Teardown and exploration of Apple's Magsafe connector

Yes, it's amazing the processing power that can be tossed into something like a charger these days. (The address space doesn't scale like that, though, and the 6502 had a 16-bit address bus.)

The charger microcontroller is in the TI MSP430 family; it's custom so I don't know it's exact properties. It probably has just 1 or 2K of flash and 256 bytes of RAM. But it's much faster, with a 16MHz processor, compared to 1MHz in the Apple II. This chip monitors the output voltage and current to handle power up and fault shutdown. It doesn't do the actual switching power supply control; there's a separate SMPS controller chip for that. And the 85W charger has another controller chip for power factor correction. It all seems a bit over-engineered to me.

I read out the ID from an L connector and its basically the same. The circuit board must be slightly different since the wire comes in from the side but its the same 1-Wire device inside. I'm reluctant to sacrifice a charger to tear down the L connector just to see though.