Great video only comment I want to make is that these are not over engineered they are within the engineering problem solving process so it has features and diagnostics that end up removed in the final products. Its engineered for the discovery process not for the consumer.
@@evodgamehunter4290 This is definitely a situation where the product was designed by a marketing department, and not by engineers, such that the engineering constraints were so ridiculous that the only viable solution was to use dozens of coils controlled by custom silicon. You can call that over-engineered, or over-designed, or whatever, but the end result is that you can accomplish literally the same thing with a single coil and a magnet (magsafe) with drastically reduced complexity and at far lower cost.
6:13 this is quite unlikely. FPGAs are mostly used in the chip development stage, as it is far easier to just "change" what a couple resistors do than to order a whole batch of new chips every time you think you have to change something about the design. It's more likely that they found out that the chip they wanted to use wasn't sufficient, so they opted for an FPGA for the development stage to essentially develop their own new chip for the AirPower. You can see more about FPGAs in Linus Tech Tips' Intel factory tour. Edit: FPGAs are nowadays almost never shipped in end-products, because they are ridiculously expensive and just unnecessary.
Yup. You find them in some end user products, but things like oscilloscopes (and I think the afterburner card uses one), not a high volume, low(ish) cost mass market device.
The company I work for uses them in our products, but our products are low-volume and niche. Reason being is because our products can be customised to the buyer's requirements so it's way easier to use an FPGA and then make the changes than to change the board layout (we outsource our PCB design).
Agreed. I have worked on a few niche speaker systems that shipped with FPGA's but it's very rare. We use it to prototype asic's in high volume products now.
Headlines from the world where AirPower was real: “World going bankrupt due to skyrocketing inflation, AirPower to blame” “Putin: Imperialist West invented AirPower specifically to weaken Russia” “Xi: AirPower is latest ploy by NATO to divide China” “Biden: AirPower has more chips than God”
1) The metal shielding will be used for structure, cooling as well as RF isolation. Mainly isolation and for compliance reasons. 2) Those gray smd components are not Transistors or Resistors but SMD Inductors which look like they’re being used instead of traditional wire coils like the ones in your smart phone (Interesting implementation!) **EDIT** (He never showed the other side which clearly has an array of inductive coils like the ones shown in other wireless chargers, these components are just capacitors...) 3) That Alterra FPGA was only being used for testing as they likely needed more io than the previous Tristar ic was able to provide. A single controller In charge of so many inductors as well as the likely beam steering that was being done probably didn’t exist so either one would have been release by a manufacturer for apple to use, apple would have ordered a custom version from and existing manufacturer or apple would have rolled their own controller. Prototypes and one offs are extremely expensive (Thousands of dollars for a bare pcb that should cost a few dollars) but when you get into volume sales and have the resources and manufacturing experience off apple you can really optimise the design and find interesting solutions to solve low volume issues.
@@Roshan_420 Agree on those looking like capacitors. These have traditional (albeit smaller maybe?) copper flat coils on the other side of the board under the black material. Both their patent and a teardown show them.
AirPower definitely seems like an over engineered solution to a pretty much non existent problem. MagSafe is definitely a much simpler solution for those people who can’t figure out how to use a wireless charger.
The issue isn't figuring out how to use the charger, the issue is putting your phone on to charge at night when you're tired, then waking up in the morning and realising it was slightly misaligned so it either didn't charge or barely charged.
@@MegaKasf yes truly. First it had to be engineered by the engineers, then designed by the designers , and finally marketed by the marketers. Truly one of the products apple ever made
I remember reading that the engineering team was caught off-guard at the AirPower announcement by what the marketing/design team was promising. All that in such a small package. So maybe it's possible SquarePower was actually the earliest prototype there?
