MagSafe Battery Pack on ALL iPhone 12 Variants By Rene Ritchie

- This is the MagSafe battery pack for the iPhone 12, perhaps the most controversial battery accessory Apple's released since the previous smart battery case for the iPhone 11 series. And I'll get into why that is in just the hot minute, but first I'm gonna unbox it. So the iPhone mini, it pretty much takes up the whole entire back. It's like Luke Skywalker with a backpack locked and loaded, ready for Yoda to jump on board. There's just no room around it at all. You can see the relative thickness and thinness, including the double lightening ports now on the bottom.

And in case you're wondering immediately, yes, it stays pretty much stuck. You can wiggle it around, but it is by far the grippiest MagSafe accessory I've ever experienced. And pretty securely on, like, headbanging on. You can just turn it though and then it comes off relatively easily. On the iPhone 12 non-mini, you got a little bit more of the border, same relevance thinness and thickness and lightening ports.

IPhone 12 Pro, no surprise. It is same size as the iPhone 12 so you get very, very similar look all the way around. iPhone 12 Pro Max is where it all changes, of course. Now you gotta aim for the apple logo on the back, and then it comes on. And you have quite a lot of space all the way around.

It's more like Luke Skywalker inside a tauntaun size, but everything else is pretty much the same. And yes, because it is MagSafe, it will work, it will stick, it will charge through any MagSafe compatible case you happen to have on your iPhone 12 at the time. Now compared to the original, the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7 battery case, there is quite a bit more lump, quite a bit more bump in this hump. I think that's just a reflection of how modern devices, including modern processors, require more power than they did even a few years ago. It's not quite as big, as in wide, as what we saw on the iPhone 11 Pro Max version of the smart battery case and that's because this has to be able to fit on every single model of iPhone 12 from the mini to the Max so we ended up getting the biggest possible package for the smallest possible iPhone 12.

It is fairly close though, to the iPhone 11 Pro non max version in terms of size and overall bulk. But again, you don't have that casing around it so that makes it much easier to take off and put on. Here, you gotta pull and it's not terrible, but it does take a few seconds. And then putting it back in is roughly the same. Whereas with the MagSafe battery pack, it's just off and back on.

The other advantage is if you had friends or family members or coworkers who needed to recharge as well, and they didn't have the exact same iPhone model and size that you had, if it was a bigger smart battery case, you might be able to fit their smaller phone awkwardly, carefully into it, but if it was a bigger iPhone, you were just out of luck. Where with the MagSafe battery pack, you can literally just slide it over from one iPhone to the other and be just good to go. Now, if you have been rocking the iPhone 12 mini and you haven't been making it all the way through the day, maybe the MagSafe battery pack will be an insta-buy for you so you can get, you know, all day, every day, into the night battery life out of your phone without having to buy a bigger phone. I mean, with this, you still have all the convenience of a really small, really light phone without the drag of constantly having a thicker, heavier device to hold onto. But you can thwack this on at any time.

You have your pickup truck, you can get your work done, but you just pull it right off and you go back to having your super luxurious sports phone, your tiny Miata of a city phone raring to go again. With the iPhone 12 Pro Max, maybe you already get a day, day and a half battery life out of it and you either don't think you need the MagSafe battery pack, or you really want to be just completely extra about it, you want two days, you want to travel, you want to camp, you want to go on longer trips and you don't have to worry about your charge level while you're doing it, then this will give you an iPhone 12 Pro Max Max. And with the iPhone 12 or the iPhone 12 Pro, it really is more in the middle. It's whether you need that longer battery life. You know what? I'm not going to call this a charger.

I think a lot of people will look at it and say, you know, it doesn't have the capacity. It's not the absolute charging unit of bigger, more brute force accessories. It's meant to be like you have extra battery capacity on the phone itself. You're not plugging into anything different, you're just injecting more battery life, longer battery life into your phone for as long as you keep it on, for as long as it's charged and you keep it on and when you don't need it anymore, you just take it off. And part of the reason for that is when it is on, when it's magnetically attached and inductively charging on the go, you're only getting five watts of power.

It's not like a giant charging brick designed to refill your iPhone as fast as possible. It's more low key. It's more stealth. It's meant to keep your iPhone going with you for as long as possible. Now you can plug in to charge on either your iPhone proper or into the MagSafe battery pack.

When you plug into your iPhone, of course you'll be charging up your iPhone at full AC power, especially if you're plugged into a 20 watt or higher AC adapter on the other end. If you plug into the MagSafe charger, though, then you'll go with the 15 Watts, the highest current available charging speed for a MagSafe accessory on the iPhone. And yeah, 15 Watts, not just an outrageous amount of watts, because Apple is not doing multiple cells charging in parallel, at least not yet. And they're also prioritizing battery health over speed to charge at this point, although who knows when and if that'll change? Regardless of whether you plug into your iPhone or the MagSafe battery pack, the two devices will pass charge back and forth between them as intelligently as possible, and tend to prioritize the iPhone. That way, if you want or need to take the MagSafe battery pack off, your iPhone will have as much charge as possible.

And yes, that does mean that the iPhone is capable of pushing, of passing through charge into the MagSafe battery pack, which some people will call reverse wireless charging or bi-directional, inductive charging, although I'm just calling it a feature of the battery pack unless and until Apple makes it available for other devices on the iPhone. Because the max safe battery pack is a qi standard charger, you can do things like charge your AirPods or AirPods Pro on them. You can't charge your Apple Watch because your Apple Watch isn't qi standard, but pretty much anything else will work. One of the advantages of this being a first-party, Apple accessory, is that they have full access to iOS and that includes the widgets so regardless of whether you're plugging into the iPhone or the battery pack, you'll see a little widget, a little charging widget on the phone showing you exactly how much capacity is in both the iPhone and the MagSafe battery pack at any given time. The other advantages that Apple has that sort of fly in the face of some of the pushback that apple gets over these, which is they are low capacity and high price.

In this case 1,460 milliamp hours and $100, is that Apple doesn't really care about the capacity, they care about the efficiency. They remove every bit of casing, everything about the battery pack that could block the RF transmission, the signal, going into the phone, because a lot of batteries, a lot of cases do block that and then radios have to ramp up and you end up consuming more power, ironically, just when you're trying to charge it the fastest. Apple's also very careful to keep the phone in mobile mode, not letting it go into plug-in mode, where network activity, things like syncing and updating and transferring, all just power up and it consumes even more energy, again, just when you're trying to recharge it the most. And I don't want to come off as the completely over-privileged jerk that I am, but for me, they're gonna be like Canon camera batteries. I'm just gonna keep one or two of them in my bag at any time, and then whenever I need one, you know, when I'm traveling, when the world stops ending, when I'm going to events again, when I'm working and I need to keep working and my charge is getting low, I'm just gonna thwack one right onto my phone and literally keep going, keep filming, keep socialling, and keep doing everything I need to do without having to worry about finding a plug or putting on a case, taking off a case.

Just, you know, slap on, slap off, slap on, slap off, like I'm training Daniel LaRusso or something. And of course, I'm gonna put it through its paces and come back with a whole entire review in a week or two. So if you have any questions at all, just make sure you drop them in the comments and then hit that subscribe button and bell so you see the video just the instant it goes live.

Source : Rene Ritchie