How many times have you plugged your earbuds into your phone and then accidentally caught the cord on a door handle, or the edge of a table, only to either rip the headphone cord in two or send your smartphone skittering across the floor? For that matter, how many times have your headphones clotheslined you?

Probably a lot. It’s a common occurrence, one that is the main selling point of wireless headphones. But wireless headphones will never sound as good as the alternatives that string their sound through a cord, and they require charging and batteries. Where is the better, safer headphone cord we all deserve?

Technically, it’s already here in a magnetically connecting cord called the Pogo. And you’re probably never going to see it on the market, because the major headphone makers are all petrified they’ll be sued into a thin, translucent smear of grease if they ever dare to make it a reality, but not by who you’d think.

Back in 2006, Apple released the Magsafe, a power connector that is tipped with a small, powerful magnet. If you trip on a MacBook power cable, the magnet immediately disconnects, preventing your clumsiness from catapulting your expensive laptop across the room. It’s a genius idea. Apple has MagSafe well-patented when it comes to laptops, prohibiting any other computer maker from using magnets to connect a cable to a charging port. But what about other cords? Couldn’t this same idea be applied to other types of cables without getting in trouble with Apple?

That was the thought process of designer Jon Patterson, who became interested in (and frustrated by) the problem of headphone cords when he purchased himself a used OP-1 Synthesizer. Patterson loved the synth, but the headphone jack on the side was so fragile that he worried he would break it off entirely. He started looking for a better solution.

“I had just left my job designing at Nooka and I had a few months off, so I started researching the history of headphone connectors,” Patterson tells me. “It turns out that there hasn’t been much innovation in headphone jacks since the 1960s, largely due to the cost of repurposing existing manufacturing facilities.” Modifying how headphone jacks worked even slightly would be disruptive to the point of impracticality.

Instead of coming up with an alternative to the traditional headphone jack, Patterson started cobbling together the prototype of what would become the Pogo. The main benefit of the Pogo is it’s an adapter, not a connector replacement. That means you can plug it into any pair of headphones, and if you trip or catch the cord on the corner of something, the Pogo’s magnetic seal will be broken instead of your headphones.