I know for a fact people do sit around and talk about how to make things cheaper.
It's a philosophy that is reflected at apple through just about every corporate decision they have made. The inability to make incremental upgrades to any apple product, or perform repairs without it being a part of the apple business model. Or Air pods, which are basically an off season april fools joke.
The MagSafe adapter has itself gone through iterations which make them less backwards compatible and less functional. A major problem for power cables is that force at the joint between the rigid connector and flexible wire is prone to failure.
The original magsafe adapter solved this problem [1]. a small amount of force at the problem area provided sufficient leverage to disconnect the power. This ensured that it was hard to use the power cord in such a way that promoted early failure, and gave the user the option of two orientations, potentially lessening the stress to the affected joint. They phased this design out for the much less sleek looking bulky orthogonal connector, which stays firmly locked in place through all sorts of damaging configurations, while providing no other justification for the "design" choice.
That this product was particularly prone to failure is made evident in the class action settlement, although you may read this as you like. https://www.adaptersettlement.com/
So before you accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist for proposing that computer companies sometimes break your property for profit, You might actually want to read about what the courts are saying, although the case in regards to the deceptive trade practices when rolling out iOS 9 on older phones is still unsettled, the facts very much are settled, and only the courts and the defense lag.
[1] http://warungmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/original-app...
There's also another good reason why specifically Apple wants to get rid of MagSafe (as opposed to it just not being worth it anymore). And that's the fact that MagSafe has insidious problem of laptops sometimes just not charging, and you often don't even notice. I myself have started experiencing this issue with my current laptop and external display - I went for almost a whole day without it charging and didn't realize until I hit 10% battery, and since then, it's been a bit finicky, sometimes requiring me to poke at it several times before it charges properly. I don't know if it's the port or the cable that's having the issue. In any case, I would imagine this issue makes for a non-trivial amount of AppleCare support. And since MagSafe isn't really pulling its weight anymore, now that we have long batteries and can plug the cable on either side, the downsides outweigh the upsides.
The problem is that my computer, which resides on a table, is connected to the wall, which does not reside on the table. If there is a gap between the wall and the table, and the computer must be connected to the wall in order to accumulate energy, then the cord must necessarily cross that gap.
Since the table and the wall are not connected, they are not path connected, which you will note, is a statement which only relies on the topology of the space in which my computer is embedded. Which side I connect my charger to does not change the topology of space-time, so your argument doesn't seem relevant.
First, there is no such animal as a person sitting in a cafe with a laptop who is not plugged into the wall.
This is easily observed by simply entering a cafe and looking at the people in it. It doesn't matter that people's batteries CAN last a long time without being charged, most people simply don't do that unless there is no other option.
Second, I don't bring my computer home and plug it into a stationary dock to allow it to charge like some kind of cordless phone from the 90s. I pick a spot where I want to perform my computer tasks, and when my battery gets low (as it often does because claims of long battery life are largely based on some wildly ideal case) I go grab my charger from the other room and plug it in wherever I am sitting.
This is THE typical use case for a laptop computer. Note my use of capital letters. The use case that you have described is strange to the point of being an anomaly. A person who behaves this way is likely not a person at all, but rather a character in the sims.
My charger comes to me. My house was built with outlets every 10 feet or so along the walls for almost exactly this purpose. I do not do all of my computing immediately adjacent the walls, and I frequently just leave my computer where it is while I go do something else.
Do you not behave this way? If your laptop gets low, do you resignedly go back to your safe table, or do you stay on your couch, like a god damned American.
Then you should not come to European cafes where you don't get a power socket, unless you happen to be luckily seated close to the one used for the vacuum cleaner.
Zero sympathy for anyone whose laptop is destroyed tripping over the power cable while charging a half-full 12-hour battery at a coffee shop.
Charge-over-USB beats one-side MagSafe for nearly all of us.
It was such a superior idea that there can only be one possible philosophy behind the move to abandon it, and that is that longevity is actually bad for apple, especially during the end of Moore's law for personal computing. My 2011 MBP is very unlikely to become obsolete in a technical sense. The battery life is still good, and the processing power is more than sufficient for anything that would not be more cost-effectively computed on a cloud instance or a desktop anyway.
That may seem like a great deal of inference, but I don't think it's unjustified. Why else would they opt for inferior technology?