Snippet: On the Utility of MagSafe ☇

John Gruber weighs in on the idea of a MacBook Air with only a USB port and headphone jack:

But one that I keep thinking about is MagSafe. I can definitely see getting rid of classic USB — it’s old and thick. Thunderbolt, sort of. But MagSafe? When Apple announced MagSafe back in 2006, I knew they were solving a real problem, not an imaginary marketing problem. Tripping over power cables and yanking laptops off tables and onto floors was a real issue. I had an iBook way back when that ultimately died after one too much such incidents. If anything, Apple has made MagSafe 2 even easier to pull apart, not harder. Switching to USB Type-C seems like it would take us all the way back to days when tripping over the charging cable would take your laptop along for the ride.

While I’m all for removing unnecessary ports, going back to a charging connector that didn’t have some sort of magnetic release mechanism just feels like a step backwards and asking for trouble. Plus, one port for everything is fine in the iOS world, but I think the current MacBook Airs have pared down the number of ports to an appropriate minimum.