We all said RIP to the AirPower wireless charging mat when Apple officially killed the product last year. At the time, Apple said whatever prototypes it had been working on simply hadn’t met the company’s high standards. That said, it would appear that Apple has revived the project from the dead.
Leaker Jon Prosser took to Twitter over the weekend to cryptically claim that Apple’s trying to re-engineer the project from the ground up, focusing on wireless coils that would “displace heat more effectively” and that prototypes were being made. In the thread, he noted that none of the current prototypes support the Apple Watch, which presents the biggest hurdle as the company refuses to release a wireless charging mat that can’t work with its popular smartwatch.
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AirPower isn’t dead ????
The project is back on, internally. No guarantee that they’ll finalize and release it, but they haven’t given up yet and they’re trying to re-engineer the coils to displace heat more effectively. Prototyping is underway.
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— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) March 22, 2020
According to MacRumors, Prosser has a decent record when it comes to Google leaks but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo did say a smaller wireless charging mat would be on deck as a major new hardware product for the first half of 2020.
Prosser’s tweets do seem to address some of the rumoured issues that eventually led to Apple pulling the plug on the AirPower in the first place—namely poor heat management. Trying to cram 20 some odd coils into a sleek, tiny charging mat led to devices getting too hot and bugs with accurate battery level reporting.
iPhone 9 has just entered mass production.
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— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) March 18, 2020
But the revived AirPower mat isn’t the only Apple rumour coming from Prosser. Last week, he also tweeted that Apple has begun mass production on the iPhone 9. While the naming is not yet official, there’s been plenty of rumours that Apple is working on a successor to the popular iPhone SE. Basically, it’s understood to be the same form factor as the iPhone 8, but with updated guts and a markedly cheaper price point of roughly $US400 ($690). A recent report also noted that it’s likely we’ll also get an iPhone 9 Plus as well.
Prosser claims that Apple is currently working with China’s BYD to speed up production, but there’s been no official word from Apple. That’s possibly because Apple was forced to cancel a planned March event due to concerns surrounding the novel coronavirus. That hasn’t stopped Apple from releasing new products, however.
Last week, it announced a new iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and the Powerbeats 4. As for a 5G iPhone 12? Prosser claims it’s still happening, but it’s likely to face significant delays, possibly until November.