FYI the parts Luke reffered to in the video as "transistors" are actually capacitors. I'd assume they are probably for filtering or a type of LC tank circutry, and thus might need changing to find the optimal value due to manufacturing tollerances. But the filtering/LC side is a guess. They are deffinetly capacitors though...
fun fact. if you attach a DCSD to a iphone XS smart battery case. you can see in the firmware that it still has alot of air power references. the XS battery case was supposed to be released along with iphone X and air power. but due to.. yeah. it didnt and got moved to XS. which also explains why a iphone X would work perfectly in the XS case like i've always done. BTW you can use a DCSD on any smart battery case. they dont encrypt those like they do on iphones
Great video and thank you. Sometimes learning takes experimentation and tinkering. The prototypes may have been a step on Apple's path to mag safe charging. Also, its possible the large third party chip was so that the prototype could programmed to try various configurations etc which could be used to compare, gather data. An optimized consumer version may not have required the same chip to simply operate. Lastly, its possible what was learned so far may still be used in a future product if the technology becomes feasible/desirable with another development. PS Tim Cook once said sometimes the best decisions a company makes is saying "no". I agree. But, I also applaud their attempt.
dude, FPGAs are very common in prototyping and wouldn't have been used on final boards, airpower wouldn't have shipped with an $80 chip like you say, most likely they wanted to have more flexibility with the prototype so they added this chip, final units could've been streamlined alot from this if development were to have continued
Someone high up at Apple, probably Tim Cook, decided that wireless charging as it was (and is in the rest of the industry) wasn't worth it, wasn't convenient enough for how slow it was etc, so they decided they were going to perfect it like they perfected the smartphone. Once AirPower was deemed a failure, they went back to the drawing board to perfect it in a different way. With both AirPower and MagSafe, you don't have to line your phone up with the mat like you do with a conventional Qi charger and I think that's the main issue they were trying to solve with both products.
Yep. Although AirPower would have solved the issue for AirPods too. The Apple Watch never had the issue really, MagSafe solved it for the the iPhone in the same way as the Apple Watch charger did. Once it worked, AirPower would have been a solution for all three products... maybe even for iPads too. Especially that huge rectangular prototype.
I'm thinking the reason for so many segments was to implement zonal charging, where segments not sensing increased current draw would be put into idle mode. This would reduce total current draw and, more importantly, waste heat. You could easily check this theory by comparing the load imposed by single vs multiple AirPods cases.
I'm not so deep into engineering and big companies but I've heard that engineers may be allowed to keep some prototypes and that new products etc. will be tested first internally (and of course you may give them to employees that aren't directly involved into the development for testing), maybe not all prototypes returned (but I'm not so sure that this happens at Apple, they became even aware of this after the legendary iPhone 4 prototype) or they also declassified it and engineers who left the company or went into retirement saved it from scrapping and were allowed to take it home. Porsche for example keeps the 918 rolling chassis in their Museum's collection: ruclips.net/video/hrh7nBRAoZQ/видео.html
Can confirm that the Belkin charger is good. I had a cheap thing similar to it and it stopped working. Got a refurbished Belkin one like shown in this video for $80. It's great!
fun fact about those ifixit toolkits: i work at a cell phone repair store, and those are what we use. they don't give them to us; all of us just have them. (some of us also have a xiomi electric screwdriver since an entire day of unscrewing and rescrewing can be pretty tough on your wrists).
The FPGA almost certainly wouldn’t have been in the shipping product. Apple would have been using it to allow for quick iteration until they settle in to what they actually need.
“Problem that nobody had” isn’t true for sure, I woke up many day to find that even though my phone SAID it was charging the night before, it wasn’t because I didn’t position it just right. It’s true that I’ve never had that problem with magsafe though
Active cooling through adding a bit of beef and a tiny fan sounds like a slightly better solution than ditching it altogether in my opinion, even if it wouldn't look as sleek.
