Oliver Haslam on March 30, 2019, 1:35 am

RIP: Apple AirPower Has Been Officially Cancelled

It’s been one of the biggest will-they won’t-they stories of technology in recent times, and we all hoped that Apple would be able to pull AirPower off. But alas, after more than year of expectation, the company has officially canned the project.

AirPower, for those who somehow have missed its lingering presence in the industry of late, was the wireless charging mat that Apple announced alongside the iPhone X in 2017.

The project was always supposed to be a future project, but as time started to stretch out, people wondered whether AirPower would ever arrive.

Expectations were increased when the recent AirPods update showed mention of AirPower on the box, but in an email sent to press today Apple has confirmed that AirPower is no more. The reasons, apparently, simply amount to the thing being impossible to make.

“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 the statement.

This is a very rare and public hardware failure for Apple, and it’s one that will do nothing to help recent worries that Apple’s hardware team isn’t firing on all cylinders right now. The infamous MacBook keyboard situation hasn’t improved of late, with keyboards failing at a rate believed to be higher than Apple is letting on.

Now that AirPower is officially dead, we can all move on. Thankfully we’re closing in on iPhone rumor season, otherwise we’d have nothing to talk about!