One of Apple\'s Best Ideas Ever - Made Worse

I think the MagSafe connector is one of Apple's best ideas ever. It's on the end of every Mac laptop's power cord. It attaches to the laptop with a powerful magnet-but if anybody trips on it, it detaches and falls harmlessly to the floor. The laptop doesn't go crashing down with it.

In this year's laptops, though, like the MacBook Air and the 15-inch Retina display MacBook, Apple changed the design of the MagSafe connector to make it skinnier. Everyone who'd bought a bunch of power adapters for their old Apple laptops has to buy a $10 adapter for each one of them to make it fit the new laptops.

But that's not the worst of it.

The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked.

The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It's so wea k, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It's a huge, huge pain.

That weakness is compounded by a second problem: a return to the “T” design of older MagSafe connectors. In other words, this thing comes straight into the side of the laptop - the cable shoots out at 90 degrees - instead of hugging the side with the cord parallel, like the old “L” connectors. As a result, it protrudes a half inch beyond the left edge. You can't rest the left side of the laptop on your thigh. It's constantly getting bumped. And since the magnet has all the grip strength of an elderly gnat, guess what happens?

I bought a MacBook Air for myself last month. It's my main machine - I'm on this thing many hours a day - so I spent the huge bucks and loaded it up with memory and storage. And I'll tell you, as a laptop, it's a dream. It's by far the fastest laptop I've ever used. It start s up in a matter of seconds. Even Photoshop loads quickly. I routinely keep 15 apps open simultaneously, and I can flip between them without ever having to wait.

But the poorly designed MagSafe connector is infuriating. It's the worst Apple design blunder since the hockey-puck mouse.

Some of the customers on the Apple Store Web site (who give it, cumulatively, a 1.5-star rating), suggest buying the older MagSafe power adapters and equipping them with the $10 adapter, which they say grips the laptop better. Unfortunately, that's a big expense, it creates an even bigger protrusion from the left side, and the tiny adapter is easy to lose.

Others are just exasperated. “I find myself trying to think of a workaround,” says one of the unhappy customers on the Apple store Web site. “Glue? No. Binder clip? No. Duct tape? Maybe. Stupid design.”

I'm with you, brother. Say amen and pass the duct tape.