The technology or principle of AirPower has been around for quite a while. See, for example, the Siemens BSH FreeInduction Plus technology for induction hobs. Yes, you read that right, I am referring to an induction hob because the technology behind it is the same. The only problem is that the energy is converted into heat and is not induced again as electricity - the problem with AirPower was just the high heat development, which was no wonder with several overlapping coils that interact for physical reasons. With its patented technology, Siemens has managed to exploit this interaction by generating a dynamic magnetic field from several coils that can be moved as desired and can be generated several times. With such an induction hob, several cookware can be used at the same time and even moved. The technology in AirPower is essentially the precursor to this technology, and is therefore not an innovation. The same technology used at Siemens can also be used in a smaller format as a QI-capable charging station. However, someone has to take the right step now.
Over engineered for a thing that was easily done with what the MagSafe (and many phone cases manufacturers) did some time later with magnets. Perfect charging placing with just one coil per device
I came here to maybe find something interesting since I don't find anything about a charger pad special. I've watched the whole video waiting for some sort of positive plot twist, only to hear Luke say 'Why would you even need this'. Nice
Cool too see you posting this the same day as 91Tech's AirPower hands on. Interesting that yours got a slight 1 second charge when his prototype had zero response.
I wonder how power inefficient these would be with the many coils and lots of waste heat. I think Apple going in the opposite direction with two perfectly aligned coils massively increased efficiency.
Far as I know, the onboard computer in the air power determined which coils needed to be used to charge whatever is sitting on it and only use those coils
I have one question and it is about MacBook Pro mid-2015 15 inch. if you could buy a 2017 15 inch same price, instead of a mid-2015 same everything would you buy the 2017 over the 2015? in the on video you did on MacBook Pro best and worst you did not have good functional keys on 2017, and top 5, 2015 13 inch, mid 2012 13 inch, mid 2012 15 inch, 2019 16 inch, and best mid-2015 15 inch. Thank You So Much.
As a person, who owned 2 nomad base station pro I can't agree with you. Placing. Anywhere. Is. Amazing. And like magic :) And cool, unnecessary tech should be indistinguishable from magic. And I'm ready to pay 300-500$ for that.
To be fair, AirPower would most likely never actually ship with an FPGA in it. For the final product it would be replaced with a mass-produced custom IC - the FPGA was there for prototyping and developing what would become that chip. Shipping commercial products with FPGAs do happen, but mostly for low-volume boutique items, where mass-producing custom ICs wouldn't be economical. At Apple scale - no way.
The engineering behind AirPower is insane but MagSafe is a much better cheaper and less complex solution but i love to see AirPower in action. On what stage are these prototypes? Are they EVT?
6:19 I Don't think he understands that FPGAs are for Prototyping and not for the actual final product and they would actually manufacture a custom chip when they actually get the chip design finished
I'm assuming you don't get the fastest charging speed on all devices on the $50 charger, since it only uses one lightening cable and the charging brick would need to have a combined output of all devices at max wireless charge speed. At best it would be slower than max wired charging for the iPhone.
This is precisely what all the engineers who commented on AirPower were saying at the time; that with the need for differently sized coils it’s an impossible engineering challenge. It’s clearly the Apple execs asking for something that they didn’t understand and forcing the engineers to work in it. Wouldn’t have been a fun project despite the ambition.
They would not ship an AirPower with an FPGA in it. They would replace the FPGA with an ASIC/custom chip for final production. FPGAs are just great for prototyping when you don't want to spin up manufacturing of a custom bit of silicon yet
really what they need is a robot arm so you can whip your phone at it from across the room and it'll catch it for you and place it on the charging pad.
The FPGA would never have been shipped. It's basically a chip that lets you redesign it without actually creating a new chip, so it's very useful for chip design. Apple would have turned the final design into a much cheaper normal chip.
AirPower died so MagSafe could be born. And now magsafe changed the whole wireless charging industry with the Qi2 wireless charging standard which is laid on the MagSafe foundation.
