Drop MagSafe from the iPhone? No, Apple’s smarter than that

Apple has made some dubious design decisions over the past 15 years, from FineWoven to the AirPods Max Smart Case. We hope that trend is about to change, under the company’s new perfectionist CEO, but even the current management is too smart to drop MagSafe from the iPhone line, as claimed by a new report.

The Weibo leaker Instant Digital, who posts a lot but doesn’t have an especially strong track record of accurate predictions, claimed earlier this week that Apple has been debating whether to maintain MagSafe as a standard feature on the iPhone. “When MagSafe was first introduced, the internal stance was very aggressive,” the leaker adds. “There were even plans to include it as a standard feature on iPads, which I mentioned before, but ultimately didn’t happen. Now they’re starting to waver.”

The rationale behind this debate, Instant Digital claims, is the “sacrifice” involved in building MagSafe into each device. And it’s undoubtedly the case that MagSafe imposes a burden on phone designers: it requires the inclusion of a ring of magnets as well as the necessary inductive charging coils. Apple could make its iPhone thinner and lighter if it were able to drop MagSafe, and early prototypes suggest that the foldable iPhone Ultra may not get the feature. It’s notable, however, that the super-thin iPhone Air did get MagSafe, so it’s not like this is an insurmountable problem.

David Price / Foundry

If true, however, the iPhone Ultra won’t be the first model in recent years to miss out on MagSafe. The iPhone 16e suffered from the same omission, although it isn’t clear whether this decision was made in order to cut costs, help with design/manufacturing processes, encourage upsell to costlier alternatives, or (the official reasoning) because target buyers simply didn’t want it. It’s worth pointing out that the iPhone 17e gained MagSafe, albeit a slower version than that seen on other contemporary iPhones, and this upgrade was a major factor in that device getting a higher review score than its predecessor.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, MagSafe is a transformative feature. Before it came along, the options for iPhone owners were using a cable (fiddly, particularly when the cable inevitably slips down behind the nightstand) or non-magnetic wireless charging (also fiddly, and prone to leaving you with a dead phone in the morning because it got nudged off the sweet spot). We still have wired charging for moments where speed is the priority, but for all other times, MagSafe is the most convenient and frictionless way to perform a much-repeated task. Going back to the pre-MagSafe world while reviewing the iPhone 16e was far more annoying and inconvenient than I ever would have expected.

With this in mind, I’d be very surprised if Apple’s supposed debate about the future of MagSafe led to terminal action. Apple (as well as the rest of the smartphone world) knows MagSafe is a winner, and as Instant Digital acknowledges, the ecosystem of licensed MagSafe-ready accessories is itself a non-trivial source of revenue. That doesn’t mean there won’t be exceptions to the rule: the company tried to live without the tech on the 16e, for example, and it seems likely we’ll see something similar on the first-gen iPhone Ultra. But the standard, surely, will be to include MagSafe, because it’s too good to die and too important to limit to the Pro models only.