EA for which power adapter

jwojda
Valued Contributor II

I don't suppose anybody has an EA that displays what power adapter to use (45w/85w/magsafe2/magsafe) handy do they?

We get a lot of requests for additional/replacement power adapters, and the end users and the analyst handling the requests don't usually know which one to get.

7 REPLIES 7

rtrouton
Release Candidate Programs Tester

You may just want to stock the 85 watt adapters. They'll work with everything, leaving just the issue of MagSafe vs. MagSafe 2.

Even there, you may just want to do MagSafe 85W and plan to toss in the MagSafe -> MagSafe 2 adapter. That way, you're covered. If the user needs the MagSafe -> MagSafe 2 adapter, they'll have it. If not, they're cheap enough that the added expense isn't much.

emily
Valued Contributor III
Valued Contributor III

If you get Thunderbolt displays for any of your users, you'll find each one comes with one of those little Magsafe-to-Magsafe 2 adapters. Which are, like, $10 from Apple I think. But we take them from the packaging and hoard them in our IT supply room.

iJake
Valued Contributor

This one liner will get you the wattage and then you can put it in a script to output with the result tags. I'm trying to determine if you can tell if it is MagSafe v1 or v2.

system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep Wattage | awk '{print $NF}'

EDIT: I don't see any data in System Profiler that denotes MagSafe v1 or v2 so if you combine the wattage results with knowing what models use which power supply you can get them the proper connector.

jhbush
Valued Contributor II

@jwojda you could scope a smart group by model for what power supply they would have.

tuinte
Contributor III

I'm with Rich on this. Just buy 85W adapters only (they're all the same price - and imagine, a world you don't even need to worry about what adapter is what!), and keep good stock of MagSafe > MagSafe 2 adapters (or horde them from Thunderbolt displays, as suggested by Emily).

JPDyson
Valued Contributor

You guys have users who wouldn't complain about carrying a larger adapter than what came with their MacBook Air? Lucky.

So, combined with the output from the one-liner above regarding wattage, you'd probably just want to scope MagSafe 2 based on model identifiers that you know have MagSafe2 (2012+ Retinas and MBAs, etc).

kyle_bareis
New Contributor III

Hey All,

In our office's conference rooms, we went the 85 W adapter with MagSafe 2 adapter route. One thing that I might look into is a Mac Cozy from Cozy Industries http://cozy-industries.com. It helps keep the adapters from running off :)

Kyle