Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore Apple's latest foray into wireless charging has ended with the cancellation of the AirPower, the white disc that was supposed to be able to power multiple iThings simultaneously. Two years ago, Apple acquired a New Zealand-based startup called PowerbyProxi as it prepared to develop the AirPower for its various devices. On …
What Apple really wanted to do was what they normally do with standards: add a couple of bits to make it proprietary (DBLA -> AirPlay) and licence it to accessory makers but they were just too late to the game for wireless charging. No doubt they'll still earn a tidy some from companies wanting to stick something like designed for I-Phone™ on the box
"even [Apple] couldn't market their way out of this one."
Ye canna change the laws of physics, cap'n.
Or (from a slightly more definitive source):
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." (R.P. Feynman, RIP. Look it up.)
It's all been said and done before, and *some* people have learned lessons.
The faithful of the Church of Apple might be in the process of (re)learning this one.
No, it is Italian for strong*. To play something fortë is meant in the sense of "use your strength while playing", which results in a louder sound.
*Source (Italian): https://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/forte
It seems that Apple wanted to sell a product - a pad that simultaneously charged a phone, watchband earbuds - that nobody else could make. This convenience would have been its unique selling point, and without that most users would be just as well served by a 3rd party Qi charging mat by Belkin, Logitech, Samsung, Xiaomi etc al, and there would be no room for Apple to put a good margin on the price tag.
The very difficulty that would have given Apple a USP has proved in fact to have prevented Apple from achieving it.
The announcement of the pad was premature but this is hardly unprecedented... it was touch and go that the first iPhone Steve Jobs announced on stage would get through the presentation without crashing. He took a punt that the bugs would be ironed out between the announcement and the release date, and the punt paid off.
Apple must have had a few teams working on wireless charging. They were late to join the Qi standard party because they had been attempting to create a better system (i.e, charging over a greater distance) and had failed.
It's not the multiple devices part that is hard, it is the ability to put the devices *anywhere* on the mat to charge, rather than on fixed sweet-spots like existing multi-device wireless chargers.
Existing multi-device chargers just have 2 or 3 coils in fixed places inside. Apple's design had 15 or 30 overlapping coils so you could place the devices anywhere,
Really? Have you been visiting the Apple Store in your time machine again? In 2019, the only storage available in Apple’s (admittedly expensive) laptops is SSD. Unless you can find a link to one fitted with a spinner (the last of which, to my knowledge was, the old MacBook Pro with an optical drive - which has been out of production for many years now)
I remember them as well. I had one for some regular long train journies in the 80s and happily set it up and tapped away debugging on one of the BR trains with my power lead plugged into the mains socket by the luggage rack (which limited my choice of seat). I got some very odd looks from BR staff but I assumed I was not breaking written rules (no one had thought someone would be that stupid) as I was never called on it.
Ahh the silly things we do in our late yoof.
Funny you mention that. I was on a train on a day out Sheffield and spotted a commuter typing furiously full of source code. My first thought was he's behind in his work. Then I my god that's how I used to be.
Never mined he will have a psychotic break and every thing will be fine.
It's a hybrid drive. I'm no Mac fan but since everything that matters will be on flash it would just be bad engineering to use a faster disk. I've long since ceased concerning myself with the speed of the hard drives I buy. The only thing that matters is capacity and cost.
bad engineering to use a faster disk.
I don't know how large or how fast the flash cache is in Apple's Fusion drives, but the original consumer Hybrid - the Momentus XT - backed 4GB of flash with 7,200rpm rust. I think later models had 8GB, but even so, that's not a lot of cache for a modern OS and the sort of heavyweight apps typically installed on an iMac, and presumably it is the need for space that dictates the use of a hybrid drive as 1TB pure SSD is still pretty pricey.
The Momentus' cache was write-through as well, so a faster disc speeds up writes, regardless.
Of course, in an iMac there's probably room for two separate drives. Fit half a TB for OS and apps and a fast spinner for local data. Maybe even make the OS present them as one device...
M.
