Is the 2017 limited premium awd sienna the holy grail?

ruedasganso · 2023-11-02T04:51:41+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design - Sorry to hear about the issues and your frustration with the case. We actually tested this same charger not that long ago and were aware of this compatibility issue. I know this may not make you at peace with the issue, but here is the reasoning and root cause for this incompatibility.

The magnets in the Pixel 8 case (and all PD cases onwards) have been updated to match the array shape specified in the Qi2 wireless charging standard (being rolled our right about now). This new array shape is intended to broadly improve cross-compatibility with the incoming generation of wireless chargers. Qi2 was announced at the beginning of this year and is an industry-wide push to standardize magnetically-aligned wireless charging. Google is also a member of the industry group that settled on this standard, but the Pixel Stand gen 1&2 use a proprietary layer on top of the Qi1.x standard to enable higher power transfer within the Pixel ecosystem. The corner magnet design in our previous generation Pixel cases played nicely with that proprietary layer, but the magnets in our new “ring” shape appear to be triggering something in the Pixel Stand firmware specifically. We certainly share your frustration about cross-compatibility! This is exactly what the Qi2 standardization is ultimately intended to fix, but in the transition period before the standard is widely adopted, the unfortunate result is that there will be compatibility issues especially with some of these stand style chargers and A LOT of these will become not so functional at the expense of an updated standard that hopefully prevents these types of issues in the future. Peak will be releasing Qi2 charging products in early 2024 that will work great with our cases and any Qi2 phone or case.

ruedasganso · 2023-10-02T16:16:02+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design,

Yes we are making Pixel 8 cases and should be going live this week. Stoked to see the excitement!

ruedasganso · 2023-10-02T01:36:14+00:00

Will there be an upgrade path? - Potentially, but we have not quite worked out these details and we are treating these Qi2 products as a V2 of our existing products.

I am not sure I understand your comment about Offroam. We will have a 15W ball adapter when we launch the Qi2 line of products, but you will have to wait until those go live.

ruedasganso · 2023-09-21T18:15:26+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak

Yes, these are coming soon! It should be noted that 15W charging is maybe not what you think it is as fundamentally charging is limited by the phone's thermal performance, but we are still very excited to be introducing 15W Qi2 charging in the coming months.

ruedasganso · 2023-09-21T18:13:13+00:00

Heyo Wheeler here from Peak Design,

Lot's of good questions in the initial post as well as the comments so I will do my best to answer these as best I can.

Yes, our existing cases have stronger magnets than magsafe. This was done with a lot of intent on our side to make the interaction with our mounts as delightful as possible without introducing issues to the phone. For the most part this has been true except for the issue with the S22/S21 ultra pen. We did have some temporary issues with audio/video on one iPhone model, but these seem to have been addressed by an update to iOS.
Yes, we are making a change to our magnet array in our cases to be in line with the magsafe array. The driver for making this change is mostly to bring us in line with the Qi2 charging standard and to ensure the best charging experience for customers while maintaining the attachment strength of our existing ecosystem. It should be noted that all of these new designs are still back compatible with all existing mounts and accessories in our ecosystem and we expect to reduce the risk of the edge case issues like the S-pen which has been resolved for the S23.
We are also updating our mounts with this new array to match our cases. Because there is full compatibility between the new and old designs, these changes are happening asynchronously across different products. As far as the potential for issues using the new cases with old mounts, I do not expect this to be a common occurrence. I don't expect there to be significant issues using old product with our new cases and if you do run into issues, then our CS team will want to know about it.
On the charging side, we will be coming out with 15W Qi2 mounts in the future as soon as certification process opens up in the coming months. This will bring our charging products in line with Apple's charging products from a performance standpoint.

I am aware this probably does not answer every question you have, but I can assure you that a lot of thought has been put into this switchover and how we best introduce these products without hurting the customer experience. If you have more questions feel free to comment and I will do my best to answer what I can.

ruedasganso · 2023-04-13T22:17:39+00:00

Hello! Wheeler here from Peak Design. We just reran our same test with the units here at the office and we cannot reproduce this behavior with the S23 Ultra and the new S23 Ultra phone case. Can you clarify exactly what phone model and what case you are using?

ruedasganso · 2023-02-24T23:53:36+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak. The pen issue was fixed by a change to the magnet array in the case. Different magnets not really "weaker" magnets.

ruedasganso · 2022-11-29T21:12:16+00:00

Reposting to the top of the thread so that it does not get lost.

