Apple’s AirPower charging mat was cancelled last year, after the tech giant was apparently struggling to get a handle on it, but now it seems like it’s back on the cards.
The AirPower mat was declared officially dead last year after Apple couldn’t quite figure out how to get it working and admitted defeat. At the time, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, Dan Riccio, said:
“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have canceled the project. We apologise to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward.”
But it seems that the kinks may have been ironed out, with Twitter leaker Jon Prosser posting photos of what looks like the AirPower mat functioning with the Apple Watch.
Well, you guys wanted a better picture of “C68”… ????
Remember how I said that the main problem was that current prototypes didn’t support Apple Watch?
Yeah.
Well.They got the Watch working… ???? pic.twitter.com/LvBeNAAtt3
— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) June 18, 2020
The photo shows the AirPower mat loaded up with the Apple Watch and AirPods, which is a big deal because the mat couldn’t manage to charge the watch last time. The Apple Watch uses a proprietary magnetic charger which Prosser explains needs more energy to juice up, and is what caused compatibility issues last year, but it seems like a workaround has been found.
Back in April, Prosser tweeted about a prototype that has the ability “to route power to specific coil regions and can dynamically wait for temperatures to drop before applying more power – preventing it from overheating.” And there were also rumours of different sized mats – the C68 for multiple devices, and the C26 for a smaller single device.
Apple has yet to confirm anything of course, but its annual WWDC event is taking place on Monday, so we might hear more then. [Ubergizmo]