Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

The MagSafe power cord is one of Apple’s smartest features. They tend to crap out after a few months of hard use though, thanks either to your poor wire-wrapping technique or your dog’s penchant for copper wire. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the line.

For Brian Richer, who co-owns the Toronto product design studio Castor, it was his dog’s taste for MagSafe that did in his first few cords. Richer has a Corgie named Lola (pictured below) who chewed through three MagSafe adapters before he decided to come up with a way to re-use the old cords. “I noticed that even though the ends were hanging on by a thread, they still passed power,” he told DesignBoom. “Eventually, I ended up with three or four adaptors that still worked, but that I didn’t want to use with my computer. “I didn’t want to throw them away, so, after some trial and error, I got them to power up some LEDs using the MagSafe head.”

The Coil Lamp, which launched at ICFF this year, is a simple loop of copper-plated steel that anchors a line of LEDs inside a white acrylic tube. All in all, it amounts to four pieces of hardware — all powered by a MagSafe adaptor, supplied by the user.

We got in touch with Brian to ask about where we could buy this ingenious little lamp, and he told us it’s on sale at Matter New York and soon online at Ylighting. The only downside? It’s prohibitively expensive at $US950. I’d wager you could probably hack together your own version too, although it likely won’t be quite as good-looking.

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps

Your Busted Apple MagSafe Cords Power These Clever Lamps


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.