RIP MagSafe, gone too soon

 




Apple unceremoniously took the first step toward killing MagSafe this week when it announced the new MacBook. It wasn’t a “remember how awesome this thing was” moment, it was more like the company quietly put it down.
I remember when Steve Jobs got up on stage and announced MagSafe for the first time in 2006. A power adaptor that’s held in by a magnet! Crazy!
Jobs touted the connector as the hardware feature that would end accidents with power adaptors and I was blown away. He even touted it as “saving us all a lot of hassle, you with your notebooks getting fixed and us having to fix them.” A win-win situation for everyone.
I didn’t get a MacBook until 2013, but MagSafe was one of the features I had always been envious of them for. MagSafe is an incredible technology that only really came into existence a brief moment ago, but now it seems like its days are numbered. With the advent of USB-C connectors that allow you to charge your computer while you have a screen plugged in on a single port, it only makes sense to adopt the better standard. It seems likely that Apple will roll out USB-C to all of its MacBooks over the next year or two, eventually replacing MagSafe entirely. That said, I’m in denial. As much as I love the idea of the USB-C single-port future, I hate the idea of my MacBook flying across the room when someone trips over the power cable.


It happened to me frequently at university on the crappy Toshiba laptop I owned back in 2008 and I wouldn’t want that to happen on a $2,500 investment. MagSafe meant I could be entirely reckless with my cables, because who cares when it just pops right out?
I’m not ready to say goodbye to MagSafe yet and I’m willing to bet that most of you aren’t either. It’s such a simple invention that’s made my life much easier and if Apple really does kill it off in its higher end laptops like the Retina MacBook Pro, I’ll probably hold off upgrading for as long as I can.
There’s still hope that won’t happen, but it feels almost inevitable. I’m just not ready for it to happen.
Please don’t kill MagSafe, Apple.