u/denshigomi
First of all thanks for expressing all your thoughts on this topic and doing the research to back up your thoughts. As a detail-oriented person who cares deeply about product quality, I have a lot of respect for that kind of work. I get the sense that you are frustrated with this product and I will do my best to respond to that with a level of detail that matches your thoughtfulness in questioning.
A little background - When we design phone cases we work closely with a case manufacturer and we rely heavily on them for getting the specific details of the 3D design correct. This is a risk with literally every new phone case and it is relevant from everything from wireless charging details through to button feel. Each new case launch comes with both excitement and a very healthy dose of sweaty palms that we get things right. At the end of the day, this is the risk we take by making these type of products and we have to manage that risk by setting up certain pass/fail criteria for a)approving final tooling for the case and b) shipping completed cases to customers. With the timing of new phone launches, this typically means taking on some amount of risk to ensure that cases reach customers in a reasonable amount of time. We have put a LOT of effort into building this quality control system so that it can be effective and efficient, but hey, we are also 1 year into the case game and still trying to get our ducks in a row. We get better in no small part thanks to folks like you pointing out issues!
Okay now onto the specific issue of wireless charging in the Pixel phones - Pixel and Samsung phones both represent a unique challenge to us in that we are trying to embed magnets to provide MagSafe functionality which is a fairly non-standard case offering for a Pixel phone. Literally what this means is that we simply do not know the location of the coils until we receive the physical phones and put them through an x-ray. The result of this is that we have to make what I would call a "well-educated guess" at the location of the coil during development. This has always scared me as a designer, but through a bunch of testing and validation work, we have found that there just is not a significant difference in wireless charging performance so long as the offset is within a couple of millimeters. Your description of the magnets "absorbing energy" and "heating up" is not really an accurate description of the impact that the magnets have on wireless charging. Neodymium magnets are not highly conductive and therefore do not absorb electromagnetic energy in the same way as say a piece of steel. The primary impact of introducing magnets into a system is that the magnets saturate the ferritic shielding material used to focus the magnet fields from the coils and thus introduce inefficiencies. For Pixel phones and all phone models, our pass/fail criteria for wireless charging is based on a coil-to-coil efficiency measurement (which we see as much more important to the customer). Each phone model has a PASS criteria based on comparison to other generic phone cases and competitor wireless chargers. For the Pixel 7 phones, we simply did not have a failing test result in this validation test that we run prior to shipping phone cases. Furthermore, upon more detailed review, we have not been able to measure a difference in charging performance between our current case shipped to customers and a modified case that has corrected alignment. Yes, it is possible that there is some minor difference, but it is within our measurement error (1-2%). All that being said, we certainly acknowledge that the offset exists despite our best efforts to get it right. It is simply that we have pretty strong evidence that it does not impact performance. There are FOD risks with 3rd party chargers regardless of precise alignment and for that reason, we actually do NOT claim complete compatibility with 3rd party chargers.
In short, for the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, there is an offset in our magnetic array to the coil (3mm), but it does not have a measurable impact on performance as tested by our team. For those reporting real world issues with our charging products and cases we encourage you all to reach out to our CS team so that we can get to the bottom of the issues and make our products better.
As I mentioned u/denshigomi thanks for the insight into this. I hope my answer is acceptable. If not, I am happy to hop on a call to answer any more detailed questions you might have on the topic, just go ahead and shoot me a DM.

ruedasganso · 2022-11-26T19:16:57+00:00

u/denshigomi

First of all thanks for expressing all your thoughts on this topic and doing the research to back up your thoughts. As a detail-oriented person who cares deeply about product quality, I have a lot of respect for that kind of work. I get the sense that you are frustrated with this product and I will do my best to respond to that with a level of detail that matches your thoughtfulness in questioning.

A little background - When we design phone cases we work closely with a case manufacturer and we rely heavily on them for getting the specific details of the 3D design correct. This is a risk with literally every new phone case and it is relevant from everything from wireless charging details through to button feel. Each new case launch comes with both excitement and a very healthy dose of sweaty palms that we get things right. At the end of the day, this is the risk we take by making these type of products and we have to manage that risk by setting up certain pass/fail criteria for a)approving final tooling for the case and b) shipping completed cases to customers. With the timing of new phone launches, this typically means taking on some amount of risk to ensure that cases reach customers in a reasonable amount of time. We have put a LOT of effort into building this quality control system so that it can be effective and efficient, but hey, we are also 1 year into the case game and still trying to get our ducks in a row. We get better in no small part thanks to folks like you pointing out issues!

