Hear me out: MagSafe has failed to reach its potential, but the foldable iPhone Ultra could revive it

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It’s fair to say that MagSafe is a much-loved part of the Apple ecosystem: ask owners of any of the best iPhones what they think of it, and you’ll likely get a unanimously positive response. The magnetic attachment system lets you wirelessly charge your iPhone, attach accessories to its back, connect it to stands and car phone holders, and a lot more.

Like all good Apple products, it’s incredibly simple to use, yet performs exceptionally well with admirable reliability. On the surface, it would seem to be a roaring success story for both Apple and its customers.

Yet despite all that, I can’t help but feel disappointed by MagSafe. Sure, it’s great at what it does, and it’s easy to understand why so many people love it, myself included. But when I think back to how it was first introduced to the world, I can’t escape the idea that it just hasn’t lived up to its potential. Far from being the revolutionary innovation it was hyped up to be, MagSafe feels so much more limited than it should be.

AirPower’s ambition

(Image credit: Apple)

MagSafe is a brilliant idea, but it wasn’t Apple’s first attempt at a boundary-pushing wireless charger. That accolade goes to AirPower.

AirPower was an experimental wireless charger that introduced the idea that you could put any Apple device capable of wireless charging — including iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods cases — onto the pad, in any order and orientation, and they’d all juice up to full.

The trouble is that AirPower required a mass of overlapping charging coils on the inside, and this created far too much heat to be able to operate…

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