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Comment by sandis | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions (rumored) issues with 3D/overlapping coils that I imagine were needed to allow for multiple device placement anywhere on the mat.

>> Specifically, I’ve heard that they ran too hot because the 3D charging coils in close proximity to one another required very, very cautious power management.

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It's not the end of the world if it slows down under multiple devices, and that trivially solves the heat problem.

Is it lack of satisfaction with those tradeoffs? Is there a more fundamental flaw somewhere else? It would be nice to know what actually caused this decision.

Selling point is that you can put all your mobile devices on it. So it’s assumed you’re using more than one and it isn’t a quality experience if you have to sacrifice charging speed for regular use.

The phone is the only one that needs a particularly high wattage. If sharing drops the phone speed by a third, that leaves enough spare capacity to do a watch and airpods at the same time (with both of them getting more percent per hour than the phone). That's still a pretty good experience.

What if they couldn’t get the multi coil design to work charging ANYTHING at high power.

Maybe it was capable of charging the watch and the AirPods just fine, it was the phone’s power demands that were the thing killing it.

Definitely one possibility of many! That's why it's so hard to guess which one or two aspects really tanked it.

Fire? Like, GS Note 7 fire? That would do the trick!

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