With the iPhone 12, Apple introduced a new charging feature, known as MagSafe. It’s pretty awesome. Despite being a little slow, it’s basically a beautifully designed power pad— and we should all love it for that.
The MagSafe charger for your iPhone is one of many options available to you when it comes to charging your device on the go. But with a new test from CNET, you may want to rethink this choice if speed is a bigger priority than being able to easily remove your phone from the plug.
According to their new test, the iPhone’s MagSafe charger charges your phone at a slower rate than using a wired USB-A to Lightning cable.
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The video shows a side-by-side comparison of an iPhone 12 with the MagSafe charger and the standard 20W using the Lightning cable. We learn that the iPhone 12 takes 28 minutes to charge to 50% with the standard charger and 1 hour to achieve 50% battery life using the MagSafe charger. Is this new technology really worth it?
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The Wall Street Journal wanted to find out how much of a charge iPhone would get if it were plugged into the MagSafe charger for an hour. The results were surprising:
After charging for an hour, the iPhone only gained 50%. While the MagSafe charger is great for minimizing the risk of electrocution, it doesn’t really deliver more juice, unless you wait for more than another half hour. Basically, if you’re using it at home and don’t mind waiting a couple of hours, then yes, it’s definitely worth it.
How fast is magsafe charger
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not wireless charging works as quickly as wired charging. Most of the debate is between whether you should use Qi or MagSafe— and then if you’re into that sort of thing, whether you should use 1.8A (like Belkin’s charger) or 7.5W (like the new iPhones).
Between MagSafe and other Wireless chargers – MagSafe is the fastest for iPhone 12, 12 Pro and 12 pro Max.
If you want to charge your iPhone at the fastest possible rate, you should use a wired connection via USB-C to Lightning.
The new iPhone wireless charger has a rated speed of 7.5W, which is actually 1.8x slower than the wired 15W charger. It’s also half as fast as other high-end chargers on the market right now, presumably because Apple wanted to hit a certain price point.
The wireless charger also only includes 1m of cable, which means you can’t keep your phone at a charging station beside your bed at night if the charging port is far, so it’s completely powered up by the time you need to leave in the morning.
Charging Speeds When Lightning Accessories are connected to iPhone
I realize that this is no surprise, but it’s still worth discussing. I just spent a little time to test this officially and confirmed what we already suspected: the MagSafe charger does indeed limit charging speed when Lightning accessories are connected.
How to charge faster using magsafe charger for iPhone 12
Apple’s new iPhones will be able to access wireless charging speeds of 15 watts in line with the most up-to-date Qi standard.
While iPhone 12 will support 15W charging, it’ll fall back to the regular 5W charging speed when used with anything but the new charger. To get faster wireless charging speeds on your iPhone 12, you’ll need to use Apple’s new $29 MagSafe wireless charger.