It's only the cache that is an SSD style on the hybrid drive. You WILL notice the difference from a 5400RPM drive to a full on SSD. Even the slowest of SSDs would be quicker than that drive. I've replaced a few 5400RPM drives recently on laptops that were almost unusable. Cloned the drive to an SSD (so same install of Windows 10 to rule that out) and the SSD brought the laptop back to life.
Years back I stuck, stupidly as I wasn't aware, a couple of 5400rpm drives in my PC and noticed the copy speed difference to the 7200 drives.
You will notice the difference.
https://youtu.be/7wICIuHK4-E
It's only the cache that is an SSD style on the hybrid drive. You WILL notice the difference from a 5400RPM drive to a full on SSD
The point I was replying to was one which said there would be no advantage in a hybrid drive (i.e. one with a small amount of flash storage working as a persistent cache for a conventional spinning disc) having the spinning part working at anything faster than 5,400rpm. We all know that just about any SSD will thrash just about any HDD in most real-world tests, whether the HDD is 5,400, 7,200 or 10,000rpm.
It's obviously a fairly complex interaction and I have no experience of Apple's drives, only the Momentus XT, which I have installed a couple of times. In this disc there is a - by modern standards - very small amount of flash (i.e. 4GB or 8GB) which is only used during reads. Writes go straight to the spinning disc for security / consistency reasons.
In concept I suppose it's a bit like ReadyBoost, but done in the drive's firmware rather than by the OS.
4GB is probably not enough to cache all the parts of OSX, Photoshop and whatever else might be loaded on startup, so some items will come straight from the spinning disc each time.
In those cases (always write-through, some reads coming from rust) moving from 5,400rpm to 7,200rpm absolutely will make a difference, though I believe that Seagate's later offerings were "intellispin", rather than fixed speed.
Another poster pointed out that Apple's drives come with 32GB or 128GB SSD. With that amount of "cache" it's entirely possible both that OSX and key applications will fit in their entirety into the SSD, and that writes can go to the SSD by default, with the drive "archiving" to rust during idle moments. In this case there will be very little performance benefit from 7,200rpm over 5,400rpm, and the slower speed should result in lower power consumption and possibly longer life; the SSD is likely to outlast the rust anyway.
Interesting. I'll have to investigate. The beauty of the Momentus XT was that it was entirely transparent to the operating system, appearing simply as a normal SATA drive. I even have one fitted to my RiscPC. Other "hybrid" drives have needed OS drivers. I wonder which type this is?
M.
The Register asked Apple for comment. We haven't heard back and we're not surprised.
Not a tea-snorter but that did elicit a chuckle, thanks.
I sometimes imagine a vast special projects department at Apple purely there to deploy interception tools to prevent employees accidentally speaking to anyone associated with El Reg.
Then I imagine the pleasure I'd get from reading an El Reg insider scoop discovering said programme.
"After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project"
That statement is very telling, considering Apple's so-called engineering standards are actually very low. If this product didn't live up to the engineering standards of a company that allowed "your holding it wrong", multiple bending issues with iPhones causing solder to break, laptops with glued together bezel pieces, laptops with easily broken keyboards riveted to the case, and more than this had to be a very bad engineering fail.
But it is at this point I have to ask Apple, what is so wrong with using an industry standard? Why do you have to make your own pretty and proprietary thing and put something banal in front of it like "i" or "air"?
Because they have always since the original Mac done it that way. The short lived licensing deal which the returning Jobs sensibly killed excepted. If Microsoft hadn't existed Apply would have had to invent it in order to have something to be 'better' than.
Though with the Chinese consumer getting nationalistic over their tech and not even the iWatch pushing phone sales they are in trouble.
In terms of the watch, as a runner and physiologist I was intrigued by the ECG upgrade. I'd quite like to have a squiz at the traces from that since I can interpret them. Well normal ones. Also as someone whose atria get funky when I run a lot (checked out by the cardiac MD's) if I got one I would have to disable the 'phone the doctor there's an atrial fibrillation' feature.
