Anyone who looks closely Apple is slowly yet steadily moving towards wireless era, be it the removal of 3.5mm audio jack or the introduction of wireless charging supports in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X phones. This feature brings the ability to drop the iPhones on a charging mat and juice it up via a process known as induction. Apple introduced an accessory of its own for this; the AirPower but said that it wouldn’t be available until 2018.
However, Apple hasn’t publicly discussed the accessory and the company engineers have been toiling away to address problems. One such challenge is making sure that it doesn’t overheat, while another is the complexity of the circuitry, according to people familiar with the device’s development. Unlike the most wireless chargers these days, Apple’s accessory; AirPower is designed to charge three devices simultaneously.
Apple also wants to give the ability to users to place any of their devices anywhere on the charging mat to begin a charge and this ambitious goal requires multiple charging sensors. This process has been proven difficult, said the sources. An executive at an Apple partner that manufactures third-party wireless chargers for iPhones said that the multi-device charging mechanism is challenging to build because it likely requires differently sized charging components for the three types of devices, which would all overlap across the mat.
The AirPower charger is more advanced than the current competition since it includes a custom Apple chip running a stripped down version of the iOS mobile operating system to conduct on-device power management and pairing with devices. Apple initially hoped to bring the AirPower by June and put it on sale by September.