Does that mean if your phone came with no charger, you have the perpetually full battery? Asking for a friend.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPhone 17 Pro Max Overnight charging 5W or 20W?
- Thread starter tilhas
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I charge overnight on my Samsung 25-watt charger, or even on my 45-watt charger it depends on which cable I grab. Don’t care about battery health.
There is no reason to use the 5W brick these days....I tried one out on my 15PM for a bit and it yellowed and nearly melted from how scorching hot it got trying to charge the phone. Meanwhile the 20W does it without breaking a sweat and the phone barely gets any warmer than it would with the 5W. I carried on using the 20W for something like a year and a half on the original battery charging only via the 20W and my USB port in my truck, and the phone continued to have 100% battery capacity for something like 330 cycles. There is absolutely no evidence to support charging via 5W helps anything long term, and as such there really is no logical reason to limit yourself to 4-6 hour charge times with the tiny cube anymore, especially when doing so gets it as hot as it does.
Thank you. I had this experience with two separate 5watt Apple chargers. All this time thought it was just me.
Those things got BURNING hot - to the point where both yellowed visibly (wish I had taken pictures). I put one on a Kill-A-Watt and it outputs more than 5w - and I think that's where the problem lies.
Those with 5w adapters - after an hour - should test the heat output of those things - mine were BURNING hot. That's not efficient or sustainable long term.
Last edited:
My husband keeps pestering me about getting rid of those 5W chargers from Apple. I got rid of some of them but kept maybe like 4 or 5. They are not only so cute, but they are compact! I also thought, well, maybe they are good enough to charge things like Airpods, so I could have one charger in my office just for that.
I wish power bricks were smaller these days.
Interesting question
I think low heat over longer period is better for battery health, and 5W is unbeatable in this because it generates minimum heat during charging. Higher heat is OK but still not as good as low heat. As for fan, I've seen few Samsung wireless models that use fan during wireless charging, and you can control power with slower bricks, so you get best of both worlds: wireless charging+safe, slow charging
25W MagSafe only for me. My 16 PM after a year of wireless only charging, no ridiculous battery limit or optimised charging, was still at 100% after a year. With my older MagSafe, my 15 PM was at 99%, 14 PM 100%, can't remember what my 13 PM and earlier phones were, but they've never dropped under 97% after a year and I've been charging wirlesley only since Apple first supported it.
Just charge your phone and enjoy it; no need to worry about this battery degradation crap.
Just charge your phone and enjoy it; no need to worry about this battery degradation crap.
I'm not one to go nuts figuring out how to micromanage my battery, but I'm using an old Nomad Base qi charger that I really like. It's super heavy, first-gen qi but with magnetic alignment. It charges very slowly, but the alignment thing is excellent and it's heavy enough to stay put when I pick up the phone. The slowness (5W? 7W?) is a liability for quick top-offs during the day, but it's perfect at night when I've got (ideally) 8 hours to charge.
Last edited:
Because it's the ideal time to charge your phone. I've been doing it since my iPhone 4S (and whatever cell phones I had before that, plus iPods, PowerBooks, MacBooks, headphones, e-readers and god knows what other devices) and it's all been absolutely fine.
Not saying nothing could ever go wrong, but I think the real dangers come from things like cheap or damaged extension cords, maybe buried under carpets and the like. A decent quality charger and cable is going to fall way down the list of electrical fire hazards.
Last edited: