“The AirPower wireless charger story was an interesting one for sure. First teased at the iPhone X launch back in September 2017, a year later, after it failed to make an appearance at the iPhone XS launch, Apple tried to wipe all traces of the product off its website,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “And then, some six months later, the company sheepishly announced that it was pulling the plug on the project, claiming the product did ‘not achieve our high standards.'”
“You have to go a ways back to find another example where Apple announced something that it later pulled the plug on. To 1996 in fact, and the Copeland operating system. But those were different times, and Apple is a company that now trades heavily on trust. And announcing a product, and then trying to make people forget that it had announced a product before finally coming clean and saying it’s dead, is a very odd move for Apple,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “And one that can erode trust.”
“And this isn’t the first time that Apple has done things that have eroded trust in the past few years,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “The whole iPhone battery throttling debacle is another example of a situation that Apple handled badly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The next time Apple promises something is “coming next year” (hopefully, AirPower will have put an end that misguided practice), most people who remember waiting a year and a half for AirPower to end up with vaporware are going to question whether Apple will really deliver.
Trust is difficult to earn, but it can be very easily squandered.
Obviously, Apple should never announce something if they’re not damn sure that they can ship it on time and in sufficient quantity to at least met some significant portion of demand.
Should we trust Apple more—or less—if they don’t try stuff? Nothing’s perfect. “Beta” always seems to apply to software. Why not hardware?
Matt, they would have had to ship in order to even achieve the level of Beta.
Betterridge’s Law.
I have no trust in Apple after the keyboard issues with the laptops. That is a far more serious and fundamental failure than the also unimpressive AirPower failure.
That follows a lack of trust given:
no adequate updating of the Mac Mini for years;
at the same time, no adequate updating of MacBook Airs for years;
inadequately powered MacBooks, which were too small to replace the Air;
inadequate MacBook Pro batteries than could not last a full day, resulting in Apple’s changing the battery indicator to hide this;
replacing the MacBook Air eventually but with a keyboard that doesn’t work.
How any of us who use Apple laptops are supposed to have trust in Apple is beyond me.
Well f@@k off to Dell then you whining loser !!
Ritchie: Steve Jobs, who always pursued excellence, would call you a loser.
As a Mac Pro customer …
The Aperture debacle by far and the MacPro debacle a bit less have broken my trust in Apple far more than Airpower. Aperture made me realize you can’t trust Apples Pro apps. they will abandon course without warning and any regard to how their customers depend on their products. Same for the MacPro. Apple is a “nice option” for goods and services but only a fool would depend on them for their livelihood.
As in Education and IT departments that were also abandoned??
Bingo.
I remember the massive push Apple made to make Aperture come to light. At the time it seemed, and they definitely fooled me, that Aperture would be supported 1000% and intelligently grown forever and ever! You know, The Apple Way. It was just the start of something mind blowingly amazing—and it really did seem that way right up until they, without warning, pulled the rug out. I was like, “Fsck!!! Really?! 100s of Gigs of RAW and edits and now you want me to use fscking Lightroom?!?!?! FSCKING LIGHT FSCKING ROOM?!?!”
Yes, I’d say that was a huge trust thing for me. I was the biggest Apple fanboi for years and now I couldn’t give a f*ck about anything they do… except iTunes? When will they screw me on that one… is Steve Balmer running Apple from his mega-yacht?
Hey Pipeline Timmy, I hear the SPLC is looking for a new CEO. Remember opportunity only knocks once.
Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Standing ovation! Post of the Month, maybe of the Year!
So, Slavish Sycophant GoeB(™️@Gotcha) has a new pretender for the title…a cheerleader for homophobic slurs worthy of an annual award.
Just wow.
WAT ??????????
Wow, your standards must be very low. But as you’re a PC lover I’m not surprised
I tend to trust them MORE for not releasing a deficient or unsafe product in spite of the flak from critics and fair-weather friends.
Or, how about ShuttingTFU until your 100% certain you have a product that can go to market.
It’s a toss up.
Loss of trust cannot be attributed to Airpower, but rather the complete disregard of Pro and semi-Pro customers with a mixture of non-updates, sacrificing features and functionality over form, and the gutting of product ranges that worked well for small business customers and professionals
Add the up to very significant price changes into the mix, and it has become almost impossible to persuade a large section of the market to chose Apple.
Their wireless routers worked (almost) perfect so they drop those then waste money and time chasing wireless fools gold instead??
How about the Disk Utility First Aid problem with 10.14.4?
