If you’ve ever toppled your phone, tablet, or laptop by tripping over the power cable, you probably wondered why, oh why, the connector tip doesn’t have a magnetic safety release such as what Apple has on its MacBooks and Microsoft on its Surface laptops.
But you’ve found a cheap solution: An $11 magnetic-tip adapter that attaches to any USB-C cable! Problem solved.
Unfortunately, while it seems like a no-name adapter off Amazon is a great idea, there’s actually plenty of evidence to suggest you’re putting your hardware at risk with them.
Among the risks cited by USB-C experts are:
The risk of static electricity discharge.
Data loss and performance degradation from electronic magnetic interference from the exposed POGO pins (the tiny metal pins that push out to make the contact).
The risk of electrical arc damage across the pins in high-humidity environments.
The potential for debris to short out the exposed magnetic pins.
It’s not officially part of the USB-C specification.
The last point may sound like a drunken sports-bar argument over an esoteric NFL rule, but it may actually be the best reason not to buy a magnetic tip adapter.
Watch out for those magnetic connectors!
Buy this instead: the best usb-c cable for charging that we've tested
Belkin BoostCharge 240-watt charging cable
As USB-C was designed around the assumption that a USB-C cable would be plugged into a USB-C port — not connected by a magnet — the engineers didn’t account for the side effects. For example, USB-C is designed to anticipate a laptop drawing 65 watts to suddenly have its cable unplugged and to minimize the risk of an electrical arc by cutting the power in a set amount of time.
All that engineering goes out the window when you attach a magnet to the end of the cable, which can be detached far faster. If power is still flowing through the cable, the risk of an arc is increased.
But, you say, “Apple and Microsoft use magnetic connectors on their laptops and they’re perfectly safe.”
Yes they do (and Microsoft even has filed a patent on a USB-C magnetic connector that it hasn’t acted on yet), but both device makers have also presumably put the engineering work into their proprietary connectors and chargers to account for the risk of damage and data loss from sudden disconnects — and have the money to stand behind the products.