We go hands-on with Apple's new $99 MagSafe Battery Pack
Phones
Speaker 1: This is the new mag safe battery pack from apple. I've been using it for five days and wanna share my thoughts and answer some questions about it.
Speaker 1: So here it is, it's made with soft white Matt plastic, which feels good. In the hand, it has a lightning port and L E D indicator. Now I get why it has lightning and opposed to like USBC, but I, we could had USBC. Oh, and it doesn't come with a lightning cable or a charger in the box. Here's what it looks like on the iPhone. 12 mini [00:00:30] iPhone, 12 iPhone 12 pro and iPhone 12 pro max. I love how perfectly flush it is on the iPhone. 12 mini. Also, if you do put this on the iPhone 12, Promax, it is heavy. How heavy? Well, I weighed the combo and it's over 12 ounces or 342 grams. When you slap it on the back of the phone, it starts charging. There isn't a button press. It just goes, it charges the phone at five Watts, which [00:01:00] is equivalent to using an old school apple five wat charger when plugged in the MagSafe battery pack supports pass through charging at a faster 15 Watts, but you need to use a 20 wat wall charger, which costs an additional $19 on top of the $99 price.
Speaker 1: The pack. Some people hooked apple would release a battery case like it had in your's pass, but plugging in the MagSafe battery pack makes it into a MagSafe charging pad for your iPhone 12, but you could also use it to charge [00:01:30] your AirPods case wireless iPhones, Android phones, that support key charging. It just won't charge them very quickly. The battery pack has excellent iOS integration like showing the pack's battery percent in the iOS battery widget. Your iPhone also communicates with a pack to stop charging at 90%. This helps prolong the life of your iPhone's battery, but if you do want to charge past 90%, this enable low power mode from the control panel and long press the icon. I can [00:02:00] also charge the mag safe battery pack when it's attached to my iPhone. And the iPhone is plugged in the mag safe battery pack has a 1,460 million a hour battery, which is 11.13 wat hours.
Speaker 1: I connected a fully charged pack to all of the versions of the iPhone 12 with their empty batteries. It charged the iPhone 12 mini up about 80%, the iPhone 12 and 12 pro up to about 60% and the iPhone 12 pro max [00:02:30] up to about 50%. All right, I do have a few criticisms and perhaps my biggest criticism is I wish this had come out when the iPhone 12 had first launched or just even a little after. And then there's the price. 90. If you wanna have a fully optimized experience, you need that 20 wat wall charger. And that brings the price of this and the wall charger to just under $120. Now there are third party options for mag safe
Speaker 2: Battery packs [00:03:00] that are half the price, like there's one from anchor that's $49. And that one has a larger capacity battery. And my last criticism is I just wish this came in a color other than white. It's just white. Look on the whole. I can see people at an apple store buying a phone, grabbing one of these off the shelf. And if you're looking for something that can double as a charging pad and keep your phone topped off on the go, this is a solid option. [00:03:30] But if you are willing to part with some of Apple's built-in niceties, there are third party options that are a better value for a mag safe, better every pack. So that's all I've got.
