MagSafe Mini (iPhone 5)

Posted by benfurneaux on May 31, 2012 09:27 am 37

According to rumours, the above image is of an iPhone 5. For the purposes of this post I'm going to go ahead and assume this is correct.

Regarding the mini dock connector — many people have noted that this will break compatibility with old peripherals — this is almost certainly true. I don't think Apple would make a change this drastic just to make the connector smaller. This leads to my point: Apple would only make this change if they were going to drastically improve the functionality and usability of their iOS device connector.

Bearing this in mind, I though of how the current 30-pin could be improved. I'm going to go ahead and predict that some of improvements I've listed below will probably be true:

• It'll be a MagSafe connector
• It'll be called MagSafe Mini
• It'll work upside-down (e.g. whichever way you plug it in)
• It'll have an aluminium plug (like the MacBook MagSafe)
• The cable quality will be much improved and won't fray and deteriorate like the current 30-pin cables do
• Along with some new battery tech it'll allow much faster charging
• It'll be support Thunderbolt, USB3 or both (I believe Thunderbolt supports USB3)
• There'll be a killer feature tied to iOS that I couldn't possibly predict

What would you like Apple to improve with this assumed revision?

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