“I think the MagSafe connector is one of Apple’s best ideas ever. It’s on the end of every Mac laptop’s power cord. It attaches to the laptop with a powerful magnet—but if anybody trips on it, it detaches and falls harmlessly to the floor. The laptop doesn’t go crashing down with it,” David Pogue writes for The New York Times.
“In this year’s laptops, though, like the MacBook Air and the 15-inch Retina display MacBook, Apple changed the design of the MagSafe connector to make it skinnier… The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked,” Pogue writes. “The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It’s so weak, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It’s a huge, huge pain.”
Pogue writes, “The poorly designed MagSafe connector is infuriating. It’s the worst Apple design blunder since the hockey-puck mouse.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re still using the nice, aluminum, barrel- and L-shaped original MagSafe with our 11-inch MacBook Airs and, right now, now we’re dreading anything with MagSafe 2 on it. What’s your everyday experience with MagSafe 2? Same as Pogue’s, diametrically opposed, or somewhere in-between?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jeff A.” for the heads up.]
I don’t understand what all the ruckus is all about. But that’s just me. It’s just an AC connection and for me it works as advertised. Did I like the previous Magsafe better? Yes – I liked the design better. But I’m not complaining about the new one either – it’s not a big deal to me.
I’ve had only two Macs, an Early-2009 13″ White MacBook and an Early-2011 15″ MacBook Pro and I like the T-shaped MagSafe connector better: it’s unobstrusive and it doesn’t matter from which direction is yanked, it comes away easily. The L-shaped connector is the opposite.
I love hockey-puck mouse, I think it was great.
Let it go already, it was not a blunder.
I feel my comment may be held in contempt as I am a hockey puck mouse user.
I have both, and actually prefer the new one. The barrel had downsides for me that were much more problematic, but still not enough to ignite this level of silliness. Normally, I find Pogue instructive. But the biggest blunder since the hockey-puck-mouse? Please, that’s just hyperbole beyond belief, or hit-whoring at best.
Having had the retina macbook for a couple days now, the new magsafe is my single biggest complaint. What the hell were they thinking??
Forget laying golden eggs. i want a magical goose that lays magsafe connectors, so I can sell them to chumps like myself 3 times over to power the same computer. There is a special place in hell for the MBAs that refuse to make a durable power cord for a $3,000 computer.
I’ve been a proud owner of a Macbook Pro 15′ with retina display for the past 2 months now and the computer is utterly awesome!!! The magsafe charger on the other hand …..what a bust!!! Honestly, my beef with the charger is not the strength of the magnet but the fact that in less than 2 months under normal use the charger is in poor condition. The apple brick is covered in deep scratches and the actual magnetic part which attaches to the Macbook has a bunch of dents in the aluminum coating. These dents were made from just a couple times the charger fell from my bed onto the tile floor. I understand I dropped it (accidentally of course) however laptop chargers should really be designed to withstand a light fall. I have had pc laptops for the past 10 years and other then getting covered with dust all my chargers never dented, scratched, or aged. My apple brick looks like I had it for 10 years. Also, luckily I knew from my mother to be extremely careful when attaching the magsafe to my macbook to avoid scratching. My mother has a macbook pro 13′ 2011 with the t-shape magsafe. She was never careful in attaching her magsafe to her macbook so now the area around the charger input is completely covered in scratches. Again, I cant believe that Apple which is capable of producing the absolute best computers could produce chargers of such poor quality. Also, I don’t want to hear I should have been more careful not to drop the charger. Anybody who has a laptop has dropped the power cord NUMEROUS times. That is just the pure nature of owing something that was built to be portable. Whoever has a pc laptop with a cylindrical input can drop the cord from 10 feet and still not dent it as it was built to withstand drops. If only apple could design magsafe as well as they do their computers. Lastly I’m not alone here as all magsafe chargers have abysmal customer ratings which anyone can see on apple’s website. Hopefully, apple reads those costumer reviews and will make a charger with the same quality as their computers.