Apple introduced MagSafe for the iPhone in 2020, just four years ago. In addition to looking great, it rescued the name of an abandoned (and later recovered) technology on their MacBooks. The initial promise was great.
Not only because it is convenient: it seemed that the integration of magnets in wireless charging would be a before and after. Both for making Qi charging more reliable and efficient and for the fact that those magnets opened up many more possibilities than simply improved charging.
Four years later, that future remains more of a promise than a reality, and may never go beyond that, as they point out in Ars Technica. Maybe, as they say in my town, the donkey can’t do much more.
Don’t get me wrong: MagSafe works great and I prefer an iPhone with MagSafe than without it. Magazines line up perfectly, holsters fit well, and accessories have an easier time staying in place. But that anticipated revolution in new ways to use the iPhone simply hasn’t materialized.
What we have is a handful of rather basic accessories: chargers, stands, wallets and external batteries. Useful, of course, but hardly revolutionary. Most are limited to replicating capabilities that already existed before, but with magnets. Suitable proposals, such as MagSafe Duo, were discontinued. The Sleep mode that iOS 17 brought seemed like the prelude to an avalanche of chargers in the form of alarm clocks, but that has not happened.
This image was powerful in summer 2023, but it has not led to many accessories that take advantage of this form factor. Image: Mateusz Haberny on Unsplash.
The problem is not technical: the magnets work very well. The problem is that Apple hasn’t been able to inspire the kind of innovation we’ve come to expect from iPhone accessory makers, an industry in itself. Not even with the arrival of MagSafe’s first cousin, the Qi2 standard.
The early days of the iPhone, the end of the 2000s, left us with a creative explosion in its ecosystem of accessories. There were even new developments that seemed great to us and then they didn’t last even a year. Remember bumper covers? MagSafe, on the other hand, has been stuck on the obvious.
Even Apple seems to have little interest in developing that ecosystem of magnetic accessories. It has practically had the same thing since the beginning: silicone cases, a transparent case, a wallet and little else.
The wallet, for example, clearly has some room for improvement, but remains the same with the difference of the mistaken change to FineWoven, a material well below the quality standard of any serious manufacturer.
Something must be recognized: the best MagSafe accessories are those that come from third parties, such as Belkin and Anker, who do not usually fail in this field. They have created ingenious multiple charging systems or versatile supports that take advantage of magnetism. But even counting on those products, which Apple itself sells in its stores, MagSafe seems far from its potential.
It’s not that MagSafe is a failure, it’s useful, but it’s an incremental improvement, not the huge leap it seemed in 2020. Maybe expectations were too high, or maybe there’s still room for someone, be it Apple or a third party, to push better. this novelty. At the moment it is a technology that continues to search for its true purpose. Like the competent actor who, after forty, is still waiting for a leading role.
Featured image | Mateusz Haberny on Unsplash
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