iPhone 12 MagSafe Battery Pack is Here! By Rene Ritchie

- Apple has just announced a MagSafe Battery Pack. It's $99 and it works with the full range of iPhone 12 products. That means the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max. Just one MagSafe Battery Pack to charge and rule them all. And yes, I will get my hands on it for review as soon as is inhumanly possible. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you see it the second it goes live.

And yes, absolutely totally sure, iPhone 12 Pro Max users might be just laughing at this saying they've got their hump already built in. But iPhone 12 mini users might still be loving their baby phone on the daily, but might want to really, really take a look at the MagSafe Battery Pack to extend that into the whole daily, the nightly. Now, because it's an Apple battery pack, you're immediately gonna see a lot of criticism saying it is low capacity and high price. Because that has traditionally been the knock on Apple's previous Smart battery cases. You'd see them just get trounced in articles, even first looks.

And then a couple months later, you'd see it's the only thing even those tech reviewers were using at CES or other trade shows. And the reason for that is Apple doesn't focus on raw capacity. They focus on the efficiency. There's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about battery pack technology. For one thing, batteries are terrible for radio frequencies.

They block them. So a lot of traditional battery cases back in the day would actually prevent the signal from getting out, forcing the radio to power up, thereby wasting a lot of the charge you were busy trying to give them. Also, they would tend to put the iPhone into plug-in mode. You know, when it thinks that it's actually on a cable in a wall. And then it just loses all its mobile restrictions.

All the networking activity starts ramping up, it starts updating things. It starts again consuming much more power than normal. So it's not taking full advantage of the charge you are trying to give it. That's something that some other companies sometimes ignore, going for the more brute force, maximum capacity, absolute unit approach, which, you know, some people appreciate. Apple has been very good about engineering around a lot of those concerns.

You know, they just wanted to get as much casing out of the way as possible. And that led to that giant hump. And now this is just that giant hump. It is the pokey evolution, the final form of Apple's slap on battery technology, but now they don't even need that case anymore because it's using MagSafe. Now there are some drawbacks to that, obvious drawbacks to that, One is it won't stay on as securely as a case will, it will only stay on as securely as the MagSafe battery allows.

And if you've used other MagSafe products then you'll know sometimes that's really good and sometimes it feels like it's moving around in your pocket. Remains to be seen how well the MagSafe specifically stays on, but it's something to certainly keep an eye on. The other thing is because it's charging wirelessly and not going through the lightning port, it's limited to 15 Watts currently for Apple's iPhones. Now it does have an independent lightning port on it, all of its own. So you can plug in your iPhone as you would normally while you're using the MagSafe Battery Pack, but you can also plug in any other accessory without any interference.

You know, plug into wired CarPlay or hard-line sync to your Mac. You can also plug directly through lightning into the MagSafe Battery Pack. And that means you'll be charging the battery pack, which will then be wirelessly charging your iPhone. And depending on the power brick you're using, if you're using one of the new 20 watt Apple Charging Bricks, it'll charge the MagSafe unit much faster. And it'll do what Apple's previously done with battery packs, and that is move the charge between the battery itself and the device.

It'll tend to prioritize the device, especially at the beginning so that you can get back up and using it without any worries. Even if you have to take off the case as fast as possible, and then it'll start shifting power to the case so you have that reserve built up. Those are the sorts of things that really, really appeal to Apple and their sensibilities. So if those are also appealing to you and your sensibilities, then you might want to check out Apple's MagSafe Battery Pack. $99, you can order it now and if you want to learn more about the iPhone 12 or MagSafe, check out these videos.

Source : Rene Ritchie