Anyone else here experience that??
The idea of trusting Apple seems like a quaint missive from years ago. Quite frankly the AirPower bs is nowhere near as bad as finding out they really were slowing iOS devices down after I had promised so many people that Apple would never do such a thing without telling us. Add that to the utter a$$ f@#$&*( of the Mac and I will never trust the company again.
I see no difference in Samsung and Apple. I see. No difference in Huawei and Apple. I have been a fanboy since the Superbowl commercial. Not anymore.
My relationship with Apple is now adversarial. The mere sight of Tim Cook deeply annoys me. He is the embodiment of disingenuousness.
I’m sick of Apple haters gloating and saying told you so.
At this point for me, it’s not a matter of trust, but one of how soon I can completely break away from Apple and convince clients to come with. Tim Cook might be the best friend the LINUX desktop ever had.
Cant disagree with any of that, short perhaps of the last para anyway for from my viewpoint breaking away is still a long way off. I find myself spending far too much time dealing with other people’s non Mac problems to risk that and fingers crossed reliability and the general computing experience is far too good to want to change. Saved me thousands over my 25 years with the platform but if that balance changes substantially I may feel differently. With Cook in charge nothing is impossible to imagine sadly he has one of those faces I am increasing tempted to want to punch when he is on stage doing his patronising contemptuous performance that fools no one, we just tolerate it and tolerance is NOT eternal.
I agree with some of this.
The battery throttling issue was a black eye to all of us who defended Apple. Had they admitted what they were doing before doing it, not a problem. Doing it and pretending it was ok without consequences? Yeah…. not so much.
The AirPower is not a big deal except for the fact that they advertised it well over a year ago. Apple needs to o back to secrecy. Stop talking about stuff that isn’t nearly ready.
MacPro? Disaster. I’m not even in that market but, uh, come on.
Once upon a time, Steve Jobs promised us that the G5 “has legs” and would be at 3GHz (from 2GHz) within 12 months. Might have been IBM’s fault, but Apple got the black eye there. What I’m saying is, shit happens.
Tim Cook clearly is out of his element in terms of releasing “insanely great” products….. or even mediocre products that are “insanely on time.”
Not ready to leave Apple. I still choose MBP before all others. I don’t think the mainstream tech-illiterates will understand Linux, despite my praises of Linux Mint and how close it is to the traditional desktop OS design.
I do wish someone, Like Scott, would pull a Jobs, come back, vote “no confidence” on Tim, and bring us to the second (third, maybe) “golden age.”
Goodbye.
You are an incredibly bitter fanboy (self-proclaimed), theloniusmac. The throttling controversy was highly overblown, in my opinion. Apple was keeping older iDevices with aging batteries working longer. As far as I could tell, these iDevices had generally passed the battery warranty period, anyway, so it was a bonus for the consumer. But the class-action lawyers ensured that it was portray as an evil and premeditated act of fraud.
If you see no difference between Samsung and Apple or Huawei and Apple, then you are truly deluded. We are fully aware that your “…relationship with Apple is now adversarial.” Please break away from Apple ASAP and take your platform extremism to the other side.
The problem with Apple’s lost trust is that it gets completely blown when some problem is found and instead of getting the truth, we get accountability-dodging and spin.
Got to say their behaviour with iWeb was the thing that hit me and I never have quite trusted them ever since. They must have sat on that decision for some 18mths minimum without ever saying a thing (indeed they never did) and we only realised it wasn’t going to be updated when the other apps very slowly were and it was gradually allowed to fade from our minds.
When you move to it from your previous software to produce perfectly adequate web sites and see the carpet gradually inched from under your feet hoping you don’t notice its truly a knife to the back of many of their users. Right decision or not they should have at least had the decency to inform us so we could plan ahead and not burn our other bridges. Yes we have long memories and trust isn’t a word I apply to them anymore, they are just another company in that regard.
They have gone from being tech nerds with a feel for innovation to tech fashionistas with a flair for all things millennial and short attention spans.
At the time they announced it, many of us harshly criticized Apple for announcing a hardware product that wasn’t ready. Its marketing 101 not to do what they did – many reasons. I hate to invoke the name of Steve Jobs, but he would have never allowed this to happen. Just for suggesting the idea of announcing it before it was ready, would have earned significant shame if not termination. I don’t trust Apple any less because of it but I’m concerned that some of the core values of the company are being compromised. Product launches are like gifts to the world – they should be a surprise and they should delight.
