I see echoes of that announcement in that of the AirPower. Why was it announced alongside the iPhones 8 and the iPhone X? What story does it complete? It can’t be the inductive charging story: surely the entire point of using the Qi standard was that there were already loads of charging mats on the market that you could buy — Phil Schiller said as much during that keynote. So what’s the advantage in letting us know about the AirPower far in advance of when it would be available?
It says a lot about Apple that they’re not able to ship a product as simple as this. There are no in-house chips, this uses a protocol that is widely available on the market, and there’s no miniaturization – as with the AirPods – that is problematic. Given how few products Apple actually releases, the delay in this one says a lot about the company.
I wonder if they’ll invite some journalists to a sit-down to explain how their design wasn’t future-proof, and how they had to start from scratch, and how they would promise a charging pad for 2019.
Source: It Has Been 229 Days Since the AirPower Charging Mat Was Announced — Pixel Envy