iPhone 12 Pro teardown shows how many magnets it takes to make MagSafe work

iPhone 12 Pro review
(Image credit: TechRadar)

One of the biggest new features for the iPhone 12 range is MagSafe – a tech that allows you to magnetically attach wireless chargers and accessories to the back of the phone, and thanks to a teardown of the iPhone 12 Pro we now know that rather than one large magnet, it uses 18 small ones.

These are arranged in a circle around the wireless charging coil, and you can see how they look in JerryRigEverything’s teardown video which revealed them.

The video also revealed that the battery is 2,815mAh – that’s something we’d already heard from previous reports, and makes it slightly smaller than the 3,046mAh one in the iPhone 11 Pro.

The video also suggests that the iPhone 12 Pro is probably quite difficult to repair – in the process of taking it apart they accidentally broke the screen, as well as breaking every single battery pull tab.

They noted that as much as Apple touts its environmental credentials through its use of recycled materials (which includes all those MagSafe magnets), it could probably have a far bigger impact just by making repairs easier to carry out.

Finally, they also highlighted the fact that there’s a potential downside to MagSafe, in that all those magnets can be harmful to your credit cards – so it’s best either not to keep them in the same pocket as your phone, or to use a shielded wallet (unless you're using the Wallet MagSafe accessory, which Apple says is shielded to protect cards).

Via GSMArena

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.