Details about a cancelled Sonos accessory for the iPhone have surfaced.
The ditched device was a speaker that used MagSafe to connect to the back of the phone, in order to boost the sound performance.
Sonos has been in the news a lot recently. While the company has been updating its soundbars with the Arc Ultra and stepped into the high-end headphone category with the Sonos Ace, those achievements have been overshadowed by problems with its app.
It has lead to the company parting ways with much of its management and worse, a considerable amount of its workforce, but a product was also reportedly scrapped along the way.
According to The Verge, Sonos was working on a MagSafe speaker for the iPhone. The details describe a squared device a little like Apple’s MagSafe battery pack but thicker, with the suggestion that it would showcase the clever speaker tech that Sonos acquired with the Mayht Holding acquisition.
That speaker tech changes the way a membrane moves, meaning you can get more powerful speakers into a smaller space. That would fit with the idea of slapping a speaker on the back of an iPhone, to deliver better sound performance than the phone’s own speakers.
It’s not a new idea and we’ve seen similar before, such as the JBL SoundBoost. That was a Moto Mod designed to work with the Moto Z. Motorola designed a thin phone, thinking that users could then add accessories to get the experience they wanted – including a speaker.
The theory stands, but in the case of Apple’s iPhone, MagSafe only offers power, there’s no connection to pass audio through to the speaker, so you’re literally looking at a magnetic speaker with Bluetooth.
The idea, it seems, wasn’t to be, so it was assigned to the R&D bin and never to see the light of day.
Apple’s MagSafe has provided an innovative way to attach a wireless charger to the iPhone and has been used for some accessories, most notably that battery pack I mentioned and a card wallet.
Attempts to bring magnetic charging to Android phones under Qi2 haven’t got off to a strong start, however. The OnePlus 13 launched with a magnetic wireless charger accessory, but requires a special case to use it. Samsung didn’t launch with Qi2 when the Galaxy S25 came out, but it is in the HMD Skyline – and not a lot else.
Perhaps, like that Sonos speaker that never was, magnetic accessories just don’t have the appeal that some might think.
