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Comment by wishinghand | Hacker News Reader

I forgot to list magsafe as one of those awesome things that was lost. I could take or leave the power indicator but it was kind of cool. It's such a no brainer that I'm surprised it's not been copied. Apple must have patented it too well.

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Microsoft's Surface connector is Magsafe-ish, with USB and DP lines running through it as well. When I get to the office I put my laptop vaguely near the connector and it snaps into place, giving me two extra monitors, an external keyboard, and gigabit Ethernet.

My understanding was that they purchased the company that specialized in the laser perforation and all of the proprietary equipment required to make the metal thin enough for the light to shine through, which is a big part of the reason we haven't seen it elsewhere. And yeah, probably IP too.

Bang & Olufsen have the same thing on some of their products, as does Koenigsegg for the center console in their cars.

There were several articles around that...

It was a very special manufacturing procedure, something that is hard to copy without the special hardware.

And Apple bought all that supply. You couldn't get the production line to do it...

(IIRC, bit my memory may fail me on that. Please Google it, I would be interested in rereading it!)

I'd like a power and / or activity indicator, especially my previous mac (2013 or 14 Retina) had Issues in that it just wouldn't start up with no indication whatsoever that it was on, starting up, or there was a problem.

I mean just show an error on the screen. It's not the end of the world.

It's been copied. My Dell XPS has it :)

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