If the problem was that it had to blast a bunch of power because apple watches couldn’t magnetize, why not make an adapter for the Apple Watch? A small thin adapter that attaches to the watch’s charging plate (we know the engineering geniuses at apple are capable of this) that would allow the watch to be used by the AirPower plate
I'm surprised that the design Apple tried failed with is a many-coil design that sounds similar to what Tesla produced and shipped with their $300 wireless charger, which has 30 heavily-overlapping coils. That's significantly more than the AirPower prototype, though, so maybe Apple just didn't go big enough! I'm guessing Apple set some harder requirements for themselves, though, and gave up when they couldn't meet them.
the square thing is real, and is or was intended by apple te be sold along side a new magic mouse to deliver power wirelessly, as a charging mouse pad, instead of the jack on the bottom of the magic mouse
Now we know how/why/where the Apple Polishing Cloth came from. It's the same size and texture of the bottom of that 'SquarePower' thingie!!! They must have had quite a few of those in inventory laying around from pre-release production stage that ultimately had no use. Then they made them avail for sale as a polishing cloth and FOMO made everybody want one. ROFLMAO
Would you have bought AirPower if Apple had made it work? Which AirPower prototype is YOUR favorite?
I like the SquarePower Prototype
Yes, I would. It really could be a revolutionary product and it was beautiful.
Great video only comment I want to make is that these are not over engineered they are within the engineering problem solving process so it has features and diagnostics that end up removed in the final products. Its engineered for the discovery process not for the consumer.
Square preferably, but it sounds like the price would be ridiculous. I now agree that it wasn’t reasonable to continue trying to make it work.
@@evodgamehunter4290 This is definitely a situation where the product was designed by a marketing department, and not by engineers, such that the engineering constraints were so ridiculous that the only viable solution was to use dozens of coils controlled by custom silicon. You can call that over-engineered, or over-designed, or whatever, but the end result is that you can accomplish literally the same thing with a single coil and a magnet (magsafe) with drastically reduced complexity and at far lower cost.
6:13 this is quite unlikely. FPGAs are mostly used in the chip development stage, as it is far easier to just "change" what a couple resistors do than to order a whole batch of new chips every time you think you have to change something about the design. It's more likely that they found out that the chip they wanted to use wasn't sufficient, so they opted for an FPGA for the development stage to essentially develop their own new chip for the AirPower. You can see more about FPGAs in Linus Tech Tips' Intel factory tour. Edit: FPGAs are nowadays almost never shipped in end-products, because they are ridiculously expensive and just unnecessary.
Yup. You find them in some end user products, but things like oscilloscopes (and I think the afterburner card uses one), not a high volume, low(ish) cost mass market device.
The company I work for uses them in our products, but our products are low-volume and niche. Reason being is because our products can be customised to the buyer's requirements so it's way easier to use an FPGA and then make the changes than to change the board layout (we outsource our PCB design).
Agreed. I have worked on a few niche speaker systems that shipped with FPGA's but it's very rare. We use it to prototype asic's in high volume products now.
Most Fritzbox models with ISDN
use FPGA. FPGAs are definitely used in the mass market (before FPGA shortage of course).
Exactly what I wanted to comment lol
Imagine the chip shortage this product would have created on its own!!
Yeah totally ridiculous to have almost all devices with chips inside!
Headlines from the world where AirPower was real:
“World going bankrupt due to skyrocketing inflation, AirPower to blame”
“Putin: Imperialist West invented AirPower specifically to weaken Russia”
“Xi: AirPower is latest ploy by NATO to divide China”
“Biden: AirPower has more chips than God”
@@alanmay7929 Be careful sounds like a scam
Really sad, the more advanced we get the less advanced we get.
Laughs in socialism
It’s very unlikely an FPGA would end up in the finished product. Surely they would design a chip with the final FPGA gate structure.
Try placing the “Squarepower” unit under an X-ray to look inside.
1) The metal shielding will be used for structure, cooling as well as RF isolation. Mainly isolation and for compliance reasons.
2) Those gray smd components are not Transistors or Resistors but SMD Inductors which look like they’re being used instead of traditional wire coils like the ones in your smart phone (Interesting implementation!) **EDIT** (He never showed the other side which clearly has an array of inductive coils like the ones shown in other wireless chargers, these components are just capacitors...)
