Charge Your iPhone With Your MacBook Charger

Apple has been touting the advantages of a magnetic computer cable for quite some time now. But while the company certainly sees the value in not pulling the MacBook off the table and onto the cold, hard ground when your friend trips over your charger cable, it doesn't seem so interested in applying this tech to the iPhone. Obviously it's not quite as important to a phone—no one's stringing their three-foot cable that far—but there are distinct advantages in not having an open charge port and Lightning cable setup.

I myself have gone through a few cables and my current one looks like a zebra tail: covered in black electrical tape. Instead of waiting for Apple to apply MagSafe functionality to their phones, Hevo Labs created the nifty Cabin, the battery case and phone dock that lets you charge your iPhone using your magnetic computer charger.

Since the iPhone's only physical connectivity comes from its Lightning port, it makes total sense why Apple didn't feel like going with a MagSafe port that doesn't transfer data. But since most people aren't plugging their phone into a computer very often—thanks to WiFi/LTE/Bluetooth—we can see Cabin working well. It makes plugging in a phone in the dark possible, enables use of a MagSafe charger in a pinch, keeps your iPhone's port closed, and saves you from going through four iPhone cords a year.

Besides the benefits of a magnetic cable, we're pretty smitten by the design, which gives the iPhone more of a MacBook Pro-look than an iPhone-look, with its rounded edges of matte aluminum. With a hole in the bottom, Cabin can still accommodate your headphones, so long as they don't have a right-angle jack.

The specifics, if you're a tech head, are competitive with other battery cases. The battery inside the MacBook-inspired unibody aluminum shell holds 2200 mAh, which extends the battery life by around 130 percent, which you shouldn't get used to. Because getting used to longer battery life means you're going to run out.

And if you miss the days of the old iPod dock, well, that past can be a new, better present with the Cabin Dock, which takes your iPhone upright.


Ethan Wolff-Mann is an editor at Supercompressor. He has three backup iPhone cables. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.