestly find it convenient and intuitive). I just don’t understand the vitriol being levelled at them.
It does make me wonder at time. Whether it is indeed Apple who has lost the plot, or if it is the long timers here who are the ones unable / unwilling to keep up with the times, and they either just don’t realise it, or don’t want to admit it.
Things like the silly placement of the charging port on the Apple mouse and the previous Apple Pencil are things that are widely frowned upon outside of Macrumors as well. If you don't understand why people think choices like that are bad then i'm not sure what to tell you, the fact Apple changed the Apple pencil charging method on the new iPad says that even Apple know they made a mistake with that one. Perhaps you need to look at your own way of thinking before making claims that people here are unwilling to keep up with the times lol.
I find the mentality in this thread to be a bit short sighted.
AirPower (the mat) is basically a proof of concept of a much bigger wireless charging roadmap Apple is readying. People seem to just see a mat that charges 3 devices and don’t understand what is actually going on here.
It’s a mesh of charging coils that intelligently recognizes where a device is and only turns on the required coils in a way that doesn’t require finicky placement.
What does that mean? It means Apple has cracked the nut on how to develop entire charging surfaces. Surfaces that automatically detect where to route power to AND avoid the massive danger of conductive objects placed on a wireless charger that shouldn’t be placed there.
This will scale.
Expect wireless charging MacBooks in the not to distant future.
Nobody has this tech, because it’s a ludicrously hard engineering problem. Even with a full year of heads up not one competitor has even attempted this, instead taking the dullard route of just spacing out coils and marketing them as if it’s comparable tech. It’s not.
This may not be a worthy reason to buy one (I’m not, I’m still comfortably using a 6s), but anyone with an ounce of foresight can see what happens when this scales....
AirPower (the mat) is basically a proof of concept of a much bigger wireless charging roadmap Apple is readying. People seem to just see a mat that charges 3 devices and don’t understand what is actually going on here.
It’s a mesh of charging coils that intelligently recognizes where a device is and only turns on the required coils in a way that doesn’t require finicky placement.
What does that mean? It means Apple has cracked the nut on how to develop entire charging surfaces. Surfaces that automatically detect where to route power to AND avoid the massive danger of conductive objects placed on a wireless charger that shouldn’t be placed there.
This will scale.
Expect wireless charging MacBooks in the not to distant future.
Nobody has this tech, because it’s a ludicrously hard engineering problem. Even with a full year of heads up not one competitor has even attempted this, instead taking the dullard route of just spacing out coils and marketing them as if it’s comparable tech. It’s not.
This may not be a worthy reason to buy one (I’m not, I’m still comfortably using a 6s), but anyone with an ounce of foresight can see what happens when this scales....
Sorry Apple, I got one from walgreens for like 15, or 20 dollars, and it glows blue when charging, works well on all wireless charging phones. Not going to pay some ridiculous amount for the same thing with an Apple icon on it.
Try to step back and objectivate things a little. Look at the product catalogue, the number of aged products, the limited number of product launches, the amount of money attributed to R&D vs. realised in products. Look at accomplishments vs. the financial momentum.I have no idea if you are being sardonic or not.
A few interesting things I have come to realised over the years I have spent here at Macrumours.
What gets the people here excited, such as new Macs, I really have little enthusiasm in. I have a 5k iMac, just upgraded to a 11” iPad Pro, and am complementing this with a HP elite windows tablet issued from work. My 11” MBA is collecting dust in a drawer somewhere.
The things that the people here like to criticise, I happen to like. I am fine with the placement of the charging port on the Apple mouse, the design of the iPhone battery case, and have no issues with the charging method of the previous Apple Pencil (that’s how I charged it for close to three years and I honestly find it convenient and intuitive). I just don’t understand the vitriol being levelled at them.
While the iPad gets much flak for lacking access to a file system or mouse support, that hasn’t support me from using it to help me teach since 2012. I love that it runs ios, amongst other things.
I ordered the Airpods the day they were a announced and 2 years later, it’s pretty much the only pair of earphones I have used.
I am also loving my Apple Watch and can’t wait to see where Apple goes with their wearables foray.
And am I the only one excited by Apple’s rumoured foray into transportation?
So there seems to be a very consistent trend where I just am not interested in what the rest here are excited over, while also being enthused over what the posters here appeared to dislike. What the critics seem pessimistic over, I am hopeful.
It does make me wonder at time. Whether it is indeed Apple who has lost the plot, or if it is the long timers here who are the ones unable / unwilling to keep up with the times, and they either just don’t realise it, or don’t want to admit it.
Fill in het BCG matrix as I gave you a start with. Be souvereign and critical, look beyond your personal favorites
You are correct. It’s really just an adult variation on the bogeyman that is used to frighten little kids. The ionizing energy E of a photon is E=hf where h is Planck’s constant and f is the frequency of electromagnetic wave. The frequency of visible light is about 10,000 times that of a radio/microwave. So the visible light coming off a simple candle has far more ability to ionize an atom in a person’s cells than a radio/microwave and it’s ability to do that is close to nil. The threat comes from when you start going higher in frequency such as UV light, Xrays and beyond. Also the electron in an atom absorbs one photon at a time so if it is bombarded with ten thousand radio/microwave photons it still couldn’t free itself and escape from the orbit of the atom. In nonlinear optics an electron can absorb two photons at a time but that occurs extremely high optical powers such as in a Class IV laser. If a person gets hit with optical power that high getting cancer is the least of their problems. A microwave oven uses radio/microwaves to cook food by basically coupling and grabbing molecules and shaking them to create heat. So if someone was up close to a high power radio/microwave transmitter they would get burned as they would in a fire but that would be an obvious danger. But this isn’t the same as some imperceptible ionizing an electron by a high energy photon from an Xray that would cause cancer.
Fascinating...almost 350 posts about a wireless charging mat. Apple couldn't have paid for better publicity.
We don't really know what exactly they cracked and how well it works. They may have settled on a simple design with fixed device locations. Another potential issue is that even if they managed to enable charging in arbitrary position on the mat, what's the efficiency of it? What if, depending on the location the charging might be conducted at, say, 10 to 100% of the nominal performance? That would suck because in this case most would prefer to be required to place the device at exact location (not a big deal) than get sub-par performance.
You may not know many geeks... Novel solutions to senseless challenges get our hearts racing.
Whether AirPower succeeds or fails, there is often value in new technical approaches when applied to different problems. And knowing that an approach doesn't work is just as important as knowing it does.
3D near field analysis is a really tricky thing. If Apple has made a breakthrough here, the Airpower product may be the least interesting part of the discussion.
I'm curious about that part in particular. 22 coils among 3 layers (no reason to believe that's actually the configuration, but it's something to think about). Are they arranged and stacked to better direct the energy, or are they arranged and stacked so they can always charge things by turning on the one right coil.
If they had enough control to charge my phone when it's stacked on top of my iPad on top of the charging mat, that would be a trick worth seeing. All side by side is taking more space than my nightstand can provide.
However, this ‘Publicity’ doesn’t reach the mass market for the average consumer that has no idea anything about the Airpower possible future launch, yet, you have ‘tech’ members who are aware of the possible re-release of the Air power in the future, because they pay attention to sites like this. Those are two things that are very much different. Apple didn’t publicize anything, it’s these factories in China that are leaking any information that may/or may not be valid.
The entire point of the technology, from reading through the patents on it, is to solve that exact problem you’re describing. It delivers peak charging efficiency regardless of orientation.
If you’d like to peruse:
https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/inductive-wireless-charging/