3) That Alterra FPGA was only being used for testing as they likely needed more io than the previous Tristar ic was able to provide. A single controller In charge of so many inductors as well as the likely beam steering that was being done probably didn’t exist so either one would have been release by a manufacturer for apple to use, apple would have ordered a custom version from and existing manufacturer or apple would have rolled their own controller.
Prototypes and one offs are extremely expensive (Thousands of dollars for a bare pcb that should cost a few dollars) but when you get into volume sales and have the resources and manufacturing experience off apple you can really optimise the design and find interesting solutions to solve low volume issues.
This. More research should've gone into this video.
Thumbs up to someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
looks like smd caps to me
so are you saying luke used the wrong side of airpower? 🤣
@@Roshan_420 Agree on those looking like capacitors. These have traditional (albeit smaller maybe?) copper flat coils on the other side of the board under the black material. Both their patent and a teardown show them.
What are the odds that both Luke and 91Tech decided to release their Airpower video within an hour of each other! fricken crazy!
At least Luke kinda got his to charge.
AirPower definitely seems like an over engineered solution to a pretty much non existent problem. MagSafe is definitely a much simpler solution for those people who can’t figure out how to use a wireless charger.
10000% agree
The issue isn't figuring out how to use the charger, the issue is putting your phone on to charge at night when you're tired, then waking up in the morning and realising it was slightly misaligned so it either didn't charge or barely charged.
@@thebuddercweeper or it starts, you do whatever, and it moves slightly off so it stops. I’ve had that happen. Any movement or bumps can lead to that.
@@Danimal25 very true
It’s simplest idea with the most complex execution ratio.
AirPower was one of the tech devices in recent memory that truly amazed me
Yes. Truly one of the tech ever made in recent history.
Apple are definitely one of the companies of all times
@@MegaKasf Exactly!
@@BullyParkerMaguire Truly!
@@MegaKasf yes truly. First it had to be engineered by the engineers, then designed by the designers , and finally marketed by the marketers. Truly one of the products apple ever made
I remember reading that the engineering team was caught off-guard at the AirPower announcement by what the marketing/design team was promising. All that in such a small package. So maybe it's possible SquarePower was actually the earliest prototype there?
Bro, I mean, great video, but why didn’t you try the square power or the other AirPower charging mat? I really would’ve liked to see that!
FYI the parts Luke reffered to in the video as "transistors" are actually capacitors. I'd assume they are probably for filtering or a type of LC tank circutry, and thus might need changing to find the optimal value due to manufacturing tollerances. But the filtering/LC side is a guess. They are deffinetly capacitors though...
This is exactly what I was looking for. Both prototypes explained in one video and you even have both of them in your own hands. Thats so cool man.
fun fact. if you attach a DCSD to a iphone XS smart battery case. you can see in the firmware that it still has alot of air power references. the XS battery case was supposed to be released along with iphone X and air power. but due to.. yeah. it didnt and got moved to XS. which also explains why a iphone X would work perfectly in the XS case like i've always done. BTW you can use a DCSD on any smart battery case. they dont encrypt those like they do on iphones
good job plugging the other 2 airpowers in and also good job on linking the guy that gave you the devices
Great video and thank you. Sometimes learning takes experimentation and tinkering. The prototypes may have been a step on Apple's path to mag safe charging. Also, its possible the large third party chip was so that the prototype could programmed to try various configurations etc which could be used to compare, gather data. An optimized consumer version may not have required the same chip to simply operate. Lastly, its possible what was learned so far may still be used in a future product if the technology becomes feasible/desirable with another development. PS Tim Cook once said sometimes the best decisions a company makes is saying "no". I agree. But, I also applaud their attempt.
dude, FPGAs are very common in prototyping and wouldn't have been used on final boards, airpower wouldn't have shipped with an $80 chip like you say, most likely they wanted to have more flexibility with the prototype so they added this chip, final units could've been streamlined alot from this if development were to have continued
Someone high up at Apple, probably Tim Cook, decided that wireless charging as it was (and is in the rest of the industry) wasn't worth it, wasn't convenient enough for how slow it was etc, so they decided they were going to perfect it like they perfected the smartphone. Once AirPower was deemed a failure, they went back to the drawing board to perfect it in a different way. With both AirPower and MagSafe, you don't have to line your phone up with the mat like you do with a conventional Qi charger and I think that's the main issue they were trying to solve with both products.
