MagSafe Charges 2x Slower Than Wired 20W USB-C Charger

ian87w said:
Meanwhile, Huawei is doing 50W wireless charging... :D
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I checked their product page...

The built-in noise-free fan dynamically adjusts its speed during the day to cut down on excess noise, and automatically switches to ultra-silent mode4 at night. Even light sleepers will nod off in no time.
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I figured there’s no way they could dissipate that amount of heat with no fan. The only “noise-free” fan is a fan that’s not turning :)
 
robinp said:
2x slower is a really bad way of saying 'half the speed'
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They have done this a few times lately. Why not say exactly what you said. Half the speed. When stating something is less than, I have never before twice now on this site read it saying x times less than.

It would be nice to have a proper editor check these articles. It’s bad enough to read improper grammatical English in the threads, but the main article should have an editor who understands the English language. I wonder how people like my kids will ever get anything correct when writing if they read what’s written all over the web these days.
 
Yup. Took mine back this morning. I was curious and jumped on the hype train but then reality sank in and I realized I was wasting my money. Ordered an Anker 20w USB-C charging brick and cable for 26 bucks.
Apple might as well just abandon the accessory market at this point for everything but cases and headphones if we’re being honest.
 
Carlson-online said:
What’s the charging time in the usb-a wall brick that’s no longer in the box? That would be a fair comparison to the new MagSafe one
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True - the one we would use to be good for the environment like Apple. But the cable is USB C so you cannot use that one. Jokes on you. Buy that charger but just remember, Apple got you to buy it instead of free and called this transfer of money from you to them good for the environment.
 
Populus said:
This was expected, but we all know Apple want to get rid of the charging-I/O port, the lightning port, so they needed to come up with an alternative to close that hole as soon as possible.
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So I will buy a phone and to charge it will have to spend an extra $40 even if I have hundreds of these chargers everyone told me were the reason we didnt need them anymore. Cute.
 
Apple is just too conservative on the wattage they allow on chargers, and they don't want people buying 3rd party, so they limit those. Not surprising. Part of the so called "Apple Tax" i guess.
 
bryn0076 said:
Wifi is called wireless too. Have you ever questioned that? My modem is full of wires.
Wires are involved, but there are no wires in my phone connected to the wires in my charger.
Wireless indicates a wire-free gap between one system and another. There are no wires physically connecting the two systems.
My Phillips Hue bulbs wirelessly connect to the internet - it still has wires. Stop being a Richard.
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Sure! Technically speaking it’s wireless. Practically speaking while using this “wireless” charger there’s as much of a wire in as close proximity of the phone as a regular wired charger. Practically this is no better than using a wired connection. It is only tenuously, technically wireless. Sure, if you need to score a point for winning an argument by all means give yourself that pat on the back. For anybody wanting to eliminate the annoyance of wired charging they will still be waiting, wanting. Lastly, I don’t like the induction charging because in my experience it always noticeably heats up the phone. Given all the glue holding this one together that can’t be a good thing. I plan on passing this year but I’ll be listening to see if people have any heat issues with this one.
 
lestmak said:
Umm, no surprise there.... 20W wired vs 15W MagSafe vs 7.5W Qi. What would one expect?
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One would expect the MagSafe to charge twice as quickly as the Qi charger like Apple claimed, except, it didnt. It performed like a "10W" charger, which ironically is the rate that 90% of Qi chargers are available at these days.

If it really was 15W [or performing like] it should have charged 15 minutes quicker than it actually did, again performed like a 10W charger
 
Piggie said:
Excatly.
It's amazing how few people have come to realise this.

Regardless of whether you like Apple or Prefer Android.
You can't go on about how green you are being and how much smaller the box is for shipping, and no charger to save the planet.
If you then introduce a new charging method for your phone which is vastly less efficient, meaning over a few years there will literally be hundreds of millions of devices all drawing vastly more power from the grid than they would do via a wire.

