I’ve been using and testing Apple's MagSafe Battery Pack every single day for a week now,
and I have to say it's one of the most disappointing Apple Products in years, and I would only
recommend it to 2 groups of people.
In this honest review I’ll give you every positive and negative you need to know, and
compare it to 3 other Magnetic battery packs, that in some cases cost less than ⅓ of the
price, are smaller, lighter, and provide more charge.
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I have to say that my favorite thing about Apple's Magsafe battery pack is just how clean
and simple it looks, the minimalist matte white is probably the best choice and it has
stayed surprisingly clean and clear of scratches even though I’ve been lugging it around
everywhere.
It’s also fairly slim but other than Ankers, the other two are just as slim and are a little
bit more grippy thanks to their glossy back, like the glossy iPhone 12’s are more grippy
than the matte Pro’s.
I do love that there is no power button, it just turns on and off automatically when you
attach or remove it, which is the convenience you get when paying Apple's prices. The same
thing goes for battery level indicators, which are nonexistent on the pack like other banks,
but instead just shows up in your iPhone Widgets.
But both of these aren’t worth paying the extra price for in my opinion, since in the
last 9 months I’ve never had a problem pressing a button when attaching a different wireless
bank, and having those LED’s on the pack isn’t that bad, in fact I probably prefer
it overall since you don’t have to turn on your phone or even have the pack attached
to your phone to see the battery level.
By the way I have links to all of these packs I’ll mention plus a few more in the video
description below.
Build quality and reliability wise, which we’ll talk about in just a bit, Apples Pack
is top notch. The Plastic feels premium, very similar to the matte back of the iPhone 12
Pro’s. It doesn’t pick up lint or stick in your pocket and the same thing goes for
the silicon material on the back even though it's rubbery but this is where the first of
the 4 big disappointments come in, one of which is an absolute dealbreaker for me and
a ton of you guys as well.
4 out of the 5 third party battery packs I’ve purchased don’t hold on to my iPhone as
well as I’d like, and I was hoping Apple's genuine pack would do much better just like
their wallet holds better than the competition, but nope. That doesn’t mean that it will
randomly fall off, but it twists easily which was my biggest complaint about kickstand,
and if you press the power button on your phone without a tight grip you’ll knock
it right off.
How come this $28 Blue Mini bank have a stronger connection and way better grip than Apples
$99 Genuine Pack? And that's where we start getting into actual performance instead of
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The thing that stumped people the most was when Apple announced this pack and we found
the capacity label in their supporting documents was how it had such a small battery 1460 milli
amp hour battery pack where most packs like anker and our kickstand charger, which yes
I called it that because it has a kickstand, offer 5000Mah, and our super small Blue mini
offers 4200.
Well it turns out that Apple was really focused on efficiency and because of that used double
the voltage to give us a real world 2920mah rating as well as having more efficient chips
and coil compared to third party brands.
But unfortunately even with its efficiency, which I’ll show you, wasn’t enough to
make it competitive. On the plus side, this thing charges very fast compared to Ankers
pack because of its small battery and because it accepts 15 watts of power if you use a
20 watt charging adapter and a USB-C cable, neither of which are included in the box.
Another major plus is that you can use it as a passthrough charger, or basically a wireless
pad which the only other one that can do this is the Anker, but since this is MagSafe you
can get up to 15w of wireless charging if you use it this way, compared to 5 watts.
When you do that it will charge both you’re phone and the bank at the same time, but at
a slower pace than charging one or the other unless you use at least a 35W adapter, I’ll
link to one if you want the quickest charging possible, if you use a 20W charging speed
will be about 40% slower unless the pack us pre charged.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the lightning port that Apple uses. It does make sense if
you only want to bring one cable, and it does allow for easy wireless charging, but this
is where the next two biggest downsides come in.
Because of the lightning port, you can’t send power back the other way like you can
with usb-c, so if you want to use wired charging at some point, say to charge your apple watch
or charge your iPhone much faster and get a full charge, you can’t like you can with
the other packs, and if you want to have lightning for convenience, the kickstand charger has
both a lightning port and usb-c for charging.
As for reverse wireless charging, yes it works, but it's incredibly slow. If you plug in your
lightning cable into the bank itself you’ll have a full charge in 1 hour and 15 min, or
two hours if it's also charging the phone at the same time. But if you plug the cable
into your phone, it will take 5 hours to reverse wirelessly charge the battery bank.
