Charge Easier and More Efficiently with MagSafe
There’s no arguing that Apple was really late to the party when it came to adding support for wireless charging. When Apple finally unveiled its first Qi-compatible iPhones in 2017, the technology had been available in at least some rival Android handsets for at least five years, and had pretty much gone mainstream by 2015, although it was still somewhat beset by competing standards.
In typical Apple fashion, however, the company wasn’t interested in being the first to add wireless charging to its devices, but was instead looking for ways to be the best. Waiting for the dust to settle and Qi to emerge as the dominant standard was undoubtedly part of that, but at the same time Apple was looking to “Think Different” in terms of how Qi charging would be handled, and from this desire came AirPower — a unique wireless charging pad that turned out to be so ambitious that it blew past its promised 2018 deadline and ultimately forced Apple to admit defeat and abandon the project entirely.
In its usual tenacious determination to do something different from the rest, however, Apple chose to approach the problem of getting reliable and efficient wireless charging from a different direction, leading to the birth of this year’s MagSafe technology — a set of circular magnets in every iPhone 12 that not only guarantees precise placement for wireless charging — offering charging speeds of up to 15W in the process — but has also opened the door to a whole new world of magnetically-attached accessories.
While we’d argue that some of these are of dubious value, especially considering they aren’t working as well as we might have hoped, creating an entire ecosystem of accessories based simply on a ring of magnets is something that we think only Apple could pull off, and in many ways it signals a whole new era for the iPhone.