I once saw a person walk away from a mixing desk in a studio wearing headphones. He got janked back violently enough that he lost his balance and fell. Pretty good cable!

I'd say pretty good jack to not allow the cable to pull out. Should have been using a magsafe jack!

I can't count the number of times I have done this very thing.

Mixing desk outputs are typically either on the very front of the desk or at the back for a less ergonomically designed deck and at right angles to the plane of the deck for top mounted and sticking out the font for front mounted. So which ever you've got you'll never be doing a nice straight pull. Magsafe would be a nice solution to this (but back then nobody thought of this).

The mixing consoles I've used had the 1/4" coming vertically out of the top of the board. For other equipment, it might be coming out facing the user in a vertical rack piece of gear. Never have I seen it on the very front of the desk. that would be very prone to getting sheered off when a rolling chair slides across the front of the desk.

I would kill for mag-safe everything jacks.

if it's safe enough to run power to a computer, it would easily be able to handle the electrical requirments for any other connector, right? you just need an adapter.

luckily, apple has you covered. you just need $19.99. /s

that would be a weird idea though. 1/4 TRS female -> magsafe-male magsafe-female -> 1/4 TRS male. i'm guessing it would look like a sort of inline coupler or similar in final design. essentially, it should be totally doable. i look forward to your pitch on Shark Tank, er, to YC, yeah, that's what I meant.

I recently bought a foundue set; the hotplate it comes with has a magsafe regular 110VAC wall cord (no DC adaptation) that's magsafe on the device end. I wondered why I had never seen one of these before. Then I realized that that flat device end is actually incredibly dangerous to the touch when plugged into the wall. It's just slightly less dangerous than potentially knocking over a pot of boiling cheese. For regular appliances that aren't going to give you third-degree burns, it'd probably be preferable to just let the device get yanked off the table, than to risk exposure to live current.

I wonder if, in the future, we could have household wall sockets and extension cords with "sense pins" ala USB PD; where the mains-voltage live "rail" isn't energized unless a device hops on the logic-level control rail and negotiates for it. Then we could truly live in a MagSafe-everything world. (Then again, to block that kind of current, they'd probably need to use relays and other non-solid-state parts, so they might not be the most durable things...)

This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.

Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting? Seems like it would never be U/L certified without some safety.

> This is how every single Apple charging cords with the green/amber light in them has behaved. There's a bit of communication between device and cable before juice flows.

Yes and no. MagSafe is safe because of the sense current and the handshake; but it's able to do that because it's just not driving very much wattage through the cable; it's low enough that it can direct the power with a simple transistor.

To make mains-voltage AC cords do that, you need a lot more than a transistor. A 1500W current (from e.g. a microwave, or a kettle) can arc a gap much wider than most transistors are printed at. Which is why, in even the most modern smart-home remote light-switch doodads, mains-voltage gets toggled using relays, rather than anything solid-state.

It's lovely to say "just do what MagSafe does", but with electricity, "quantity has a quality all its own" — i.e. very different engineering challenges to overcome.

> Did the end of the cable not have recessed "pins" specifically to avoid accidental shorting?

It has recessed pins (pads, actually), but only barely (by about 5mm); basically to the point that a round metal table leg could make contact with the live pad within the recess.

And, as far as I can tell, there's no sense logic in the cable, either. No click of a relay coming from the cable when it gets connected; and no place for a transformer to live (not that it needs one—it's a hotplate, i.e. a big thick piece of iron you run mains-voltage AC current through.)

There is a relay inside the hotplate itself, which roughly acts as a thermostat (rather than a rheostat) to toggle the coil on and off to keep the cheese at temperature. You can hear it ticking on and off, and an indicator light goes on and off along with it.

But for that logic to work, the cable has to be drawing power to power it. So, AFIACT, the cable itself is always live.

Do you exclusively use a messenger bag/shoulder bag? I've never had a problem with a backpack and wired headphones.

There's an auxiliary benefit as well in that a backpack seems to be way better for my back than a shoulder bag.

A downside being that backpacks (outside of hiking context) are so visually associated with schoolchildren that wearing them as a professional is kind of impossible, image-wise. For someone fresh out of college maybe; for thirty+ it starts communicating a very juvenile appearance. The key with messenger and shoulder bag ergonomics is all in positioning (vertically and in orientation relative to body).

How juvenile do you have to be to give a fuck about what people think of you wearing a backpack

Or to give more than a second's through to someone wearing a backpack, beyond "oh hey they have a backpack".

For one, if you're carrying enough crap isn't a backpack more ergonomic (assuming you wear both straps and aren't one-strapping it like the cool guy you are)

Image is one of those laws of society that we all wish wasn't true, all believe shouldn't be true, but is intractable and almost certainly derived from evolutionary pressure.

"Vestis virum facit", or clothes make the man is extraordinarily powerful in business and social dealings. Clothes signal a lot of information quickly. So this isn't about you caring what other people think, it's about how what other people care about affect your options. I could prescribe a few experiments to witness the differences directly but I'll tell you from personal experience that the A-B differences are stark.

There was a time when I was younger that I raged against this rule, but it's a youthful variation of "old man yells at cloud". You can try and create a new reality in your head and believe it fervently, and cut your nose to spite your face, but image matters greatly to other people, at a deep level.

Those kinds of things matter when it's all about appearance and there's nothing of importance being done.

If I need a job done, I couldn't care less if the person who is able to do it wears a backpack or not.

I could give less of a shit if someone wants to judge me by whether or not I wear a backpack.

FWIW I think messenger bags are shitty design and think people who use them just don't know any better.

No, silly. You just get a nicer backpack that is made of leather or something instead of nylon.

It boggles me how angry I get when that happens to me with earbuds. It's so jarring. You feel like u been attacked by the earbuds.