Does this bug anyone else?

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

semi-cross posted from my LJ...

(excerpt from Apple's blurb site about the new mac laptops)
MagSafe Connector
Mobile users will love the new power adapter featuring the MagSafe Connector — a magnetic DC plug that both ensures a tight connection and enables a clean break from the power port when there is undue tension. It prevents the MacBook Pro from being pulled off of a desk when the cord is accidentally tripped over, and it protects the power cord from wear and tear

Raise your hand if that blurb causes a flashback? or violent twitches & fidgets?

Maybe it's a measure of my having been in tech support WAY too long but all I (and some of my friends) can think of is:

Magnets...especially Electromagnets...Near Media...BAAAAADDDDD

Now it may not be as much of a concern in this day & age of flash drives & CDs & DVDs which are theoretically more magnetically stable. But I'm just waiting for the first time somebody sets one of these near a crucial set of backup tapes...

*twinge*

Comments

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Oh. My. God.

i totally missed that on the site.

*cries*

okay, i quit. effective yesterday.

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

*pats back*

I know.

[photosinensis.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not too worried, as I neither work with Macs or backup equipment. However, the fact that it's magnetic makes me hope for users' sake that they put the hard drive on the other side of the laptop from that sucker.

[mawz.livejournal.com]

CD's and DVD's are entirely magnet-safe. No danger there, they're purely optical.

Electomagnets might damage a flash drive if powerful enough, but that requires a lot of power.

With the death of magnetic removable media, solutions like this became a whole lot safer.

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

This is true. However, what twitches me is what happens when someone brings one of these into a site that ISN'T so modern.

and we ALL know several places like that. Probably work in them.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

CD players, however, often float the head in ferrofluid for vibration dampening. I could imagine a sufficiently strong field pulling it out.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

The magnet the magsafe connector uses is about as strong as the magnet the MacBook uses to pull the screen latch out when it's almost closed. Totally safe, and a freakin BRILLIANT idea. Embed the power contacts in the middle of attracted magnets, and no more broken power plugs.

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

I agree it's a brilliant idea. and I agree on the need for something like this.

but it still twitches me.

[jecook]

Yes.

This is one of the things that will hopefully leak over to the PC side of things.

I've see at least two laptop that have become unusable due to the power jacks being broken. A friend of mine had fixed a fair number of them as well.

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

And it's a hella lot of work to deconstruct a laptop all the way down to the mobo, so that one can remove the broken DC jack and install a new one.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

I sent my toshiba in for service 3 times due to the powerjack. THREE TIMES. And it wasn't a matter of some one tripping the cord, just general use.

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

I wonder what kind of shielding they have. I just bought an iMac G5 for the office and it has a magnet on the side of the screen to hold the Apple remote in place. But it is not very powerful at all, just enough to make it stick. My thinking is they thought this through very carefully and the disturbance is probably negligible. I bet my desk phone has more of a field than the magnets they are using. Still, I'm nowhere near any tape backups so I'm not concerned

And I'm a little annoyed that they just released new iMacs after we bought this one all of 6 weeks ago. Fortunately I wanted the PowerPC architecture because there is no way that I can replace our software library anytime soon. But now the iMac seems less shiny than it was before :-(

Re: Um....

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

I'll sit corrected on the electro magnet.

It's been a long time since high-school physics. All I could visualize was wires past magnet = electricity & vice versa. and wires & current & magnetic = higher field.

Re: Um....

[kalium.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a magnet, so it has an elecetric field...

[patgund.livejournal.com]

the tech support guy in me is cringing.

The Apple Certified Portable Technician in me is going YAY!! Because replacing the AC power card after someone tripped over it is a major PITA. Basically in most units, it's a strip down 60% or more of the machine to replace.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

But it's great for the sales jockey that gets to sell a $300 repair for that as I used to when somebody busted their power connector :P.

