It’s high time Apple offered wireless charging technology, and including MagSafe in this year’s range is more than just wireless charging technology. This will change the way we use and produce phone accessories forever.
Photo by Daniel Romero via Unsplash.
Go to the past
Every year, Apple’s technical media and fan clubs look forward to the surprises that the new iPhones will bring. Once it is commercialized, Android OEMs will implement it. It’s no secret that it took less than a year for the entire Android OEM space to realize that the change here is forever.
In the past we’ve seen it with the earphone plug carved or removed. This year there are about 5G, the release of wall chargers/Airpods and the launch of the MagSafe accessory ecosystem.
Let’s take a step back and think of Apple’s AirPower.
It must have been Apple’s first proprietary wireless charger that never saw the light of day. Wireless pricing is a big change, but it poses a number of challenges to the customer’s actual usage scenario.
Eliminate the guesswork, dear engineer!
It is difficult to find and land the phone where the input coil of the phone and the output coil of the wireless charging unit meet.
But it wasn’t easy for the technicians to keep increasing the number of output coils to give users the freedom to hold their phone anywhere in the path to enjoy fast wireless charging. In the case of AirPower, Apple engineers were faced with problems of overheating, software and hardware errors, and eventually failed to make the system fail-safe.
The show must take place on.
None of this has prevented many brand name manufacturers and low cost Qi chargers from continuing to provide wireless charging stations to the iPhone’s ecosystem, but paying attention to the limited charging speeds that are possible.
It’s nothing new that Apple values the safety of devices and iPhone users over ultra-fast charging. Charging speed is therefore limited to less than 7.5 W to avoid overheating problems and hardware failures when using third party Qi chargers.
MagSafe, the magnetic future
Now that MagSafe offers the opportunity to be creative and solve many problems in the accessory ecosystem, we are seeing a wave of requests from both current and early iPhone users. They look forward to exciting new solutions and are willing to pay a premium.
New discipline between man and machine
MagSafe is working on the efficiency of magnetic rings. This reduces the risk of human error in positioning and location, as well as the hardware/software interface of the machine.
It is no longer just specification.
Of course, given Apple’s stringent new guidelines, MagSafe technology can lead to additional certification and manufacturing costs. But it will be a big step towards quality and efficiency. Apple’s MFi certification for charging and syncing a Lightning cable is a striking example, with Apple providing a chip with a unique serial number for each Lightning connector.
Silver alone does not help accessory manufacturers
Now the question is not who has the deepest pockets to make these products faster, but how creatively a company can use MagSafe as an opportunity to create something.
These are my two cents on how MagSafe is going to make a difference for accessory manufacturers and iPhone users around the world. The most popular word on the planet for USB usability is Plug & Play, but this could be the last year of its glory, with MagSafe the future belongs to Snap & Play.
What’s the next step?
An iPhone without a charging port? The result: houses, offices, cars and journeys without a cobweb of threads.
Invited participant: Atin Sharma is responsible for the growth of DailyObjects, an Indian brand of accessories for D2C mobile phones.
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