It’s funny that John Gruber’s ‘little birdies’ at Apple had it completely right back in September.
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Probably had the new AirPods in the queue and didn’t want to show their hand before releasing them. “Here are our new qi-charged AirPods but we can’t make a charger for them.”
Why didn’t Apple release a different Qi charger design? In the process of developing AirPower they must have learned to make a great mat without overlapping coils.
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Why release a Qi charger if it’s exactly the same as every other Qi charger on the market?
Yeah, they kind of have Belkin to do that for them.
Edit: in trying to determine Apple’s interest in Belkin, it turns out that Foxconn now owns Belkin. So it’s kind of a Mercedes / Chrysler situation - perhaps.
Because the market is replete with pads that limitations of discrete zones and power limits. AirPower was designed to be something that extended the Qi technology to be something unique, which pushed the standard beyond anything currently available. (And Apple said they were working to extend the standard so eventually other devices could replicate.) Apple’s mandate was to allow placement anywhere on the pad up to three main products to be charged (AirPods, iPhone, and Apple Watch), using 24 power coils of various sizes, and controlled by a custom charging chip powered by a version of iOS. But reports are that heat issues could not be overcome, that heat resulted in reduced charging performance, and that heat also affected the charging chip.
If you want something that does less you can find it now. Apple didn’t want to make a me-too product.
Not sure about that. There was AirPower documentation on new AirPods packaging and found on their Australian site (IIRC) until just the other day. It seems like they made strenuous efforts in the last few months to overcome the design obstacles, and, when they couldn’t in time to even pre-announce it with the already-produced Qi Airpods case, they finally made the decision to kill it in the last few days.
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Until someone comes up with a solution that allows me to toss all my devices into a “charging drawer”, I’ll stick with cables. After 7 years of buying devices with lightning ports, I have an embarrassing number of them.
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Oh yeah, definitely know where you’re coming from on that.
So maybe Airpower worked but could not fulfil regulations … https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/
As mentioned by someone in the comments on that thread, this Energous WattUp technology looks better anyway.
After seeing the AirPower cancellation news, I bought the Nomad three coil + watch base station from Best Buy. It took three days to arrive to my local store. When I went to pick it up yesterday, they scanned the barcode in the Best Buy app, and then they asked for my ID and scanned it to make sure it wasn’t fake. The employee said they have yet to see a fake ID at Best Buy.
The dark look looks good on my wooden nightstand and the height is low enough that it doesn’t look like I have a block on my desk. The Watch charger stands up, but I think it’s actually better than AirPower would have been in that the Watch is oriented to support Nightstand mode instead of laying upside down. (I tap the table to check the time and the alarm occasionally.)
Placement takes a bit of thought, but it’s not too fiddly. The XS will charge if it’s aligned to the edge of the charger. The AirPods case needs a bit more careful placement but the case LED lighting up is beginning to train my muscle memory. 
The charger delays turning off when you pick up a device, which is annoying but I don’t know if that’s normal for these. The charging LED is a dull orange, but the fully charged LED is white and too bright for a dark bedroom, so I am going to mask them with something translucent. And although it has three coils, each with its own LED, there isn’t room to charge three devices on the pad. I’m not sure if it would even work.
Overall, I’m happy I bought it. It’s nice to just set everything down on the table and go to sleep. I should never have to think about my AirPods case charge or the quality of a lightning port cable, lint in a port, etc., again. It’s nice to tuck away one cable instead of managing a few of them. Also, I no longer have to worry about a family member stealing a lightning cable. However, I don’t have any idea how long it’ll last, so when it breaks I’ll be comparing the cost of the charge cables and adapters I think I would have gone through in the meantime.
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Tuned into part of the ATP live broadcast last night and they had an anonymous tip from before Airpower was cancelled that what was to be AirPower was actually from a product that PowerByProxi had developed and were shopping around. The deal wasn’t even finalized when they announced the product was coming during the iPhone X event.
Once onboard it appeared that they were then part of the iPad Pro/Apple Pencil 2 Qi charging implementation. So the full team was no longer on AirPower to go along the fact that it hadn’t been really proved to work in production but had already been announced. Hence why they slowly stopped mentioning it until it was officially cancelled recently.
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You were more than likely right.