But when I had to strip a laptop down and resolder a power connector, I called it a right pain in the ass, cause I didn't get anywhere near that. The magnet does sound like a good idea especially as the magnet itself is likely not very strong and probably would only affect floppy disks if you set them right on top of it. Flash memory I don't think is affected by weak magnetic fields - you'd have better chances of wiping it by putting it next to your subwoofer and running it than a power connector like this.

[jecook]

I cried for a few minutes when I learned to doing a hard drive swap on an iBook involved a total dismantle of the entire unit save the screen.

Took me a total of four hours to walk through the steps to do it, too.

[inahandbasket]

... ouch.
and to think I was going to do that for a friend recently, I'm glad she didn't take me up on it.

As for the magnet thing, it actually takes a much stronger field and a lot more work than you'd think to do any damage to most magnetic media.
It twitches me a little too, yes, but I'll be surprised if anything ever comes of it.

[jecook]

http://www.pbfixit.com/Guide/50.12.0.html

This link is what I used to walk me through the process. It's _very_ detailed.

[inahandbasket]

gracias

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

Why the f would they build it that way?

[jecook]

Because it's Apple. That's the only explaination I can think of.

Havign seen the insides of one now, it is an engineering marvel in how small and elegant those folks made the damn thing.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

Why they don't make it so that you can easily swap the HD out I'll never know.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

I've got to be honest -- the only media I've ever seen effected by any kind of magnet -- be it a powerful sound system or an electro magnet has been floppy disks, and they're barely used anymore.
Hard drives are shielded beyond belief (I've seen them run bare on top of running amps without that problem) and I've never had a problem with high capacity backup tapes near magnets. Solid state media theoretically shouldn't be effected in an adverse way, at least not before the attached device starts having problems first. Optical media is obviously more or less immune.
Disclaimer: I'm referring to anything in the consumer range here. I'm assuming no one is going into their local data center with a degausser or a running diesel powered freight train engine.

[akage.livejournal.com]

Maybe not a degausser, but I wonder how one of the older Motorola walkie-talkies would do? At a place I used to work at (this was pre-Nextel) we used these big clunky Motorolas to communicate within the building. Had about a half-mile range.

Fun little units, until someone showed me that you could steer a cursor around on the screen just by holding the transmit button and placing the unit near the side of the monitor. The cursor would start sliding away from the walkie-talkie.

Also, if anyone had a desk radio on within about 10 feet, they'd get a really nasty static burst when you used 'em. God knows how much EMF my brain absorbed from those things.

Never remember any issues with accidentally erasing floppies or HDDs, but then I would think it would take at least several seconds' sustained exposure.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

Actually, you do raise a good point. On my former place of work, I was on a raised floor where we had a lot of full IBM Z series and P series systems a little less them one tile apart from one another.
Apparently if you were between two of them and they were each running, and a high powered cell phone went off (like a NexTel or an older analog cell phone) on your person, it would trigger both systems to do a cold reboot.
I never did get to test the theory, but I do know that my headphones picked up a good deal more wierd interference when a nearby unit was open or the cold water cycling system for the floor was having a problem.
I doubt this would ever result in data loss per say, but it does raise the question of collateral hardware damage to the workstations and monitors that were sprinkled throughout the area.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

my blackberry 7510 makes monitors unhappy, both from the speaker in the back, and from the EMF off the transmitter.. I have to remember not to park it on top of a floppy disk.

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

The phrase "running a diesel powered freight train engine" made me crack up. :D

[jjjiii]

I seriously doubt that it'll be a problem. They're not electromagnets, they're just ferromagnets or perhaps rare earth magnets. I have a deep fryer which has this same style of power cord as a safety feature, and it is VERY easy for the cord to come loose if it's bumped even slightly. The magnet is just barely strong enough to hold the cord to the contacts, and will probably annoy you a lot more by coming loose every time you shift your seating position slightly with it on your lap than it will by accidentally destroying all your magnetic media.

Try rubbing the shit out of a floppy disk or old hard drive and see if you have any problems -- I seriously doubt that you will.