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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> My favorite part of my touchbar MBP is that it uses USB-C charging. MagSafe is neat, but I don't miss the $80 proprietary charger with a cable that's fixed to the brick and will probably fail if you do anything other than leave it sitting at a desk.

Magsafe is more than neat, it pretty much solved the major annoyance with laptop power cables (e.g. someone trips on cable, and laptop gets jerked around, eventually damaging something).

Apple likes to toot its own horn way to much, but they deserve tons of credit for Magsafe.

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Here's an alternate solution to that problem: build a laptop with 20 hours of battery so that people aren't sitting on the couch with their laptop on the coffee table and a power cord dangling across the living room floor.

I don't have an M1 machine, but the impression I get from people is that "Plug it in overnight at your desk and literally don't worry about its battery running out" is a reasonable thing to do now.

>Here's an alternate solution to that problem: build a laptop with 20 hours of battery so that people aren't sitting on the couch with their laptop on the coffee table and a power cord dangling across the living room floor.

That's a non-solution, since a large majority of the people will use the laptop on their office desk/home desktop, and prefer to have it plugged in while so.

I’d argue that using the laptop at a desk negates the need for a “yank-proof” charger since in most office situations there’s an outlet near or under the desk. Thus the cable won’t be draped across a walkway where someone might trip on it.

Do you have people tripping over the cords under your desk?

Are all people's desks conveniently placed for cable management?

Well I’ve got a power strip so I’m not running separate power cords for my computer, a powered USB hub, a lamp, an external hard drive, etc. since that would need a whole bunch of wall outlets that I definitely don’t have.

Having more than two things plugged in at a desk is pretty common situation and literally everyone solves it with a surge protector / power strip. So the laptop cord isn’t dangling across the room, it just runs from the power strip under the desk up the wall to the laptop on the desk. Not a situation where MagSafe would do anything for it.

There are well setup home office desks (I use one, now, didn't always have one), and there are all kinds of office makeshift desk situations, from a simple small ikea desk with a laptop on it and not much else, to the kitch table used as a desk (and cables going to the wall).

Sometimes you're also on the sofa and need to charge, and so on...

Right, but my point in the original comment is that with a 20 hour battery life you wouldn't have the "on the sofa and need to charge" problem anymore.

That's the experience I have with my HP "windows on arm" laptop (one of the launch devices - not the newer more powerful CPU). And of course in the last few rounds of Windows updates they broke "Instant On" which besides battery life was the only other great thing about it. Now it's a slow laptop with great battery life that's frustrating because it takes 20 seconds to turn on.

Connected Standby is still functional today... you might want to do a reinstall... (sadly Windows still doesn't always _remain_ stable with time)

I too loved MagSafe. It wasn’t without issues though. The cables didn’t have strain relief so ended up destroyed in certain hands. The other issue may be more region specific - New Zealand has iron sand beaches and fine black sand gets everywhere. Presumably some got into a bag of mine and a very small amount go into the laptop charging ports of multiple laptops. It caused the charger to not connect perfectly and this generated hear and blackened the plug and laptop around the port.

Also if you have small children who put the magsafe connector in their mouth it kills the power brick. If you plug a faulty power brick into a laptop it would sometimes fry the power circuit on the laptop as well.

But I'm 100% in agreement that Apple underdesigned the strain relief on the MagSafe connectors, probably for aesthetic reasons.

Apple deserves credit for bringing magnetic power cords to laptops, but they didn't invent it.

It's been used on Zojirushi kettles since 1982: https://www.zojirushi.com/blog/?p=4147

I do like Magsafe. I always wonder how may plug/unplug cycles the USB-C charging will last. I never worried about magsafe.

I love the design of the MagSafe chargers, you point out a great advantage of them, but sadly they aren't durable. And like the parent comment said, they are expensive. I'm on my second for my current laptop and it's frayed on the end so I'm soon to be on my third. Hopefully a next iteration of MagSafe takes this issue more seriously.

I have a couple MagSafe chargers (for the 15 inch Pro) sitting in a drawer with no Mac that can use them. I can’t be bothered to sell them on eBay, I’d be happy to pass them on if you cover shipping.

> I love the design of the MagSafe chargers, you point out a great advantage of them, but sadly they aren't durable.

I was only talking about the MagSafe connector, which was genius. I agree that they made a few very poor decisions in other parts of the charger (specifically: the cable itself).

Shore it up by wrapping electrical tape around it. To be stylish, find some white electrical tape.

That works for a while so long as it's not fraying near the Magsafe connector itself. I eventually threw out my older charger because there was more electrical tape than original coating. My current one started deteriorating right at the connector so it's patched up with epoxy paste to provide strain relief.

I tend to agree that Apple isn't going to retreat on USB-C. That just doesn't make a lot of sense. And whatever minor virtues Magsafe may have, I'm happy when traveling not to have to remember a one-off charger for a laptop. (Which I have forgotten a couple of times.)

I just bought my first macbook, a 2015 model. Looking at the charger, the connection with the magsafe connector looks ok (but definitely weaker than regular barrel jacks), but it seems to me that people get the tendency to unplug it by pulling the cable instead of pulling on the connector. Perhaps that's why they deteriorate rapidly?

I'm sure people do at least now and then. I almost certainly have--are at least I'm not super careful. And I know mine does get accidentally yanked out every now and then.

And I find the covering of the whole cord tends to deteriorate over time, which isn't strain related.

Use self-amalgamating tape, I use this on all new cables where I suspect strain relief is needed.

Or some Sugru if you want to get real fancy.

This can only be planned obsolescence. Anti-fray cable ends have been a standard feature of headphones for decades.

I did not like magsafe at all - i couldn’t sit on a couch with my laptop without inadvertently disconnecting the charging cable every once and then.

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