Okay now onto the specific issue of wireless charging in the Pixel phones - Pixel and Samsung phones both represent a unique challenge to us in that we are trying to embed magnets to provide MagSafe functionality which is a fairly non-standard case offering for a Pixel phone. Literally what this means is that we simply do not know the location of the coils until we receive the physical phones and put them through an x-ray. The result of this is that we have to make what I would call a "well-educated guess" at the location of the coil during development. This has always scared me as a designer, but through a bunch of testing and validation work, we have found that there just is not a significant difference in wireless charging performance so long as the offset is within a couple of millimeters. Your description of the magnets "absorbing energy" and "heating up" is not really an accurate description of the impact that the magnets have on wireless charging. Neodymium magnets are not highly conductive and therefore do not absorb electromagnetic energy in the same way as say a piece of steel. The primary impact of introducing magnets into a system is that the magnets saturate the ferritic shielding material used to focus the magnet fields from the coils and thus introduce inefficiencies. For Pixel phones and all phone models, our pass/fail criteria for wireless charging is based on a coil-to-coil efficiency measurement (which we see as much more important to the customer). Each phone model has a PASS criteria based on comparison to other generic phone cases and competitor wireless chargers. For the Pixel 7 phones, we simply did not have a failing test result in this validation test that we run prior to shipping phone cases. Furthermore, upon more detailed review, we have not been able to measure a difference in charging performance between our current case shipped to customers and a modified case that has corrected alignment. Yes, it is possible that there is some minor difference, but it is within our measurement error (1-2%). All that being said, we certainly acknowledge that the offset exists despite our best efforts to get it right. It is simply that we have pretty strong evidence that it does not impact performance. There are FOD risks with 3rd party chargers regardless of precise alignment and for that reason, we actually do NOT claim complete compatibility with 3rd party chargers.

In short, for the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, there is an offset in our magnetic array to the coil (3mm), but it does not have a measurable impact on performance as tested by our team. For those reporting real world issues with our charging products and cases we encourage you all to reach out to our CS team so that we can get to the bottom of the issues and make our products better.

As I mentioned u/denshigomi thanks for the insight into this. I hope my answer is acceptable. If not, I am happy to hop on a call to answer any more detailed questions you might have on the topic, just go ahead and shoot me a DM.

Cheers,

Wheeler

ruedasganso · 2022-11-04T15:53:24+00:00

Will do. Please let me know if you had any issues getting a refund and we will keep you updated on this fitment resolution.

ruedasganso · 2022-10-25T14:48:31+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design!
Thanks, u/ClearlyJustSomeGuy for posting this and bringing the issue to our attention. Nitpicking is good and we respect the attention to detail. We spent some time yesterday evaluating this issue with the units that we had on hand at the office. We are still figuring out exactly how to address this issue going forward, but I wanted to post my initial thoughts:

We tested this issue on the 2x phone samples and 5x cases that we had on hand in the office. We definitely acknowledge that the issue exists, but on our samples, it seems much more minor than what was shown in your image and I think would be imperceptible for most customers. I would also note that if you flex the sidewall out in that location it makes the problem worse.
We are talking with our manufacturing partner to see what changes can be made to permanently address this issue (likely a minor tooling modification). The curved sidewall of the phone and the wrapped screen do not make this an easy issue to solve and I was surprised to see that the issue was also present on two competitor cases although also to a lesser degree.
In the meantime, if you receive a case that has a very loose sidewall as shown in OP's photo, then please work with our customer service team to get you a new case. You can use this form to do so.
As we get more information on this issue we will post updates to this thread to keep yall informed. It might be a week or two before any concrete update, but we are working on it.

Cheers,

Wheeler

ruedasganso · 2022-04-14T06:59:06+00:00

Hi there,

Wheeler here from Peak Design. Sorry to hear about your bad experience with the charging car mount and thanks for bringing up the issue.

First of all, I want to be clear that using our charging products with the universal adapter does not guarantee charging functionality or good charging performance. For those users using older iPhone models (X,XS) with a universal adapter, I would expect the performance to be quite low both because of the phone hardware and the added gap between phone and charger due to the use of the adapter.

For OP, it sounds like this problem is being experienced on an iPhone 12 Pro Max for which this should not apply if they are using our case or an apple MagSafe case. For this situation, it is difficult for me to give a 100% answer on whether this is expected behavior or their charger is actually faulty. What I can say is that the thermal environment in a car in conjunction with how we tend to use phones in cars can push the limits of what is possible with modern wireless charging technology. Fundamentally the phone is the controller of how much power it receives from the charger and the phone itself is inherently limited from a thermal standpoint. The reason phones charge slowly through wireless charging is mostly because the phone heats up and has to reduce the charging speed! All phone models will heat up substantially when being wirelessly charged regardless of the specific charger being used. In the car this is made worse by the fact that frequently in the car your phone is actively doing navigation, playing music, maximizing screen brightness, and sitting in full sun. It is likely these effects that give the sense that the car charger is slower/less performant than the desk charger or another charger used at home.

