Linked List: September 16, 2023

Saturday, 16 September 2023

Apple Is No Longer Selling the MagSafe Battery Pack and MagSafe Duo Folding Charger 

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Although these accessories are technically obsoleted by today’s announcements, you can still buy them on sites like Amazon (MagSafe Battery Pack and the MagSafe Duo Charger) while supplies last, if so desired.

It’s unclear if Apple plans to introduce USB-C versions of these accessories in the future, or if these products have reached their natural end-of-life anyway. It’s never quite clear how popular Apple’s iPhone accessories are, after all.

The Duo Charger was a good concept, especially for traveling, but modern iPhones are too big for it, and it didn’t support the new higher-speed charging for recent Apple Watches.

But the MagSafe Battery Pack is a flat-out great product I’m sad to see disappear, and might still be something you’d want to buy while supplies last. Travel with one, and you can charge a new iPhone 15 using either a USB-C cable (plugged into the phone) or a Lightning cable (plugged into the battery pack). Either way, the other device will get charged via the two-way MagSafe connection.

Before the MagSafe Battery Pack, Apple sold a series of battery cases for some older iPhone generations. You remember them — they looked a bit weird, because the battery part was like a pregnant hump. Apple never once released a battery case at the same time the corresponding iPhones were announced. They’d announce the iPhones in September, then release the battery packs like two months later, without fanfare. I’ve always suspected this was deliberate — that Apple did not want to announce an external battery pack or case at the same time as new iPhones to avoid the possibility of even some of the news coverage for the new iPhones suggesting that they need an external battery pack because the built-in battery is insufficient.

So, maybe Apple is simply done selling the MagSafe Battery Pack. But, even if they have a new USB-C version in the works, I’m not at all surprised that it wasn’t released last week. Let’s wait for November. I hope they do release one, because Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack is far better than the third-party ones I’ve tried (including two decent ones from Anker). Apple’s isn’t the biggest, but it’s the best because it’s the smartest. It negotiates intelligently with the iPhone when connected and doesn’t waste energy charging the iPhone past 80 percent or so. You can feel the difference in efficiency by heat alone. Third-party inductive battery packs get quite warm; Apple’s doesn’t. Also, the third-party ones seem to all be “magnetic”, not officially “MagSafe” — Apple’s sticks better too.

Why the iPhones 15 Pro Feel So Much Lighter 

Dr. Drang:

Finally, we come to Jason Snell’s surprise at how light the 15 Pro seemed when he played with it in the hands-on area. He mentioned this not only in his Macworld article, but also in the post-keynote episode of Upgrade. You wouldn’t expect a change from 206 g for the 14 Pro to 187 g for the 15 Pro would be that noticeable, but Greg Joswiak mentioned it in the keynote and Jason confirmed it. How can that be?

One answer is that people are just more sensitive than we give them credit for being. A 9–10% drop in weight may seem like a small amount to our brains but a large amount to our hands. But because it allowed me to do some simple calculations, I decided to look into another possibility.

Your ability to manipulate a phone is based primarily on its mass, but also on its moment of inertia. And since the reduction in mass when switching from stainless steel to titanium is occurring almost entirely at the perimeter of the phone, the moment of inertia should be reduced more than if the mass were reduced uniformly.

Drang, of course, shows his work. There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s something to this: the new iPhones Pro feel even lighter than the weight reduction alone would suggest.