Just to be clear, I have no problem with Apple announcing software or services in advance because its necessary to align developers and others over many months – they have proven that they can do that well.
I am generally all in with Apple, however that does not I have to have every Apple first day. Took me a year to save for my first Mac
Got a FAT Mac.
Didn’t get an Apple phone until the the 3GS …
Got an iPad Day One.
Know what you may be looking for, then go with the product that best meets those interests, often it will be an Apple Product.
I do not distrust Apple as a whole, but I do distrust Tim Cook.
Overly aggressive profit seeker, it’s in the pipeline when it’s not, blowing his horn with outrageous hyping to name a few.
Enough to distrust him.
Apple’s biggest mistake is announcing a device before it was ready to launch. Other companies do vaporware. Apple typically does not.
Personally I would not have used it. A flat pad would not work for my Apple Watch since I use a band that does not open out (Apple made by the way). Plus I use a stand to recharge the iPhone that is more convenient that a flat pad.
it held little utility for me and not the greatest solution for charging multiple devices.
Expected the outcome of Air Power. A simple gadget such as a charger could not possibly take almost 2 years. Apple should never have announced it until they were sure they could accomplish it. For me, I was trusting Apple a lot less before anyway. The keyboard debacle in particular has really gotten under my skin and made a significant impact to my opinion about Apple. The company without a doubt has issues. I’m so disgusted with the quality of my MacBook Pro I told managers I will never buy another one until they go back to the old keyboard. There just isn’t any excuse for a piece of shit keyboard
I lost trust in that they’ll deliver what they say they will, of course. On the other hand, it was probably a decent product as it was — but it did not meet their quality standards. So, in that sense, they gained some trust in that I can be confident if it comes to market it’s a good product. Of course, that’s generalizing a lot. Sometimes a design flaw is revealed through its proliferation . . . . some might point to the butterfly keyboard as an example . . . . and what seemed great in the lab and in prototype doesn’t bear out to be true with millions made and put into the world. Every company is going to have a few of those things, to this point I still believe Apple has far fewer blunders. I think it’s safe to say Apple has lost its “magic” lately. Hope exists within me that there are things coming to excite me. I believe Apple Watch gen 1 was a remarkable product not so long ago and was done minus Jobs. Apple has not lost me. To say it has not lost SOMETHING would be a lie, though. I’m ready to be delighted again and expect I will be.
Folks, This isn’t about trust. If it was, we would trust Apple all the more because they had the courage to axe this thing before people started spending money on something Apple had endorsed by shipping it. What if Apple is telling the truth? What if right up to the end, they believed this thing was do-able — was something they themselves would want — but then decided it wasn’t. The “right” thing (the APPLE thing) to do was to say, “No.” This is an act of integrity, not of incompetence.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Steve Jobs
I’d rather the company drop the project than force some half baked product out…because they said they would. I see it as affirmation of their determination to get it right or let it go. Imagine if they released a complete failure. The damage would be far greater.
Never thought that a small item such as this would turn out to be a profound, multi-level blunder. One level reflects badly on internal coordination as if the various senior executives and their cliques are working at cross purposes, not knowing, or rebelling against, what another is doing. On the reputation front, I think that it’s worse than Ping or Pippin but they shipped. This Apple devotee and promoter is saddened and shocked, fearing that Apple may be Gil Emilioing itself.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/1418-biggest-apple-fails.html#s16
Why I don’t trust Apple, as badly as I want a new iPad Pro
1) Battery debacle
2) iPad Pro Bendgate, touch screen issues and fragility issues exposed in drop tests. They sacrificed chassis reinforcement for sake of being light and thin as possible. Then they issued the statement that bent iPads are acceptable ? For REAL ?!? Still can’t get over that.
3) There is more but I’m out of time 🙂
According to my recollection, Apple did not issue a statement that bent iPads were acceptable – at least not nearly to the extend of the flawed and skewed iPad photo that was distributed over and over. You are complicit in continuing to spread the FUD. Please stop being a tool.
My recollection is that Apple has an iPad flatness specification that the product must pass before being shipped – something on the order of a couple of sheets of paper from one corner to the other. Hardly a statement that bent iPads are acceptable!
I guess I don’t understand why Apple was shooting for the near-impossible with AirPower. Seems like what killed it was the desire to charge stuff wherever you put it down on the mat.
Was that really necessary? Would it be so bad to have designated spots for the three devices? Of course, Apple wouldn’t be able to overcharge for it quite so much if all it did was what every other pad did.
Never cared about wireless charging, at all.