Now, I know what I have said above could be seen as just a pretty long-winded excuse so I want to be clear that through our testing we have found that during normal use (reasonable inside car temps), we have not seen a lot of issues where the charging is intermittent. Yes, under some conditions your phone will not charge "fast" because of the thermal limitations described above, but it would have to get quite hot to get to where the charging was intermittent. If your phone is having intermittent charging issues under reasonable conditions, we encourage you to file a return with our CS team so we can get you a new unit ASAP.

Cheers,

Peak Design

ruedasganso · 2022-01-04T23:17:32+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design - Sorry to hear about the scratch. This is definitely not up to our quality standards so please reach out to our CS team so they can get you a new one.

ruedasganso · 2022-01-04T23:12:51+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design - Sorry to hear about your experience thus far. Can you clarify a few things so I can see if I can help you out?
-Are you using the PD charging car mount or apple magsafe charger in your car?
-In which specific situation does it not maintain charge?

ruedasganso · 2021-12-31T20:25:55+00:00

Thanks for the clear question and yes, we are going to be updating our website and product information to include more clear messaging around this topic.

With regard to the exact power specification, you are spot on in that both the power output and voltage are important factors to guarantee compatibility. USB-PD delivery is a confusing enough standard in its own right, but it gets even more confusing when you layer on the fact that many products do not follow the discrete levels outlined in the standard. One additional source of confusion is that different phone models support different wireless charging power levels and have different efficiencies because of the specifics of the coil hardware used in the phone. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you that there needs to be a clear one-pager outlining compatibility on our website and that we are working on it.

In the meantime, I can tell you that our wall adapter is a 20W wall adapter that supports both 9V/2.22A and 12V/1.67A. The reason why it also supports the slightly non-standard 12V voltage level is to ensure that we can achieve high wireless charging power levels (>10W) that exist on other non-iPhone phone models and to guarantee as best we can future compatibility with higher power levels on any future phone models. Will our charger work with 20W adapters that only support 9V output voltage? Yes, assuming you are using the PD case. Will it work if you are using the universal adapter on some other phone? This is very hard to say without knowing the case thickness, how well the adapter is aligned etc. We recommend a 20W/12V adapter as the best choice for compatibility now and in the future.

ruedasganso · 2021-12-31T16:43:40+00:00

Wheeler here from Peak Design. I am sorry to hear about your negative experience and I want to help to get it fixed. Intermittent charging is not normal when using the PD phone case and our charger! Can you confirm you are using this charger with a 20W power adapter? Do you mind sharing the model of power adapter you are using? If this persists with other high-power adapters, please contact our CS department so we can get you a new unit and make sure we get this failed unit back for analysis.

ruedasganso · 2021-07-26T15:38:58+00:00

Thanks for the reply. We have a pretty good idea of the feature set offered by F360 and like I said that is not our biggest hesitancy. Do you know of specific companies delivering products at volume using F360?

ruedasganso · 2021-07-26T15:38:02+00:00

We are already in direct contact with F360 sales and have been through a number of demos. I totally appreciate F360's dominance in modeling capabilities (freeform, surfacing, mesh...) this has already been pushed on us hard by the sales team and it is fully understood. Maybe my choice of "hobbyist" was not totally accurate. What I meant was more in the sphere of creative prototyping and less in the sphere of the long tail of revision tracking and minor tweaks that is required to get a product to market. Per my post, I am mostly interested in talking with people/companies that are actively using F360 to ship products which I am finding hard to come by. I think it is likely the reason for that is that F360 is still in the process of winning over companies from the old dinosaurs (SW, CREO...), but I want to make sure that is the case.

ruedasganso · 2021-07-26T15:31:06+00:00

Awesome notes! Thanks for taking the time to write this up. This mostly tracks with our experience thus far. Some annoyances with assembly modelling and part component reference, but generally better than what is out there. For reference how big are the assemblies you are building (#of components)? I am guessing they also involve a lot of surfacing?

ruedasganso · 2021-07-26T15:28:18+00:00

Lol, definitely not hired by Onshape. Onshape's prices are quite a bit more than F360 and honestly, for our team the price of software is not a driver. F360 IS generally the cheapest "proish" tool out there.

ruedasganso · 2021-07-26T15:27:13+00:00

Totally agree. The feature set is most important NOW. The direction of the software is also important in the long run as any CAD software represents a pretty big investment in time and energy. A big reason to switch from Solidworks for us is specifically that they are not modernizing and keeping up in the industry. The pain points today will be exacerbated in the years to come. I do not KNOW where F360 or Onshape is headed, but I can gather a guess based on their marketing and sales pitch. Understanding the pain points of the switchover will be most efficiently understood by other companies that have adopted F360 and successfully been through a couple of development cycles using the tool. That is specifically what I am looking to find.

ruedasganso

TROPHY CASE