Apple engineers are apparently feeling a bit of nostalgia in Cupertino. After reports that the company is apparently planning to kill the Touch Bar, a Bloomberg report suggests that the company is planning to bring back the MagSafe charger and SD card slots.
For those of you who are not familiar with MagSafe, it was the company’s way of preventing your laptop (or you) from breaking when you inevitably tripped over the charger. The company started to abandon MagSafe after introducing USB-C with MacBook 2015. As good as USB-C is, it doesn’t do much to keep you from stumbling.
A future MacBook Air, to be launched in late 2021 or sometime in 2022, will apparently introduce MagSafe once again. It will also have a pair of USB-4 ports (still using the USB-C format) and will be smaller and lighter than the current MacBook Air. This will be achieved in part by reducing the setting.
It is unclear what the new MagSafe charger will look like – whether Apple will reactivate the old connector or create a new one.
Anyway, it seems like a strange move. The company recently boasted that it no longer included chargers in its smartphones, citing environmental reasons, so it seems strange that they would reintroduce a charger when USB-C is such a reliable connector for devices that fit its energy capacity.
But, according to Bloomberg, the return of MagSafe is an attempt to attract loyalists to the Mac. To that end, it is bringing back the SD card slot on the MacBook Pro – a feature that we haven’t seen since 2016. That certainly will appeal to many photographers on MacOS; it’s 2020, but SD cards don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Apparently, Apple has also considered cellular connectivity and Face ID on the next Macs, but no features are expected to arrive this year. There was also a 15-inch MacBook Air under construction, but the project is apparently ruled out for now.
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Published on January 22, 2021 – 23:26 UTC