Yep.
Although AirPower would have solved the issue for AirPods too.
The Apple Watch never had the issue really, MagSafe solved it for the the iPhone in the same way as the Apple Watch charger did.
Once it worked, AirPower would have been a solution for all three products... maybe even for iPads too. Especially that huge rectangular prototype.
@@something2sea AirPods have MagSafe now
@@thebuddercweeper yeah but it’s not great
@@Fusion05 what do you mean?
Well, except Palm did that in 2009, using magnets to align the coils
I can’t even imagine how much this would cost. Look at how expensive the MagSafe Duo Charger is and it’s only two coils!!!
It's been VERY cool to see you getting your hands on more and more prototypes. :)
I'm thinking the reason for so many segments was to implement zonal charging, where segments not sensing increased current draw would be put into idle mode. This would reduce total current draw and, more importantly, waste heat. You could easily check this theory by comparing the load imposed by single vs multiple AirPods cases.
You can easily tell that Squarepower's DNA was brought to the Magsafe Duo. The design is pretty much identical outside of the fabric material.
I just wondered, while watching this, who goes dumpster diving behind the engineering buildings? This is awesome, I love tech like this.
its recovered from ewaste recyclers in china.
I'm not so deep into engineering and big companies but I've heard that engineers may be allowed to keep some prototypes and that new products etc. will be tested first internally (and of course you may give them to employees that aren't directly involved into the development for testing), maybe not all prototypes returned (but I'm not so sure that this happens at Apple, they became even aware of this after the legendary iPhone 4 prototype) or they also declassified it and engineers who left the company or went into retirement saved it from scrapping and were allowed to take it home.
Porsche for example keeps the 918 rolling chassis in their Museum's collection: ruclips.net/video/hrh7nBRAoZQ/видео.html
Can confirm that the Belkin charger is good. I had a cheap thing similar to it and it stopped working. Got a refurbished Belkin one like shown in this video for $80. It's great!
fun fact about those ifixit toolkits: i work at a cell phone repair store, and those are what we use. they don't give them to us; all of us just have them. (some of us also have a xiomi electric screwdriver since an entire day of unscrewing and rescrewing can be pretty tough on your wrists).
Just wanted to say nice pfp
Luke the gray components that you called "transistors" are actually just filtering SMD capacitors. FYI
That “square power” would make a great apple Magic Mouse pad. And they could have made it wireless charging.
It's amazing how exciting 3 none-functional chunks of material can be!
The FPGA almost certainly wouldn’t have been in the shipping product. Apple would have been using it to allow for quick iteration until they settle in to what they actually need.
Reminds me of the story of the zero gravity pen vs the pencil
“Problem that nobody had” isn’t true for sure, I woke up many day to find that even though my phone SAID it was charging the night before, it wasn’t because I didn’t position it just right. It’s true that I’ve never had that problem with magsafe though
Active cooling through adding a bit of beef and a tiny fan sounds like a slightly better solution than ditching it altogether in my opinion, even if it wouldn't look as sleek.
Omg Luke you are a legend. How awesome to get ya hands on those. Wow 😯. Thanks heaps for the vid.
