Yes, you can stick your AirPods to your MacBook screen, if you absolutely must

Apple products have a reputation, carefully built and mostly lived up to, for working well together as an ecosystem. But here’s a new way that possibly not even Cupertino’s hardest-working nerds thought of: You can “stick” your AirPods to the top of your MacBook screen, thanks to the power of magnets.

CNN’s product review and hacks TikTok account, @CNNUnderscored, shared a video in July of the “hack”, which was duetted and shared by plenty of users. To quote one, @constantlygus: “HWWWATTT?!”

Tweet may have been deleted

It works with both regular AirPods and the Pros, as the Mashable tech team had minutes of fun confirming earlier today. You can either put them both on one side, or one on either side; it works a little better with the OG models, which as the original TikTok shows will hang happily from a shared spot on the screen, while I found my Pros were more secure arranged symmetrically, each with their own magnets.

Let she whose laptop is not sometimes covered in dust and fingerprints cast the first stone, OK?
Credit: caitlin welsh / mashable

To be clear, this almost certainly isn’t a feature specifically designed to “store” your AirPods.

Most Apple laptops have magnets near the top rim of the screen and matching ones along the front of the base. When those come close enough together, that’s what tells the laptop to go to sleep — which is why you may have at some point accidentally shut it off by placing something magnetised on the laptop. And your AirPods are magnetised because they are tiny speakers, and speakers work through the magic of electromagnets. (For some reason likely related to the overall balance and build, one Mashable editor did find that her “old” Bose earpods stuck much less securely.)

So yes, this is cute and fun. But in the interests of offering responsible advice: Your AirPods come with a nifty little case that both charges them even when it’s not attached to a charger, and keeps them both in the same place. You should store them in that, not stuck to your laptop.

That said: Against my very nature, I always, always, always put my AirPods right back in the case. Taking them out of my ears after a call and tossing them on my desk the first few times I used them earned me the tech-specific eye-roll my more disciplined partner normally reserves for when he is forced to see my file-cluttered desktop screen. (Yes, I’m a chaos gremlin. That’s for another post.) But more importantly, when I didn’t put them back in the case, they didn’t charge, and I would get caught out on a boring walk or a noisy meeting.

But some of you clearly never got past the toss-em-on-the-desk phase, and that’s fine! Putting my AirPods back in their case every single time I use them is literally the only thing I do that makes me feel like I have my life together, and for you that one thing might be something better like eating a non-potato vegetable most days, or always washing your makeup off at night.

So go, be free, and stick your AirPods to your laptop with abandon, if it helps you to keep track of them.