I reckon it would be shocking if someone were to cost out what that many iphones would be costing the electrical grid extra due to this change.
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illogical... Smaller boxes and redundant chargers are better for the environment and that is independent of Qi charging (NOT introduced by Apple). If you are a super duper environmentalist then you should use a cell phone... use a wired phone or a carrier pigeon.
 
dannys1 said:
Because induction charging is incredibly inefficient too, so you send 15w to get about 8-9w charging, where as with the direct charge you're using 20w to get about 19w charging.
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So a company that promotes conserving energy also promotes wireless charging.
 
Why charge fast and easy with a tiny lightning cable just a few millimeters in size, when you can instead charge slowly with a big heavy metal disk with questionable attachment strength? It'll probably save money, too, since super advanced direct wire charging must cost a fortune to implement. I'd only expect to see wire charging on a super expensive flagship phone.

In all seriousness, where did Apple EVER get the idea that simply plugging in a phone to charge is so inconvenient? They already used advanced technology so I can't put the plug in backwards. If they want to add super advanced sophistication, make the port light up when the lightning connector gets close to it, so I can plug it in in the dark.
 
Nicksd84 said:
Yes. the verge mentioned this in their podcast, but feel like there needs to be more journalistic critique of promoting environmental friendliness of their packaging decisions while at the same time promoting a charging solution that’s substantially less efficient. Hammering on this needs to come before they go portless, not after.
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Apple is doing whatever is good for apple. The “good for the environment” is just an incantation to mesmerize certain people.
 
ksec said:
You do get ~70% so it is closer to 10W. Still.



There is no need to do test on MagSafe. Wireless Induction Charging are like that. It is not as efficient. And I am surprised this now gets media attention as if it was something new.
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Agreed.
There are plenty of inefficiencies in induction charging.
You have resistive heat loss in both the receiver and transmitter.
Then you have losses if the coils are even slightly misaligned.
Then you have losses based on distance, because energy drops off as an inverse of the distance cubed.
It doesn't much distance to halve the charging efficiency.

Wireless might be convenient but it is no substitute for a wired connection.
This is such a non-story.
 
NightFox said:
Once you reach a certain coil size, it's more efficient to go to multiple coils than just going bigger with a single coil. Then you're starting to look at something like the ill-fated AirPower design, though maybe Apple learned something from that they could bring to a future iteration of MagSafe charging. It will be interesting to see how warm the MagSafe charger gets, as heat dissipation is one of the challenges they'd have to face here.
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OnePlus does something like this and they call it Warp Wireless 30.
It is backward compatible with Qi.
 
Piggie said:
If you then introduce a new charging method for your phone which is vastly less efficient, meaning over a few years there will literally be hundreds of millions of devices all drawing vastly more power from the grid than they would do via a wire.

I reckon it would be shocking if someone were to cost out what that many iphones would be costing the electrical grid extra due to this change.
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Not really since charging a phone requires very little energy.

Let's assume than on average each phone battery stores approx. 10 Wh (like the Galaxy S10 and iPhone XS) of energy and there are 5 billion phones out there which are charged fully on average once a day.

10 Wh * 5e9 * 365 / 1000 = 18.25 billion kWh.

I believe the world wide energy consumption is about 23 000 billion kWh thus making it about 0.08% of the world's energy consumption.
 
techwhiz said:
OnePlus does something like this and they call it Warp Wireless 30.
It is backward compatible with Qi.
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I’m guessing there’s a fan involved in anything over 15W, whereas you can get 20W and above wired with no fan. Just another thing to consider. The backwards compatibility drops down to 7.5W more than likely.
 
I think the move to magsafe needs to be seen (as with many initially controversial apple choices) as the first step of something that will snowball into something bigger in 10 years...what I wish is that a “Magsafe2“ (faster and more efficient) in 2030 was adopted universally by all brands and all battery powered devices..
 
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