The technology or principle of AirPower has been around for quite a while. See, for example, the Siemens BSH FreeInduction Plus technology for induction hobs. Yes, you read that right, I am referring to an induction hob because the technology behind it is the same. The only problem is that the energy is converted into heat and is not induced again as electricity - the problem with AirPower was just the high heat development, which was no wonder with several overlapping coils that interact for physical reasons. With its patented technology, Siemens has managed to exploit this interaction by generating a dynamic magnetic field from several coils that can be moved as desired and can be generated several times. With such an induction hob, several cookware can be used at the same time and even moved. The technology in AirPower is essentially the precursor to this technology, and is therefore not an innovation. The same technology used at Siemens can also be used in a smaller format as a QI-capable charging station. However, someone has to take the right step now.
Over engineered for a thing that was easily done with what the MagSafe (and many phone cases manufacturers) did some time later with magnets. Perfect charging placing with just one coil per device
I came here to maybe find something interesting since I don't find anything about a charger pad special. I've watched the whole video waiting for some sort of positive plot twist, only to hear Luke say 'Why would you even need this'. Nice
Any chance you’ve thought about using some magnet paper to check out what’s going on inside the SquarePower?
No, you use an FPGA to field test your own designs, just a lot slower.
You should have tried an iPhone with IOS form 2018. At one point they had all the software built in to properly work with AirPower
Cool too see you posting this the same day as 91Tech's AirPower hands on. Interesting that yours got a slight 1 second charge when his prototype had zero response.
Finally finally some good stuff from you man. But you didn’t show us that that squarepower works or not
I always wanted to hear that the air power charging sound, sad they never put that in with MagSafe.
These are my favourite Miani videos
Good day sir luke for you which is better MacBook pro mid 2012 or 2015???? Pls reply my comment!
Your intro song is so ‘stranger things’ , love it
I wonder how power inefficient these would be with the many coils and lots of waste heat. I think Apple going in the opposite direction with two perfectly aligned coils massively increased efficiency.
Far as I know, the onboard computer in the air power determined which coils needed to be used to charge whatever is sitting on it and only use those coils
I was hoping for you to just hold up a usb-c cable for when you said "here's my charger" lol
Those two pad components are ceramic caps!! Congrats for getting your hands on the AirPower’s omg 😱
I just love that the Prototype looks like a keyboard!
aks=o, why did you only test the second air power prototype for charging and not the first?
I have one question and it is about MacBook Pro mid-2015 15 inch. if you could buy a 2017 15 inch same price, instead of a mid-2015 same everything would you buy the 2017 over the 2015? in the on video you did on MacBook Pro best and worst you did not have good functional keys on 2017, and top 5, 2015 13 inch, mid 2012 13 inch, mid 2012 15 inch, 2019 16 inch, and best mid-2015 15 inch. Thank You So Much.
No way! It charges. Those 2 seconds made him and us excited. 👍🏻
As a person, who owned 2 nomad base station pro I can't agree with you. Placing. Anywhere. Is. Amazing.
And like magic :)
And cool, unnecessary tech should be indistinguishable from magic. And I'm ready to pay 300-500$ for that.
MagSafe really fixed the problem of not putting ur phone on the right wireless spot so maybe MagSafe became AirPower take 2
Nice video, mate. Enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the four chapter format. Squarepower is now a thing.
amazing find!
To be fair, AirPower would most likely never actually ship with an FPGA in it. For the final product it would be replaced with a mass-produced custom IC - the FPGA was there for prototyping and developing what would become that chip.
Shipping commercial products with FPGAs do happen, but mostly for low-volume boutique items, where mass-producing custom ICs wouldn't be economical. At Apple scale - no way.
SquarePower looks like an upgrade of AirPower, that apple would’ve probably called ‘AirPower Max’
The engineering behind AirPower is insane but MagSafe is a much better cheaper and less complex solution but i love to see AirPower in action.
On what stage are these prototypes?
Are they EVT?
After seeing that demonstration I can't believe Apple didn't release the product.
6:19 I Don't think he understands that FPGAs are for Prototyping and not for the actual final product and they would actually manufacture a custom chip when they actually get the chip design finished
I'm assuming you don't get the fastest charging speed on all devices on the $50 charger, since it only uses one lightening cable and the charging brick would need to have a combined output of all devices at max wireless charge speed. At best it would be slower than max wired charging for the iPhone.
