The MagSafe power cord is one of Apple's smartest features. They tend to crap out after a few months of hard use, though, thanks either to your poor wire-wrapping technique or your dog's penchant for copper wire. But that doesn't have to be the end of the line.
For Brian Richer, who co-owns the Toronto product design studio Castor, it was his dog's taste for MagSafe that did in his first few cords. Richer has a collie named Lola (pictured below) who chewed through three MagSafe adapters before he decided to come up with a way to re-use the old cords. "I noticed that even though the ends were hanging on by a thread, they still passed power," he told DesignBoom. "Eventually, I ended up with three or four adapters that still worked, but that I didn't want to use with my computer. "I didn't want to throw them away, so, after some trial and error, I got them to power up some LEDs using the MagSafe head."
The Coil Lamp, which launched at ICFF this year, is a simple loop of copper-plated steel that anchors a line of LEDs inside a white acrylic tube. All in all, it amounts to four pieces of hardware—all powered by a MagSafe adapter, supplied by the user.
We got in touch with Brian to ask about where we could buy this ingenious little lamp, and he told us it's on sale at Matter New York and soon online at Ylighting. The only downside? It's prohibitively expensive, at $950. I'd wager you could probably hack together your own version, too, though it likely won't be quite as good-looking.