When you're fit enough with an athletic heart it can get quite funky at rest. A bit like how the engines of racecars don't idle smoothly or even at all in some cases. It is incompatible with the high performance bit. Even well specked road cars have something of this feature and the savvy driver will rev the engine when stopped in traffic.
I am reminded of the observation that you can commute quite happily in a Porsche 911, but not in a Lamborghini or Ferrari. It's the difference between engineering for usable power and engineering for show.
Any self respecting modern engine sets its own idle speed anyway.
If a "well specked" (bird shit?) car has an idle problem it is because the injection and ignition systems have been poorly engineered. With modern variable cam timing and algorithmic control of the ignition point, it shouldn't happen. Unless some boy racer has tried to improve the performance without knowing what he is doing.
1) Low margin item - and I do not mean cheap : low margin in proportion to the resources needed and likely sales, which leads to >
AND 2) it could have made perfect sense (and I do not believe they could not have solved the engineering issues) if Apple were brave enough to eliminate all ports from a future generation phone, lightning, USB-C, everything (which would have been interesting). But if there is always going to be a physical port of some kind why spend valuable resources on a fancy dongle (which others are doing nicely at, thank you).
Finally, like many here I have cupboards full of plugs, adapters, chargers and cables going all the way back to the first iPod, as well as many other devices. WTF am I supposed to do with that bloody lot (alongside the crates full of other cables and ... I’m gonna stop here to protect my blood pressure).
I think you're right that Apple don't see the point in just making a generic Qi charging pad since there's no money in competing with Belkin, Xiaomi, Anker, Samsung etc.
They were attempting to do something difficult - make a pad that charged three devices simultaneously without the user being too careful with device placement - since that same difficulty has so far prevented Apple's rivals making such a thing. Alas for Apple the difficulty has proved too great.
A three device charger makes sense only for an of a iPhone, Apple watch and earbuds.
It's not like the charging pad is practical. If you're charging then how can you use your device at the same time? Pretty useless device. I would give a teeny tiny bit of credit to Apple for admitting the quality standards weren't good enough and removing the product. Apples usual tactic when devices fail is stonewalling. Large numbers of people complain about GPU failures, stuck keys etc. and Apple deny there's a problem but offer an expensive fix - they don't do repairs, just replace components with equally fault prone components.
"1) Low margin item - and I do not mean cheap : low margin in proportion to the resources needed and likely sales"
I think it depends on where they planned on going with it if it could be done successfully. The first version was certainly only ever going to be a niche product, but if it worked you could see it being improved to the point where you could build it into desk surfaces and things. AirPower as advertised didn't have much use, but being able to just throw any device on your table and have it charge would be incredible.
I see it similar to the folding phones everyone's pushing out at the moment. In their current form, they're completely pointless. But if they can prove the technology in expensive niche products, just think what we could be getting 10 or so years from now.
They were working with Energous on distance charging at the same time they were developing this, so I always thought making a charging pad was just a step along the way to their real goal. Their charging pad patents showed 15 coils, whereas no existing pads have more than 2 or 3, so they were clearly setting some ambitious goals for it but I guess their solution was too complex in the end. Hopefully the distance charging work is still ongoing, as that is 1000x more useful than charging pads. I have no interest in buying a wireless charging pad and wouldn't have had any interest in Apple's had it come out either. Wireless charging for phones is still a solution in search of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
A little wireless charging tower that could charge devices within a few feet would be a game changer (especially for smart watches since you could leave them on all the time) Stick one at your desk and it could keep a wireless keyboard and mouse charged without having to place them in a special spot. Might even be able to charge a laptop if there was line of sight between the back of the display (where the coils would need to be) and the tower.
"Wireless charging for phones is still a solution in search of a problem as far as I'm concerned."
Problem: Having to replace the charging (and primary connection) port in the lifetime of one battery and twice in the useful life on the last phone.
Solution: Current phone wirelessly charges, charging port still going strong due to not being used as often. Charging cables are lasting longer as well.
Distant wireless charging is doable, but the power losses are great with current tech. We haven't progressed much beyond where Nikola Tesla left off. He was focused on wireless power transmission over a distance for use as you go, not so much for charging which requires more power.