Did you try to plug in square power??
This is precisely what all the engineers who commented on AirPower were saying at the time; that with the need for differently sized coils it’s an impossible engineering challenge. It’s clearly the Apple execs asking for something that they didn’t understand and forcing the engineers to work in it. Wouldn’t have been a fun project despite the ambition.
They released magsafe for us to forget airpower and now soneone's trying to have it remembered
I can’t remember many other products from apple which got announced and killed. The closest thing was white iPhone 4 which took forever to come out
seeing "squarepower" i HAD to press the like button!!! :)
This was one of ur coolest videos 😂
This would be so much better than those crappy megsafe duo things..
They would not ship an AirPower with an FPGA in it. They would replace the FPGA with an ASIC/custom chip for final production. FPGAs are just great for prototyping when you don't want to spin up manufacturing of a custom bit of silicon yet
What a great video
really what they need is a robot arm so you can whip your phone at it from across the room and it'll catch it for you and place it on the charging pad.
The FPGA would never have been shipped. It's basically a chip that lets you redesign it without actually creating a new chip, so it's very useful for chip design. Apple would have turned the final design into a much cheaper normal chip.
i cant believe you didnt test the squarepower
You should test this with a device with ios 11.0 because iOS 11.0 still has animations for the AirPower
AirPower died so MagSafe could be born. And now magsafe changed the whole wireless charging industry with the Qi2 wireless charging standard which is laid on the MagSafe foundation.
91Tech: ((releases a video about AirPower))
Luke: Are you challenging me?
Kidding but still, what a coincidence 🤣
To be fair, this is more of a fluff piece. As an engineer, the 91tech video was more interesting
If the problem was that it had to blast a bunch of power because apple watches couldn’t magnetize, why not make an adapter for the Apple Watch? A small thin adapter that attaches to the watch’s charging plate (we know the engineering geniuses at apple are capable of this) that would allow the watch to be used by the AirPower plate
That would overcomplicate things when the purpose of this is to make things very simple and work w products you already own
I always thought this device was overpriced. But now I see it was underpriced and over engineered.
If it had worked out, it surely would have been a very useful product. It probably wouldn't have been cheap.
glad they went with a standard for wireless charging
Tim Cook about to unleash the Apple Police on you.
Before you send this back, invite Quinn from Snazzy Labs over to look at it!!!
Drinking game: take a shot every time Luke says “insane”.
I'm surprised that the design Apple tried failed with is a many-coil design that sounds similar to what Tesla produced and shipped with their $300 wireless charger, which has 30 heavily-overlapping coils. That's significantly more than the AirPower prototype, though, so maybe Apple just didn't go big enough! I'm guessing Apple set some harder requirements for themselves, though, and gave up when they couldn't meet them.
And drops the square power👍
Why didn’t you plug the square one in or talk about why you can’t test it
AirPower or PowerFromAir or WeWillNeverEverReleaseIt... Pro.. Max... 2137... Turbo... Mini... Space Gray
the square thing is real, and is or was intended by apple te be sold along side a new magic mouse to deliver power wirelessly, as a charging mouse pad, instead of the jack on the bottom of the magic mouse
I think MagSafe is the air power replacement.
Why didn't you test SquarePower?
Square power is beautiful. It’s just a square.
91Tech uploaded the same video at the same time lol
Where's the Donglebook channel link in description?
What screwdriver do you need to take the display assembly off a 2011 MacBook air
He's not in the description.
Now we know how/why/where the Apple Polishing Cloth came from. It's the same size and texture of the bottom of that 'SquarePower' thingie!!! They must have had quite a few of those in inventory laying around from pre-release production stage that ultimately had no use. Then they made them avail for sale as a polishing cloth and FOMO made everybody want one. ROFLMAO
This is amazing 🤩
Have ifixit X-ray square power?