The Inventor of these MagSafe Headphones Thinks He Outsmarted Apple

during the last decade, untold numbers of people have taken a have a look at the MagSafe cable charging their MacBook and notion to themselves, “would it be unbelievable if there were a MagSafe for headphone cables?” it’s a super concept that needs little justification, but time after time, companies that attempted to make that idea a truth discovered themselves strolling into a felony minefield of patents, the largest of which was once held with the aid of Apple itself.

but Jon Hallsten, a 37-year-old self-described innovator from Akron, Ohio, thinks he knows his manner during the minefield. Having simply launched a brand new product referred to as Magzet (in point of fact!) on Kickstarter, an adapter that lets you unplug a pair of headphones just by way of magnetically snapping off the jack from the cable, Hallsten no longer best thinks he has outsmarted Apple, however that he has also solved problems with magnetic audio cables that no one else even thought to deal with.

we now have talked prior to about how brilliant Apple’s MagSafe patent is. no longer the tech (which is also sensible), but the patent itself. it is a masterpiece of legal wording that mainly put the kibosh on all other magnetic cables for over a decade. “A fantastically crafted patent,” is how Hallsten puts it.

however, to create MagZet, Hallsten needed to figure a technique round it, or prove like the other inventors whose lawyers mentioned “no frickin’ means” the 2d they tried to sell their very own would-be MagSafe for headphones.

consistent with Hallsten, the key hindrance in designing round Apple’s MagSafe patent is reversibility. The magnetic tip of a MagSafe cable can be hooked up in two other ways: proper facet up or the other way up (although visually they are identical). Any in a similar fashion reversible magnetic cable automatically violates Apple’s patent. but Apple’s MagSafe patent money owed for best two degrees of reversibility: A MagSafe can handiest be connected at 0° and 180°, not forty five°, 240°, and so on. Magzet gets around Apple’s patent by means of having countless levels of reversibility. The adapter is 360° round, so no matter the way you slap it on, it simply works.

That, Hallsten says, is enough for Magzet to sidestep Apple’s patent. however MagSafe’s not the only patent that has saved earlier magnetic headphone cables off the market.

A specifically tough patent for magnetically removable headphones was once filed by using an organization known as Replug in 2008. Its product idea got a good deal of buzz on the time, and the patent awarded to it stopped an organization we mentioned on two years ago from releasing its own magnetic headphones.

however Replug never in reality delivered fully on the concept that. while it shipped an adapter, the magnetic connection used to be so vulnerable, it required plastic end items to hold together. Then its website went stomach up. here, serendipity benefited Hallsten: Replug’s patent has because expired, the grace duration for renewing it has ended, and the company itself appears to have long past under.

but Hallsten thinks that it will be mistaken to dismiss his company’s magnetic audio cable as just a sneaky ripoff of what has come before, saying there’s at the least one problem that Magzet solves that no different magnetic headphone maker has attempted.

lets say you’ve gotten a collection of magnetic headphones plugged into an iPhone. one of the simplest ways to “unplug” your headphones from the instrument would simply be to break the magnetic connection. but if you did that, the jack would nonetheless be throughout the iPhone, effectively leaving it on mute. Your cellphone would just maintain trying to pump audio through the jack, even though no headphones are linked to them.

Magzet solves this problem by making the audio jack electrically “disappear” when the magnetic reference to the cable is broken. the hot button is that the Magzet jack is in truth made up of three separate pieces of metallic which might be ever so quite separated from one every other. When the the jack is magnetically linked to the cable, the gaps between every piece are bridged, permitting a smartphone to discover that a headphone is plugged in. however when that connection is broken, your iPhone can’t see the plug anymore, even though it’s sitting right in the jack. Electrically, it can be now invisible.

whether or not the Magzet adapter is as impervious to patents as Hallsten thinks will most effective be proved in courtroom. however Hallsten sounds confident that he’s put in his due diligence, and he has big visions that Magzet’s expertise will be utilized to all sorts of different cords and cables. “you know Intel within?” he asks me. “We see ‘Magzet inside of’ turning into the subsequent Intel inside of.”

If he is right, let’s hope Hallsten adjustments the title. Magzet sounds a little bit too as regards to one thing the Insane Clown Posse would possibly dream up, even if we do need all our cables to be as magical as MagSafe.

that you could preorder a Magzet magnetic audio adapter through Kickstarter beginning at $35.