Apple engineers are apparently feeling bit of nostalgia up in Cupertino. After reports the company is apparently planning on killing the Touch Bar, a report from Bloomberg suggests the company is planning to bring back the MagSafe charger and SD card slots.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with MagSafe, it was the company’s way of preventing your laptop (or you) from shattering when you inevitably tripped over the charger. The company began to abandon MagSafe after introducing USB-C with the 2015 MacBook. As great as USB-C is, it doesn’t do much to prevent you from tripping.

An upcoming MacBook Air, to be released in late 2021 or sometime in 2022, will apparently feature MagSafe once more. It will also feature a pair of USB-4 ports (still using the USB-C shape), and be smaller and lighter than the current MacBook Air. This will be achieved in part by shrinking the bezels.

It’s not clear what form the new MagSafe charger will take — whether Apple will revive the old connector or come up with a new one.

Either way, it strikes me as an odd move. The company recently bragged about no longer including chargers with its smartphones, citing environmental reasons, so it seems weird they’d reintroduce a charger when USB-C is such a reliable connector for devices that fit within its power capabilities.

But according to Bloomberg, the return of MagSafe is an attempt to appeal to Mac loyalists. To that end, it’s reported to be bringing back the SD card slot on the MacBook Pro — a feature we haven’t seen since 2016. That’ll certainly appeal to the may photographers on MacOS; it’s 2020, but SD cards don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

Apple apparently also considered cellular connectivity and Face ID on upcoming Macs, but neither feature is likely to arrive this year. There was also a 15-inch MacBook Air in the works, but the project is apparently scrapped for now.

Did you know we have a newsletter all about consumer tech? It’s called Plugged In – and you can subscribe to it right here.

Published January 22, 2021 — 23:26 UTC

Former OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei has finally launched his new venture today — and it’s called NOTHING.

Apart from the brand name, the company hasn’t given many details about its product roadmap. It said that it’ll launch smart devices in the first half of the year.

Pei’s message on the launch was cryptic. He said that the company wants to remove boundaries between people and tech:

It’s been a while since anything interesting happened in tech. It is time for a fresh breeze of change. Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future. We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. When sufficiently advanced, it should fade into the background and feel like nothing.

In December, the company received $7 million in seed funding from several investors, including Tony Fadell (the inventor of the iPod), Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, ProductHunt CEO Josh Buckley, and YouTuber Casey Neistat. A report from TechCrunch at that time noted that this new brand would initially concentrate on Audio accessories. 

Pei left OnePlus last October after 7 years in the company to start a new venture.

In an interview with The Verge, Pei said that Nothing plans to make money out of hardware and not software subscriptions. The company plans to use custom components to have a different feature set and unique look from the competition.

Did you know we have a newsletter all about consumer tech? It’s called Plugged In – and you can subscribe to it right here.

Published January 27, 2021 — 11:01 UTC