Where’s the Third Party At?
All too often, I’ve stood there helplessly as clumsy feet or curious children send a computer sailing to the floor; one of the most reassuring features added to the MacBook/MacBook Pro families is the MagSafe power adapter, which helps prevent such heartbreaking accidents.
On the other hand, as a student, I’m always shuttling between school and home. And whenever I move, I face the daunting prospect of disentangling my adapter, toting it to my destination, and reconnecting it. As the quintessential lazy man, it would be nice to have two adapters like I did with my past PowerBook, one to use at home and one for on-the-go.
I have been waiting (relatively patiently, I think) for a third-party release of the power adapter. While I could always just buy another adapter from Apple, branded adapters are historically almost three times more expensive than the third-party alternative; on a college budget, that money directly impacts daily diet! So with the months passing and no word on new adapters, I decided to do a little research. It turns out that Apple has not released the connector design or documentation to any third-party manufacturers!
I assume this has something to do with trade secrets, but come on! Although there have been some rumors of third-party solutions in development, and even some unofficial alternative solutions, I think I’ll just wait and suffer for a little while longer.
It’s not going to happen. I asked about this at WWDC, and Apple’s not licensing the design of the magsafe connector to anyone.
-jcr