Remember AirPower? The idea was to create a convenient wireless charger that just worked.
Using a whole bunch of coils, you could just place your device anywhere and not worry about
bad alignment. It would just charge. So look for the AirPower charger next year.
Well, that never happened. And what we got instead three years later is this. MagSafe.
It's a really neat feature added to the iPhone 12 last fall. In essence, it's a ring of magnets
surrounding the iPhone's wireless charging coil. You can see it right there. And I think
in many ways that it is better than AirPower could ever have been, because it makes for
a much more interesting and handy ecosystem. Let me show you how.
You're smart because you bought an iPhone 12 mini. My favorite small smartphone option
on the market. It's easy to hold, doesn't demand all your attention, and fits in any
pocket. But it might not have enough battery life for your heavy usage. So if you're not
at home, you might not be able to plug it into a wall. And holding a battery pack plugged
into a phone is just embarrassing. So what about this?
It's Apple's brand new MagSafe battery pack. Their first powered MagSafe accessory since
the puck is designed to top up your phone in a pinch. Just attach it to the back and
it'll send a 5 watt trickle of power to your phone. You can see how perfectly its dimensions
match the edge of this mini. It's basically designed for this phone. For $100, it's such
a peculiar little thing, full of little bits of Apple magic and odd priorities. Let's
take battery capacity for example. It's labeled at almost 1500mAh, which seems low, but battery
capacity numbers make no sense to me because it's rated at 7.62 volts and 11.13 watt hours.
So I don't know. Well, it means that when I tried to recharge my dead iPhone 12 mini,
it made it to 73%. And that took about 3 heat generating hours. So it's not going to charge
your phone up completely. Not that it ever would have, because when you first attach
the battery pack, you do get a notification telling you that it won't charge past 90%.
Which I imagine is there to help prolong the longevity of your iPhone's precious battery.
Which I should also note, only costs $70 to replace.
It's pretty neat that if you plug it into a modern 20 watt charger with a USB-C lightning
cable, neither of which are included in the box, it turns into a full spec 15 watt MagSafe
charger like the Puck. Or if say you need to plug your phone into CarPlay but want to
top up the battery pack, it supports reverse charging too. Placing it on your phone conjures
up a nifty animation that shows the outline of the battery pack and what's getting charged.
And the capacity shows up in the battery widget, which I think you'll probably want to set
up on your home screen or in the today view. The downsides are that you need iOS 14.7 to
get it to work. Also, I thought it would be clad in Apple's typically glossy white plastic,
but it isn't. It's matte. Now there's also something like this. It's the Anker Powercore Magnetic 5K. Functionally,
it's the same, but capacity wise it has more juice. Able to charge this iPhone 12 mini
from empty to 98% and hold it there for a bit. It's got this same untethered charging
speed and because it has a USB-C port that also doubles as a charging output, it's a
bit more useful if you have other devices to charge and a bit less useful if all you
have are lightning cables in your home. It also costs $46 which is $54 less. So like
which one do you get? These two very similar accessories kind of show the interesting state
the MagSafe ecosystem is in.
See these accessories here are not MagSafe. Rather, they're compatible. It's confusing.
I know. Let me explain. Any accessory maker that wants to take full advantage of Apple's
full speed wireless charging magic and then have the privilege to print made for MagSafe
on their box will have to pay into Apple's MFI program. Well, you'll have to pay, but
you know what I mean. This presents a bit of a problem because there's official MagSafe accessories and then there's
MagSafe compatible accessories. It's annoyingly hard to differentiate between the two. Looking
in Apple's accessory guidelines document where the specs and dimensions of the magnets
are found, it appears that Apple calls the ring of magnets MagSafe Attach. Okay, so then
to be clear, if it's MFI and officially sanctioned by Apple with fast charging, we'll call it
a MagSafe accessory. And if it simply has the magnets and uses everyday slower Qi charging,
we'll refer to it as an accessory with MagSafe Attach. Hmm, I think that's easy to understand
right? And I got these right. Yes. Yes.
The first and most famous MagSafe accessory is Apple's official MagSafe charging cable.
At $40, it's expensive. With one meter length, it's short and requiring a 21 adapter that's
sold separately. It's a little inconvenient. Interestingly, when you search MagSafe on
the internet, you often get accessories that merely hold this charger. In fact, there's
a whole sub ecosystem of this stuff from cheap holders for your dashboard all the way to
this expensive and beautifully crafted mount by Grovemade. But mostly, it's all kind of
lame if you think about it. Because as far as I'm concerned, if it doesn't have its
own magnets, it doesn't really count as an interesting accessory, especially when you
consider this. It's the Belkin Boost Charge 3-in-1 charger.
Affectionately referred to by Vergerider as a charging tree thing, it's cute and mighty
convenient for the ultimate Apple device user. In its base is a 5-watt Qi charging pad for
AirPods. There's a spot for your Apple Watch. And right next to that, there is an official
MagSafe pad. It means you get the full 15 watts of inductive charging throughput, well,
12 on this mini, and a cool animation just like on the Apple Watch. At $140, it's a
lot of money. I wish it had USB-C and a more discreet wall adapter for when you can't
plug it into a wall, but I like it. Put one of these things on your desk at work and you
can schedule your charging routine for then, meanwhile not missing on any notifications.
