iPhone 16e “secret MagSafe” myth: debunked

I thought it was pretty much clear that the iPhone 16e does not have magnets and does not support the MagSafe standard, but recently, a piece of news made a round trip on the blogosphere suggesting otherwise.

A tech pundit found out that their official MagSafe puck sticks to the iPhone 16e’s back. And miraculously, it sticks at exactly the right spot where it can begin to wirelessly charge the phone. However, the latch is super-weak and easy to shake off, and also does not work through a case (unless it’s a MagSafe case with its own magnet ring).

OK, let’s walk this back a little. No, the iPhone 16e does not support MagSafe, doesn’t have magnets, this is not a “hidden feature”, and Apple most certainly didn’t stick a couple of magnets into every unit of iPhone 16e before going “You know what? Actually cancel that”.

However, it does still support wireless charging.

Even if a puck sticks to your iPhone 16e, that doesn’t mean it has magnets

OK, so what facilitates wireless charging in the first place? A coil that is made out of metal.

Now, to be exact, the external layer of a wireless charging coil is typically made of copper. And copper is non-magnetic whatsoever. So, it’d be right to assume that a magnet can’t possibly be sticking to that.

However, underneath that layer of copper you will find ferrite. It’s there to serve multiple functions — it will direct the electromagnetic field generated by the charging process and concentrate it, and it will also serve as an electromagnetic interference shield for the internal components.

Now, ferrite is not magnetic per se — it doesn’t attract metals, but can be attracted by magnets. And it can be magnetized, either temporarily or permanently. But that’s beside the point. The point is this — if you bring a magnet (a MagSafe puck has magnets inside it) close to a layer of ferrite, the two materials will display some sort of attraction, albeit weak.

And we can test this with a phone that we positively know to not have MagSafe or magnets inside of it — the Galaxy S25 Ultra. We know it doesn’t have magnets for a fact, because they will interfere with the S Pen’s digitizer, and Samsung has officially made this statement and even has a software warning pop up when you do put a Qi2 case on the phone. Oh, also, multiple teardowns.



Yet, a MagSafe puck does stick to its back. Right in the middle — where the wireless charging coil happens to be. It's a very weak latch, very easy to shake off, exactly as the original source had described the supposed MagSafe stickiness of the iPhone 16e. It's just minor magnetic forces playing with eachother, nothing special.

The real reason Apple cut out MagSafe?

Well, it’s pretty hard to not immediately say “to save on production costs”, obviously. The iPhone 16e is the cheapest iPhone in the most recent lineup, yet it has an A18 chip, 8 GB of RAM, Apple Intelligence, and a new 48 MP camera. So, how do you pick which corners to cut?

According to Apple, the target audience for the iPhone 16e “doesn’t use MagSafe and are used to charging the phone plugged in”. Well, if the target audience is owners of the old iPhone SE (2022) or models that are pre-iPhone 12 then I would imagine they didn’t use MagSafe — they didn’t have it.

Also, counter-question — then why does the iPhone 16e have wireless charging at all?

For the next episode, maybe…