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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> No magsafe

Has anyone seen or personally heard of someone yanking their laptop, of any brand or model, onto the floor via the power cable? I haven't. I instinctively think it's a risk, but reality says otherwise. It seems to me like a solution looking for a problem; the only reason I ever suspected that it's a real problem is that Apple made the Magsafe connectors - maybe they had some data that I didn't. Now I suspect it was all to address unfounded fears in consumers.

I've seen it happen plenty of times with cell phones, however. I wouldn't mind a Magsafe connector for an iPhone.

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>I instinctively think it's a risk, but reality says otherwise.

What an argument. Do you happen to have Auto insurance? How about fire insurance? Did your house burn down even once? Mine didn't so far and yet here I am still saying fire insurance is very much needed if you own a house.

And that is exactly what the MagSafe was. Insurance incase this happens. And as you can already tell by the other responses, this does happen. And even if it only happens once, you will look at thousands of dollars worth of damage.

So, no thank you with the non MagSafe MacBooks. Having a choice if I want that yanked off my table to the left or the right depending on which USB-C connector I used to charge it is not a selling point.

MagSafe made sense when laptops had such terrible life they were almost always plugged in out of necessity.

Now if you're at your desk you're probably plugged in to power and a few other things that aren't break-away. If you're not at your desk you're probably not plugged in. The biggest snag I've always hit is the headphone connection. It's the most likely to get yanked if your headphones get caught up on a chair.

It was a convenient solution at the time. Now it's a bit of an anachronism.

If you like insurance, get a break-away USB-C cable for each of your devices: https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-po...

I actually did it to a Dell laptop about 4-5 years ago. Somehow I got the power cable tangled in the office chair I was sitting on, and when I moved the chair the laptop fell to the floor. Managed to put a small crack in the body, although I didn't notice any other damage, and everything appeared to function fine after that. Never bothered trying to get it fixed, I just lived with the crack for a few more months until I got the laptop replaced (for completely unrelated reasons – I moved to a different team at work, and members of my new team were eligible for beefier machines than my old team were.) I was lucky, could easily have resulted in much worse damage than it did.

I stepped into someone's magsafe cable a few days ago and disconnected it. I don't know if I would have dropped the mac to the floor because it prevented us from discovering it :-)

I'm much more careful at placing my HP power cable on the ground and up to the desk and never got my pc pulled to the ground.

Magsafe protects the laptop. But more directly, it protects physical power port from damage and wear.

The magsafe connection gets pulled out of my Macbook with enough frequency that I know I'd otherwise be slowly bending the power port on a standard DC adapter.

> more directly, it protects physical power port from damage and wear.

I've never seen a problem with that either. I've seen plenty of wear on the jackets around connectors on cables.

Multiple Thinkpads had to have complete motherboard changes because someone stumbled over the power cable, which broke the female power jack which was soldered directly onto the motherboard. :(

I've seen a friend Dell completely destroyed by someone stumbling over the cable.

I haven't, but having my MagSafe cable ripped out of my laptop thanks to one of the house dogs running through it is a semi-regular occurrence. Not really looking forward to upgrading.

For me it happened quite often back when I was going to University. Often other students could accidentally hit the cable in class. It was really neat in those kinds of situations.

I would have killed 3 macbooks if I didn't have magsafe.

Yes, actually, happened to me multiple times before MagSafe. I've also encountered pre-MagSafe MacBooks with broken power jacks.

You could really beat them up. The hole became a sort of ragged edged crater you mashed the cable into. Probably not the look Ive is after, but it seemed effective.

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