Air, Life, Extreme: All three products released for tooling. Although challenges with the new Apple “Magsafe” wireless charging for iPhone (see below) delayed the formal start of production, all three products have now been released for tooling. This final delay was very unfortunate, but crucial: we could not manufacture tens of thousands of units that would fail to charge Apple’s new iPhones.

The good news is that the entire MAGFAST range will now be fully compatible with Apple’s Magsafe. Tooling is the final stage before shipping and the schedule is now a highly predictable, mostly automated process.

Our manufacturer has committed to us that production units will arrive at our fulfillment center in time to make first shipments to first customers with the updated Qi design (and *all* the improvements we have added since we first announced the MAGFAST family) by March 30, 2021. We will work to hold them to this commitment.

All products: Apple iPhone 12 brings charger problems. In late September, our team started hearing rumors about changes to the wireless charging technology in the soon-to-be-released iPhone 12. There were concerns, on review of the new Apple “Magsafe” wireless specs that it might not support industry-standard Qi chargers. This was a real risk: Apple is not always concerned about backwards compatibility. We were in active communication with our manufacturers and took the painful decision to slow release to tooling until we had reviewed the changes introduced by Apple’s Magsafe.

Apple announced the iPhone 12 on October 13, indicating that it had introduced magnets to the area of the Qi coils. Our team recognized the potential for wireless charging issues: Qi chargers use electromagnetic fields which can be affected by magnets.

We immediately put a hold on tooling to minimize the risk that we were about to produce many tens of thousands of chargers that might not work with iPhones in future – a potential disaster for MAGFAST and our customers.

The first iPhone 12s were shipped on October 23. We immediately purchased one for testing: as with many of our competitors’ products, Apple’s magnets caused problems with MAGFAST’s chargers. Apple support would not officially acknowledge there was an issue, although the support representative admitted that his new iPhone 12 did not work with the Qi charger in his car.

To demonstrate the scope of the problem, by 6:40 pm on the second day of shipping for the iPhone 12, there were already 1,893 official reports of customers unable to charge their iPhone 12s using existing Qi chargers.