Jul 20, 2021
You Should Buy The MagSafe Battery Pack.
Made by Apple.
The MagSafe Battery Pack is Apple’s official battery pack featuring MagSafe. The battery pack can charge your iPhone on the go. The battery pack costs $99.
Charging.
The battery pack charges via lightning. When charging, the battery pack will charge your iPhone at 15w but when you remove the lightning cable the battery pack will charge your iPhone at 5w instead. The interesting part is that when you charge your iPhone while the battery pack is charging, the iPhone will use reverse wireless charging to charge the battery pack at the same time. I don’t recall Apple mentioning that the iPhone 12 has reverse charging capabilities. Do you?
Compatibility.
Because the battery uses MagSafe it will work best with the iPhone 12 series and future iPhones as well. If you want, the battery pack will work on older iPhones but it won’t charge as quickly (5w vs 15w) and you won’t be able to see how much charge is left in the battery pack because the older iPhones don’t have MagSafe. Having said that, it will work.
Fit.
Fit wise, the battery pack is similar to the MagSafe Wallet but a little taller. If I were to describe it, on the iPhone 12 mini the battery pack looks ridiculously huge. On the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, it looks just right. On the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it looks slightly small in comparison.
Capacity.
Apple doesn’t mention the capacity of the batteries in the MagSafe Battery Pack on its website. After some digging though, I found that the battery pack will charge the iPhone 12 from empty to 74% (Source: Vincent Zhong). This means that the battery has less capacity than many other battery packs that will charge your iPhone from 0–100 multiple times while costing half as much. The good thing though is that the MagSafe Battery Pack is considerably smaller and lighter than the aforementioned battery packs.
I think Apple did the correct thing by trading off battery capacity for greater mobility. Mobility is an important aspect for something that you are going be carrying around with you. Having said that, the end result is that the MagSafe Battery Pack is not really a battery pack by normal standards. But rather, it is something you use to top off the iPhone on unusually long days or days where you expect heavier iPhone usage. Something to curb your battery anxiety, if you will.
Use Case.
In my head, i can’t imagine carrying the MagSafe Battery Pack all the time. Instead, I will use the battery pack as a pseudo MagSafe Charger 90% of the time. Occasionally, I will bring it with me if I expect that i’ll need a little more juice to get to the end of the day. The good thing about this is that I don’t have to buy a MagSafe Charger anymore. That’s $39 I can use on Big Macs instead.
Things To Look Out For.
At the very end, I would like to bring something to your attention. According to Apple you should not use the MagSafe Battery Pack with your iPhone if you are using a leather case. This is because the battery pack may leave stains on the leather case. Of course, this is down to personal preference. Some people may care; others may not.
