In this video I’m going to answer 3 things, first how much faster is Magsafe charging than standard 7.5W Qi wireless charging? Second, is magsafe charging much slower than using a lightning cable, spoiler alert, yeah it is.. And third, do you really have to buy Apple's new 20W usb-c charging brick or can you use an older 18W one you might have, and if you don't, how about a cheaper and much smaller third party charger like the 20W Anker Nano? Which btw I love and have linked down in the video description below. I also share 3 very weird things I found when using my wattage meter with these chargers that I haven’t heard anyone really mention.
Let's start out by comparing 4 standard chargers so it's easy to see the differences before we throw in some variables. We have the 5watt lighting that everyone has, a cheap 7.5W qi wireless charger that is super convenient and also linked below, Apple's Magsafe charger with the new 20W brick, and 20W fast lightning cable charging. After 10 min of charging the 5W got us to an 8% charge, 7.5W Qi actually charged 1% less at 7%, Magsafe surprisingly resulted in only 3% more at 10% and 20W lightning gave us a whopping 20% charge in just 10min. To be honest I was expecting 15Watts of magsafe to be about twice as fast as 7.5W Qi charging instead of only 30% faster, and only 2 percentage points higher than slow 5W charging, but maybe it will speed up as we go on.
20 min in, 5W wired gained 6% charge, regular wireless charging gained 5%, and thankfully magsafe stayed consistent with the first 10min and gained another 10% charge. 20W lightning also stayed consistent and gained another 20% for a total of 40% charge in just 20min. This is where the first weird thing showed up when I used my wattage meter to test out Apple's new fast charging brick that's rated at 20W. As soon as I plugged in the meter instead of showing 20W being pulled it consistently showed .. (AD) 18 Watts. I tested this multiple times with different cables and iPhones and the result was the same. More on this, and what it means in just a bit but first let's get back to the charging speed comparison. 30min into the test we have 20% charge for 5W wired, 18% for regular wireless charging, 30% for Magsafe, so hey we’re finally seeing a good difference with this faster wireless charging, and 58% using fast lightning charging. So as you see, even without the full 20W from the new charger, Apple still exceeded its advertised 50% in 30min. Lets jump to the 40min Mark where the slow chargers are maintaining a consistent pace but the fast chargers are starting to slow down.
Our 7.5W wireless charger is still 3% behind the slow 5W wired charger which is really sad, and magsafe 16% higher at 38%, but that's still 34% behind fast lightning charging at 72%. And here's the scores after 50min, as you can see 5W wired and 7.5W wireless charging are staying super consistent so far at about 6% charge per 10 min, Magsafe slowed down after its good start to about 8% per 10 min, and wired really slowing down now gaining just 9%. Now for that nice round 1 hour mark. 5W wired is at a sad 39%, 7.5 Wireless an even worst 36%, Magsafe with 20W brick at 55% and 20W wireless at 88% which is enough juice for a whole day for many people.
As you can see Magsafe took twice as long to charge to 50% compared to fast lightning charging. To speed up the test I’m going to jump to 15min increments now but first lets quickly touch on that 20W fast lightning charging. As you can see it started slowing down after the first 30min and really slowed down after we hit 80% gaining just 7 percent between 50 and 60min instead of 20 percent each 10min at the start.
I was curious how much the wattage tapers down with the chargers as the phones become more charged so I tested them. The 5W lightning and 7.5W wireless don’t taper down at all, magsafe does slow down a bit, but fast lighting tapers like crazy. It starts out with 18W fast charging if you’re using a 12 or 12 Pro, by the way my 11 Pro Max accepts the full 20W from this charger, and the 12’s keep pulling 18 Watts until the phone hits 50% at which point they slow down to 14W. That lasts until 70% where it then slows down to 9 Watt charging but that only lasts until 80% charge, where we have another slow down to just 5w charging for the remaining 20%.
Let's get back to the charge test and finish it up. Going from 1 hour to 1:15 the 5watt jumped by 9 perfect to 48%, 7.5 wireless jumped by 8 percent, Magasafe increased by 11 perfect and fast lightning by just 4 percent. After an hour and a half the slow chargers finally reached over 50% and Magsafe hit 75% charge, while USB-C PD was slow charging to 96%. After another 15min USB-C charging was finished while the others are trying to catch up. At the 2 hour mark, our 5W lightning charger reached 74%, and 7.5W Qi charging was 6% behind at 68% and magsafe reached 90% where it starts to slow down even more. So how much more charge do you get after 2 hours with this fancy new $40 magsafe charger and $20 brick compared to your super old slow 5W charger? 16% more, let's just say I was more than a bit disappointed. I also want to say that this has been the most boring video to test, having to constantly charge and then discharge these phones is mindnumibly boring so if you appreciate it please hit the like button and subscribe if you want to see more videos.
