Reports: Apple AirPower still overheating, may be “doomed to failure”

The Ikea product is 3 wireless chargers that are connected to each other. The apple mat however, seems to be attempting a system where you can place the product anywhere on the mat and it just works. This does seem significantly more difficult to me.

Isn't there a clear distinction between both products ?

Steve Jobs announced that Facetime would be open source and never happened, apparently because he didn't check with any engineers or lawyers before making the announcement.

Sure. It's rare precisely because it's such footgun and so "easy" to avoid simply by never keynoting and talking about stuff that isn't actually in mass production and ready to ship, and Apple has generally been very conservative about that and taken their secrecy seriously. But it has happened, one of the most famous ones of the Jobs era was the PowerMac G5 intro, where there was a slide (IIRC) and explicit promise that the PowerMac G5 would reach 3.0+ GHz within a year. But the G5 could never manage that, and my vague recollection on internal scuttlebutt at that point was the Jobs was pretty fucking furious about it. The G5's problems and the massively increasing importance of notebooks vs desktops to Apple made the Intel switch inevitable anyway but that didn't hurt the push.

Edit to add that it's happened more with software related promises then hardware, though in fairness the two big ones I can think of instantly there were ZFS and FaceTime open source and such and both were down to IP bullshit. Maybe Apple could have had its ducks in a row there somewhat better, but maybe not, and at any rate it wasn't due to technical fault on their part. Software patents have been an eternal plague upon our industry.