I can't say I've seen a charging port break before on a phone except for the time it broke after so much else was already broken that I just threw the device away. My problem with charging pads I've seen is that they are only about as big as the phone itself, require rather precise positioning of the phone on the pad, and don't work if the phone has a case. This makes it easy to put the phone down in what you think is the correct position, not look at it to confirm because it's at night and you're planning to sleep, and get up in the morning to find that you put the phone down at enough of an angle that it didn't charge.
If you cannot replace the port, that's the fault of the design, not the physicality of it. Wheels are easy to swap for a reason. But a manufacture could glue them in... consumers would walk if they did.
People remove a headphone jack, and consumers lap it up. That's the problem. The anti consumer actions (removing repairability, options, useability etc), are ignored.
I've never had a port fail in a phone, though I've never had a phone that used microUSB which was a terrible design doomed to lead to lots of broken ports. USB-C is better but still not as good as Lightning insofar as with Lightning the port is just a hole, so if something breaks it is the tab on the cable you are connecting to it. The one flaw with Lightning is that the port in the phone attracts pocket lint like that's its job and will eventually have trouble making a solid connection due to the buildup, so you need to dig around with a needle or safety pin every 6 months or so (amazing the volume of lint that you'll pull out)
Fantasy. So called "wireless charging" can have as much distance as my cordless kettle or an induction hob. The "wireless charger" needs a cable and a LARGER mains SMPSU as it has losses. It's inductive magnetic transfer, like a transformer core in two halves, primary on one and secondary on the other. An air gap more than a few mm and it doesn't work at all. A cordless kettle is just like a DECT phone dock, or security two-way radio dock. Actually very long ago you could charge a phone in a dock in the car or in the office. Easier than a fiddly connector. Bring them back as an option!
If you use RF to get range, then you create massive interference and need more complex certification. A lot more losses in the transmitter, path and receiver. You might need x10 the power of the existing inductive/transformer types.
Also for travelling a so called wireless charging plate takes up more space in your bag than a conventional charger, as it needs a larger PSU to power it!
Magnet, powerful, 2 for orientation, pair on each phone/gadget and number of pairs on charger depending on number of gadgets charging it supports.
Then simple external USB connectors with smart testing for continuity/voltage/charging connection (to test if in water or on charging plate), or basically what Motorola and a few others already do with their external USB interfaces on the backs of phones.
I mean, Pogo pins have existed for how long now?
Old Nokias had external charging and data pins, more recently Xperia Z mobiles have had magnetic external charging pins, as have Moto's mod system.
I just can't see Moto's sane mod system gaining much traction until other Android vendors can use it. The protocol is AOSP GreyBus but the physical connector is Moto proprietary.
DougS noted, "...showed 15 coils..."
They could use smart switching circuitry to 'explore' each coil several times per second, and then apply full power once they find a load on one or more of them. With correct system design, they could have a hundred coils if they wish. With zero downside except cost.
In response to inevitable rebuttal: Yes, I am. Much.
Reading around the Qi "multiple cooperative flux generators" topic a bit I think this may be roughly what they were trying to do (there are a few more wrinkles in compensating to localise the field). Why they ran into a brick wall I'm not sure, the harmonics explanation given in the linked article doesn't sound quite right, but the Qi standard appears to rely on driving the system in or near resonance, so complex resonances between the coils may be an issue, especially since the device is meant to communicate back to the charger by modulating its load.
Apple's hardware record has not been stellar recently. Its laptop "butterfly" keyboards elicited enough complaints and lawsuits that the company sleeved the internals to prevent dust from blocking the optical sensors.
Apple are on the third generation butterfly keyboard and areas still having problems...
Appl Still Hasn’t Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm
I think they need some real engineers in instead of some pretty thin box designers.
Is anyone even vaguely surprised about this?
Rest of phone industry has settled on USB as an interface, whether it's micro on lower end kit or the move towards type-C. Apple still use proprietary connectors.
