Late last week – Apple announced that the AirPower charging mat project is over – the product is cancelled and it won’t go on sale.

AirPower

In case you don’t know, alongside the iPhone X and iPhone 8 launch at the end of 2017 – Apple also showed off AirPower, Apple said it would arrive in 2018 but as we all know this never happened and just over 18 months later, Apple has now explained what happened to the project.

It seemed all ready to go, Apple launched, for the first time wireless charging on the new iPhone models at the time, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. The wireless charging on the iPhone even adheres to the Qi charging standard.

Keynote from 2017

Canned

But it’s over now. Last week on Saturday, Apple’s Dan Ricco emailed Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch to say that the AirPower project had been 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.”

Dan Riccio – Apple SVP of Hardware Engineering

The news was a bit of shock to the tech commnity, as the week before the Apple event, it seemed all geared up to be released. In that week a new iMac refresh came along, as did new AirPods units and a new iPad mini and iPad Air.

For later in that week, a few people did suggest that AirPower was likley due but it didn’t come.