iPhone 15 Owners Say BMW's Wireless Charger Is Frying Their Devices

The Qi standard for wireless charging has been around since 2008. That means people have been taking advantage of the technology for the better part of 15 years, and it's been fairly dependable over that time. That is, unless you're one of the subset of folks who happen to own both a BMW and iPhone 15 today, in which case, it may be wise to juice up your shiny smartphone the old fashioned way.

New iPhone owners across the internet have been reporting that the charging pads in their BMWs have been bricking the NFC chips inside of their new devices, rendering contactless payments, certain digital car keys, and other NFC-related features unusable.

https://twitter.com/ishanagarwal24/status/1708472144609595494

As reported by MacRumors, users who experience the issue say that while charging, their iPhones display a white screen and enter into recovery mode. Once restarted, everything appears normal until the user tries to use any function that requires NFC.

Users with affected devices will then see an error message inside of the Wallet application that reads "Could Not Set Up Apple Pay." There does not appear to be a fix as of yet, though some customers report that Apple replaced their damaged devices following the error.

"[T]his has happened to my friend's new iPhone 15 Pro Max picked up from the local Apple Store last week," wrote a user on the /r/BMW subreddit. "He went back to the store and the Apple employees said it was not fixable, so they did a refund. The bigger problem was that they didn't have another iPhone 15 Pro Max to sell to my friend. All they could do was to place another order for him with an estimated delivery date of first week of November."

While Qi charging and NFC don't operate at the same frequency, both standards do employ a similar method of data transmission known as inductive coupling. This standard allows devices to wirelessly transmit data at close range.

NFC operates at a very low power frequency—13.56 MHz—and though it could technically be used for charging, that functionality would be fairly limited due to the maximum negotiated charging rate being just 1 watt. Instead, NFC's typical use case has been data transmission where proximity is important. For iPhones, it's used for Apple CarKey and Apple Pay contactless payments.