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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Thank god. The magsafe adapter is cool, but has some serious flaws to it. Namely: it's magnetic, so any sort of [ferrous] metal dust will accumulate inside of it, preventing you from getting a good seal on the connector.

If you work in any environment other than a sterile coffee shop, this will be a huge problem for you. I spend almost all of my time working in a hackerspace, and fiddling with my power connector on my less than 1 year old laptop is a constant annoyance.

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I've had three MBPs over the course of a few years and never had this issue. Though, I have noticed a very small dust build up but it definitely hasn't compromised the magnetic seal. Is it an older version? I don't plug/unplug a whole lot so that may also be contributing.

It is a problem if your environment includes ferro-magnetic crud. All my lab's magsafe ports are wobbly and it's hard to clean them out.

Strong adhesives are often a good way to defeat magnets. (I've used this principle, but not in the specific context of removing magnetic crud from inside a magsafe plug.) A properly designed magsafe power plug would have a way of either easily replacing the plug or removing/defeating the magnet.

Thanks, that's a good tip.

Not to be a dick here but I think you're in a minority. I dont think many users are going to run into this issue.

If your environment contains ferro-magnetic dust you should probably be more concerned about inhaling that stuff.

Not dust, just macro-scale but small bits of crap.

I think some of it in my bag is from a black sand beach. That stuff kills headphones as well as wonkifying magsafe sockets.

I took a bag to the beach, then put my laptop in that bag a few weeks later. The leftover sand (because sand is basically glitter) had some magnetic bits, which clogged the magsafe connector. I had to spent like 20 minutes with a toothpick to get enough out to charge, and it was never quite back to normal.

Yeah same here. I've been through 3 MBP's and never had a problem with any of the MagSafe chargers.

Metal dust is a problem in "any environment other than a sterile coffee shop"?

It's a bit of a dubious rhetorical move to cast anybody who works in an environment that doesn't contain a lot of ferrous dust as some sort of freakish outlier. You might be ever so slightly guilty of overgeneralizing your experience...

I use my Air and used my old Macbook (the white plastic one) in my workshop, where we make shoes by hand. So I have lots of nails (and thus, lots of tiny metal scraps from the nail boxes, as well as nail pieces when we need to cut some down) lying around and lots of knife-sharpening dust around our (unplugged, since we usually keep the computer away when hammering/sharpening, but we just leave the connector in his usual place) Magsafes and have seen no problem in the connector.

Your hackerspace sounds like a hazardous work environment. Do they have HEPA air filters? A vacuum cleaner, even?

I thought the magnetic part of the MagSafe is actually an "extra", not a downside.

I'd like to see a magnetic near field adapter: no holes, no plugging. Call it an asexual connector?

Nothing you mentioned here is a flaw .

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