Rest of phone industry has settled on Qi for wireless charging, Apple goes proprietary. And so it goes with miracast for wireless display (although Google have now decided to be dicks about that and force Android users on to ChromeCast), micro sd for expandable storage, 3.5mm headphone jacks etc etc.
At this point with China rising so fast, everything Apple is doing is aimed at vendor lock in. Unrepairable products mean expensive insurance is essential. Apple services are designed to be incompatible with standards to make migration as difficult as possible.
Even if the products were as good as their adverts say I wouldn't buy them because over the years I've realised just how essential it is to be able to second source everything.
I was reading on a car website of someone who had a fault on an Audi. The Audi garage told him an entire subassembly had to be replaced, $900. Having an evil mind he took the defective part to a VW dealer who sold him it for $15.
Apple wants to be Audi, but without people being able to get at the VW parts bin.
It's not only the cost thing of second source. It's flexibility.
I can get a Thinkpad repaired almost anywhere in the UK. You can find a small PC repair guy and he can fix it. He can get parts fast from a number of suppliers. If Lenovo don't have any in stock in the UK, you can always get a copy.
@Franco
Apple *do* use Qi. Qi is a baseline, supplying around 5W. Faster wireless charging is possible, but it's not a mandatory part of the Qi standard. Google's Pixel for example will only charge faster than the Qi baseline if they handshake with the wireless pad from a specific vendors. Apple phones will wireless charge up to 7.5W, and apparently are happy to do so from a Samsung charging pad. Galaxy phones can accept 9W.
Apple's iPhone was using 3.5 mm jacks when Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola were largely using proprietary weird audio connectors in their feature phones, and often several flavours per vendor.
Apple created Lightning connectors before USB C, and Lightning, like USB C, is clearly superior to micro USB. Regulations that would force a vendor to use a poorer connector would not be in the interests of the consumer.
I don't use Miracast (an inelegant way of doing things) but Chromecast plays nice with Android, iOS and MacOS kit.
1. If they used Qi properly, then it would be interoperable with other vendors kit. It is not, therefore Apple are proprietary even if they are using parts of the Qi standard.
2. They have now removed the 3.5mm jack, what they did in the past is irrelevant. If they could get away with it they'd lock out bluetooth to only work with Airpods as well.
3. That is the most ridiculous argument I have ever seen in my life. Apple have never done anything that is the interest of the consumer, only that is in the interest of Apple. They have always been proprietary on the connections, and caused a lot of problems for people when they changed to Lightning and docks didn't work anymore.
Apple spent years criticising Microsoft for their anti-competitive practices, now they are the industry leaders in it. More and more people that I know are leaving Apple because of their attempts at vendor lock in and ever increasing prices for no particular upgrades.
Apple's iPhone was using 3.5 mm jacks when Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola were largely using proprietary weird audio connectors in their feature phones, and often several flavours per vendor.
Apple wasn't making any phones back when Nokia (for example) was still using the pop-port and its predecessors for headsets. By the time Jobs decided to get into the phone game, just about everyone were using 3.5mm port for headphones/headsets.
In fact Apple was one of the first, if not the first, to abolish the very convenient standard 3.5mm headphone connection...
It seemed to matter to you, since you chose to lead with that.
As for the dreaded "lever vulnerability", I've lost count of the number of phones, walkmen, mini-disc, cd, mp3 players, stereos, computers, guitar amplifiers I've had. Number of them that have fallen foul of the fearful lever vulnerability? None. Those still sweating in fear about it at night might also observe most earbud headsets use a right-angle jack.
Number of bluetooth speakers/headsets I own? Three. Number that have intermittent problems connecting or arbitrarily decide to connect in lo-fi mode, requiring faffing about in bluetooth settings to re-pair? Three. Number with abysmal battery life? Two. Number that cost less than a decent pair of wired headphones or earbuds? None.
It's got its place (I've got each of those three devices for a reason, prime among them the fact there's no standard for phone controls), but bluetooth involves adding more complexity to otherwise simple hardware, for mostly illusory convenience. More inconvenient to uncoil a cable or to reboot your phone?
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