And the other thing is reverse wireless charging won’t work if your phone is charging, I
only say it kicks in once my phone stopped charging, so that 5 hours is with a fully
charged iPhone. That means that it will take 7 hours total to fully charge both if you
plug your 20w charger into you iPhoen 12, compared to 3 hour and 15min if you put the
plug into the bank.
In addition, you can’t use anything but an iPhone 12 to reverse wirelessly charge,
if you have a wireless pad, a magsafe puck, or a 3 in 1 magsafe stand you can’t charge
it that way, you have to start using a lightning cable.
And that's not even the worst or most annoying thing about it. Let's get into the charging
performance and major limitations.
For my testing I used an iPhone 12 which is by far the most popular new iPhone, but the
12 Pro should charge exactly the same since it has the same battery. I’ll comment on
12 mini and 12 Pro max in a little bit.
I made sure the iPhone 12 was completely drained and attached each battery to see how long
they would take to turn your phone back on, and the name brands were a fair bit quicker,
Apple coming in second to Anker.
After 15 min Apple’s MagSafe hit 9%, better than Blue Mini which only hit 6% but slightly
behind Anker at 10% charge and kickstand managed 12%.
At the 30min mark, all chargers about doubled their charge rate with the Mini blue hitting
13%, Magsafe at 18%, Anker still higher at 19% and Kickstand at 23%.
So it looks like we were right in our first video about this charger, when you’re using
it as a wireless power pack it provides nowhere near 15W MagSafe speeds which is the biggest
reason so many of us were waiting for and willing to pay extra for it.
I tested all of them using an App that actually measures how much wattage is captured by the
battery, and Apples is slightly lower than Ankers, better than Blue mini, but still behind
other third parties that can charge wirelessly at up to 7.5W.
Let's skip over 45min and jump to the 1 hour mark, and Apple pack hits 36%, the Blue mini
is slower at 28% and kickstand is much higher at 42%, but these other chargers have another
advantage.
Jumping to the 1 and a half hour mark, which is where wired fast charging would have fully
charged the iPhone 12, Apples Magsafe pack hit 53%, and just 15min after that the pack
was completely drained, charging our iphone to 57%.
At that time Anker was slightly ahead but still had power, and kickstand reached a much
higher 68%. Our smallest and slowest charger reached the same amount as the Magsafe about
15min later, but it kept going until 68%, and the other two kept charging for another
30 min until they hit 87 and 95%.
So Apple's charger is only faster than the much smaller and cheaper mini charger, but
the charge capacity is far lower than all the third party options.
Apple's Packs is more efficient, but does it really matter if it only provides 57% charge
with an iPhone 12 or 44% with a 12 Pro Max? And even the mini will only charge 79% of
its small battery.
Now I know some of you will say that you don’t need a full charge from it, you just want
it to maintain your iPhones battery while you’re using it and pull from the external
one kinda like Apples old battery case.
Well that's the last disappointment. This thing is very sensitive to heat, maybe because
Apple is being sensitive to battery longevity or maybe heat will cause the tiny battery
in it to die super quickly and give you barely any charge.
All of those previous charge percentages was when I wasn’t using the phone and it was
in a cool room. When you’re using it and there's anything that is pushing the phone
the battery won’t charge even though the charge logo shows up.
In my previous video I shared that the battery pack wasn’t charging when I was gaming and
the battery drained from 100 to 90% in 30 min of gaming while ankers held the battery.
I did the same test but started at 50% battery to make sure there weren't any charging limits,
and after 30 min of call of duty the battery dropped to 36% and the pack barely changed.
Anker kept the battery at the same charge, and the phone only lost 2% when using Blue
mini that has a slow charge.
This isn’t with gaming exclusively, other tougher apps cause the Magsafe pack to stop
charging, and yesterday I was out on my boat the bank wasn’t charging my phone even though
it wasn’t super hot out and there was a breeze.
I understand battery longevity, but If I were to plug my phone into a cable during these
use cases it would still charge even though it would get the phone hot..
So taking everything into account, this thing costs $100 and has way too many limitations
compared to third party options that provide more charge and are way more flexible. Because
of this I’m returning two of these that I bought for my own personal use, I’m not
even taking them out of the box and this one I’ll keep in the office for future videos.
The only people who should buy Apples Pack are those who don’t care about performance
and want the brand name and long term longevity, which personally I’d much rather have this
blue mini even if I have to buy a new one a year or two later, or for people who don’t
yet own a wireless charging pad and are going to be consistently using it for that as well.
Apple's MagSafe Pack looks great, has good build quality, is really well integrated into
the ecosystem but the performance just isn’t there, especially for the money.
Let me know you’re thoughts in the comments section, and click that circle above to subscribe
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