And to save time let's jump straight to the end result. Magsafe took 2 hours and 45min to reach 100%, a whole hour longer than fast lightning charging, and only 15min faster than using your old 5W charging brick. Comparing 15W magsafe charging to a cheap charging stand the difference was only 30min for a full charge. So how is this possible when Magsafe charges at 15wats? Well here's the thing. It doesn’t. Apples says it can hit a peak of 15 Watts if you use the 20W charging brick which is true, but they don’t say how long it stays there. In my test Magsafe actually peaked over 16 watts but that's only at the start, after that it would charge at about 6 watts.
Now this could be wrong, but my usb-c tester seems to be accurate based on the other tests and it lignes up with the results. The other question is how is Magsafe charging faster at 6W then standard Qi at 7.5W, well it could just be because of perfect alignment and a more efficient coil. The next question I had is if Magsafe spends most of its time charging well below 15 watts, do we really need that new 20W charging brick or can we just use the 18w older one, or maybe a third party one. I’ve seen a few tests show that other bricks don’t hit the full wattage, but none of them tested Ankers new 20W nano which unlike most, supports the new PD protocol. After the first 10 min, Apples 20W with magsafe is just one percent above the other two chargers. When checking the wattage it seems like the Anker needs more time to reach the full 16W compared to Apples but once it does it actually stays there a little longer, as you can see by the 20min point, Ankers brick is slightly ahead compared to the others.
30min in, Apple's older 18W power adapter is just 1 percent behind the 20W, and Ankers is 2% ahead. The gap gets slightly wider after 40 min with Ankers now being 5% ahead of Apples 20W and 6% above the 18W charger, and after 50Min it reaches above 50%, a consistent 10 percent every 10 min compared to 8 percent for Apples 20Watt and 7 for the 18W. This trend continues so lets jump to 1 hour and 30min where Apples advertised pairing is at 75%, the 18W brick is only 2% behind at 73%, and Anker achieves 83%. How is this possible if the Anker is rated for the same 20W, well first off, its not tapering down its wattage as fast and when it does its actually drawing 6.5W where apples chargers are pulling 6 watts. Lets jump to 2 hours now, where charging speeds are really slowing down and Apples bricks are at 89 and 90% while Ankers is at 95%. 15min later the Anker is done taking a total time of 2 hour and 15 min. Apples chargers take much longer to finish off the last little bit, their 20W brick takes 30min longer than Ankers at 2 hours and 45min , and their 18W brick takes an additional 15 min for a total time of 3 hours, the same exact time as slow 5W lightning charging.
So we have our final results. 15 watt Magsafe charging is way slower than we thought. Sure if you want to top off a low battery it's a little faster than your 5watt brick but you're way better off using a lightning cable, it's literally twice as fast. With that said, if you have an 18W charging brick don’t bother buying the 20W to lightning charge your iPhone 12 or 12 Pro since they seem to be limited to 18 watts. I’m guessing only the Pro Max will use the full 20 watt to allow it to reach 50% in 30 min.
For those of you wanting to use magsafe you might as well use an 18W usb-c brick if you have one because the charging speed is barely different, but if you don’t or you want the fastest magsafe charging buy an Anker Nano. It's very small and keeps its wattage slightly higher and longer than Apples, I’ll link it down in the video description. No this video is not sponsored by Anker, but I am trying to work out a deal with them since I already use and love their small usb-c chargers. And as a last note, if you’re going to buy an iPhone 12 mini, that won’t accept the full 15 or 16W peak of Magsafe, Apple is saying its limited to 12W. Let me know your thoughts down below and if you want to support our channel pick up a super soft max tech premium shirt, hoodie, or mask in that merch shelf or by using our link below. If you want to see how fast Magsafe charges other iPhones or Androids I have a very interesting video right over there, and why not subscribe if you haven’t already for more videos like this one which almost no one is making.
Thanks for watching this has been Max and I’ll see you in the next video.
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