AirPower alternatives?

Apple has announced the AirPower Wireless Charging Mat is officially cancelled.

“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize 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," said Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering in a statement provided to TechCrunch .

With that unfortunate bit of news, I thought we could use this thread to talk about wireless charging mat alternatives especially those which can charge multiple devices at once. Show us what you have found so far

So far I’m leaning towards this.

Now it doesn’t charge the Watch wirelessly, but with certain bands like the Milanese Loop, Sport Loop and Link Bracelet, you cant actually put them down on a charging mat without removing the band anyways.

This one is pretty pricey though so I’ll be looking around for a bit before I make up my mind

Utter incompetence from Apple

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I saw that Nomad one on YouTube and it looks nice. It’s actually the only one I’ve seen out there.

:rofl: that’s probably taking it a bit too far, but yeah they probably shouldn’t have announced it and printed it on the AirPods wireless charging case box until it was a lot further down the track

:scream: :open_mouth: :scream: :open_mouth: :scream:

Is that official? I mean - honest to god - Apple announced a product, then said - Ahh, not doing it?

runs to google

Zoinks!

What on earth could have gone wrong for them to reach this PR-nightmare inducing decision?! Was it catching fire? Destroying the electronics it was meant to be reviving? Sparking wormholes? It couldn’t have been a cost issue - even if the RRP had to be $999 we know that Apple builds products that people will want to buy, not just to price points… cough

I wasn’t hanging out waiting for Apple’s wireless charging offering - we only own 2 devices capable of using it, and 1 lives in a magnetised case, so can’t use one anyways. My $35 option from Woolies is working fine.

But - ye gads… PR meltdown… Move over G5 Powerbook…

Surely they could have put something together and released that? Even if it wasn’t what they were talking about earlier?

Why not a shaped pad with three charging points using the pop up piece from their charger (which is expensive but ‘just works’).
image

A custom recessed slot for AirPods along side a large pad for the phone.

Sure it wouldn’t be the put anything anywhere design they were originally promising, but it would suit their own three products that can be charged wirelessly.

Not to mention the money wasted on buying a specialist wireless charging company some time ago. Other companies have made perfectly functional wireless charging pads for several years now so why on earth can’t Apple?

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Indeed! As mentioned above - even if it wasn’t exactly what they had previously shown - just - something!

Will love to read the behind-the-scenes story on this one day…

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Possibly they thought if they put out something not as good as what they promised, something with a lot of compromises, that it wouldn’t be up to Apple’s standards since they like to release products that are an improvement on the standard

They might’ve thought that it was a better move to scrap it, and then maybe release something else later on after things have blown over. Who knows, we will probably find out one day

https://hardciderlabs.com/products/slicecharge-3in1-wireless-charger

This is a tempting one, looks nice. Not as expensive as the other I posted and it comes with a USB-C 30w adapter with Australian plug, free shipping and as a cherry on top they accept Apple Pay

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The world’s biggest tech company is removing ports and moving everything towards wireless charging, but they can’t build a charging mat.

Bad enough to ever announce it was in development. Worse to have not released anything 15 months later. Ridiculous to cancel the project 18 months later.

Maybe they should just cancel the AirPods and put a headphone jack back into everything.

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No, they couldn’t build the charging mat they were aiming for to the standard they were aiming for in this project. Who knows, they may reset expectations and try again, or they might just stock a larger range of third party chargers that already fill that void (see above).

WTF.

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That would be great (although it won’t ever happen) as I can never find the silly little lightening to 3.5mm adapter that came with the phone (have no idea where it has vanished to and will get around to replacing it one day perhaps) and I’m not replacing perfectly good wired headphones with bluetooth ones - mainly because a good set of bluetooth headphones that would be as good as my wired Sennheisers would cost me $300-400 which I simply can’t justify.

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Great video on the subject

And @Dan it also shows a list of alternatives in it :+1:

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I have a plux works good can charge all 3 at the same time.

While I’m using Bluetooth at the moment if I had to/chose to go back to hard wired I would heatshrink the adaptor to my headphones. Yes it means I can’t use them with anything else without carefully cutting the heatshrink off, but then I don’t use anything else anyway so it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

The alternative is something like this:

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