Now if we broaden the horizon to include MagSafe Attach, then there's a lot of interesting
and convenient accessories available. Take this kit for a moment, for instance. Reading
up a phone to make good social content can become an annoying faff. But what Moment has
done is beefed up their magnets in both their cases and in here. These little pucks easily
stick onto the back of your iPhone and turn it into the ultimate production rig. This tripod
adapter is brilliant, actually. At the top you have a cold shoe mount for a light or better
yet a microphone, dongle not included. There are three variations, including this one,
which lets you vertically mount your phone on your tripod so that you can record the
hottest TikTok dances. And then there's also this multi-threaded puck, which the camera
guys here say is extremely handy for rigging. The ease at which you can place and remove
your phone really makes this compelling. You can have a rig set up for precious moments
without your phone becoming a wright old mess. And it's all for a cost of between $40-60.
But here's an important thing to remember. If you're going to be using MagSafe Attach,
you need to make sure that you have a case with the magnets built in. The separation
a normal case creates from the iPhone's built-in magnets weakens them significantly. Which leads
me to an interesting thought. These moment cases would be perfect for Madison, our social media
coordinator here. However, her work phone is an iPhone 11 Pro, which doesn't have MagSafe Attach.
But if the MagSafe Attach specification is a simple ring, why can't someone just buy a case
with those magnets built in for their older phone? Sintechi has a sticker you can adhere
to the back of your phone to give it MagSafe capability, but I think you can do better.
I searched high and low and found this, the Zira Clear MagSafe case. It looks very much
like Apple's clear case, but with a difference. It's also available for all of the iPhone 11
models. And I've tried it with all our accessories here. And it works flawlessly. While not being
the most quality of plastic cases, it is around $27 for two. I should note that I have seen
MagSafe Attach cases for older phones scattered on AliExpressive as well. But the usual cap vets
of that platform apply. Long shipping times, question of quality, you know.
Now back to inductive charging. Outside of officially sanctioned MagSafe, there are plenty
of options. There's this Sintechi stand for instance, which is about $60. That's about $15
less than the comparable Belkin. And this power wave magnetic from anchor is even less, if you can
get it. For the road warriors among us, MagSafe Attach can actually be pretty handy. A lot of
you are asking what I was using in my AirTags video, and it's this, the $36 ESR Gear Halo
car mount. Now it's far from the prettiest car mount in the world, but it does actually charge
your phone as you drive along. I'll be it very slowly because I'm using this gas station five
volt adapter. But at least it's something. Otherwise, if you don't care about charging,
the stronger magnets and slim profile of the moment car mount is a pretty good option.
I'm still pretty shocked that after eight months, we haven't seen more official MagSafe
accessories hit the market. Where's the official fast charge car mount? Where are the cool
interactions created by the NFC chip that's part of MagSafe? I can't find them. The MagSafe Attach
ecosystem, however, is thriving quite well. But I feel like it'd be pretty easy to make it even
better. Well, Zira has shown that it's perfectly workable to add a ring of magnets to an iPhone 11
case. Why stop there? Why aren't there good cases for older iPhones that support cheat charging,
or even Android phones? To be able to easily and conveniently attach to a burgeoning accessories
market would make MagSafe, or MagSafe Attach, all the more compelling. It's not hard, and I have a
box full of chargers that are useless, otherwise.
You get a MagSafe Attach charger! You get a MagSafe Attach charger! You least have a
MagSafe attached charger! You get a MagSafe attached charger! You get a MagSafe charger!
You get a MagSafe charger! You get a MagSafe charger! You get a MagSafe charger!
Apple's MFI program first started with the iPod.
Remember how many different accessories were available back then? The ecosystem thrived because lots of people wanted to easily use their iPods outside of
their headphones, and Apple was the sole gatekeeper of the iPod's 30-pin connector.
But with MagSafe, cheat charging is not controlled by Apple, so nothing stops third parties from
avoiding the burden of Apple's MFI program while making accessories that still work.
Meanwhile, I think customers will be happy to put up with slightly slower charging if
it means they save $20 or $40 off the price.
There are murmurs that MagSafe might become the future of charging on the iPhone, and
that certainly would increase demand for MagSafe accessories.
But at a cost to your wallet and power efficiency, look, MagSafe is neat.
It's a future for charging, but please not the future.
Thanks for attaching to this Mac Address. If you'd love to be able to magnetically attach your phone to things, give this a like.
And if you've already experienced that, why not subscribe? Now one thing I didn't mention is that Moment also has this magnetic wall mount that you
can drill or glue onto the wall. But I'm having trouble coming up with a reuse for it.
The best I can think of is putting it on the wall opposite of the toilet for watching
YouTube. Like what you're probably doing right now.
But if you have an idea, let me know in the comments below.