Hey guys! Today we’re going to review Apple’s official MagSafe battery pack and also compare it to another MagSafe compatible battery pack, Anker. Was the Apple one worth the wait? Let’s find out.
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So here is the Apple MagSafe battery pack, it retails for $99 bucks, comes in white currently, and is built from a soft matte plastic material which feels nice and smooth. On the bottom it has a lightning port and an LED charging indicator, and of course in classic Apple fashion, they did not include a lightning cable with this battery pack.
Moving on over to the Anker battery pack, it currently retails for $46, comes in matte black, and is also made from a soft plastic material. On the bottom you’ll find an on off button, a usb-c port, as well as some LED charge indicator lights. Anker does include a usb-c cable but does not come with a wall adapter.
Now here’s what both devices look like when they snap to the phone: On the Apple one, just plop it on and it starts charging. On the Anker, it’s a pretty similar process, just snap it on, press the power on button and it starts charging. Both devices will charge your phone at five watts and also act as a wireless charging pad so if you have other devices that utilize Qi charging, those devices will also be compatible.
They also both support pass-through charging so if you need to charge up your phone and your battery pack at the same time, you can do so with one cable though it’s worth mentioning that when doing pass-through charging, Apple’s battery pack will support up to 15 watts of power whereas the Anker will stay at 5 watts.
As far as size and dimensions go, you can see that they’re pretty similar with the Apple one being just slightly taller and wider but makes up for that by being half a centimeter thinner and 15 grams lighter.
There are definitely a lot of similarities between these two devices on the surface but as you know with Apple, they love to add that Apple magic so let’s go over some of those additional features that you’ll be getting on the Apple MagSafe battery pack: First off, no power button. The Apple battery pack will start charging as soon as you put it on the back of your phone so there’s no need to press the power button, which is something that you’ll need to do on the Anker. Next up, iOS integration. If you have the battery widget, you can see just how much battery you have left on your battery pack just from the home screen whereas with the Anker, you’ll just need to press the button on the bottom and check the LED indicator lights.
Finally, Apple’s battery pack is able to communicate with your iPhone so it stops charging at 90% in order to prolong your iPhone’s battery health, though if you do need to charge all the way up to 100%; you can override the setting by long pressing the low power button in control center.
With the Anker battery, what i found was it’ll take your iPhone all the way up to 100% and keep it topped off which may diminish your iPhone’s battery health as well as drain the Anker battery when it doesn’t really need to so, if you do have the Anker battery make sure to turn it off once your phone reaches 100% in order to save that juice.
So, some of you guys may appreciate those features more than others, but you know none of those things really matter if the battery capacity is tiny. So, let’s talk about battery capacity.
The number that we’re all used to seeing advertised for battery capacity is usually described in milliamp hours. In Apple’s battery you’ll see the number 1,460 milliamps being tossed around and on Anker side you’ll see 5,000 milliamps. Many people will just assume that the Anker one has over three times the battery capacity of the iPhone one, and therefore, charge your phone three times as much. But that’s actually not true for two reasons: first, we need to take into consideration the voltage which will in turn affect the watt hours of the battery. That watt hour number will tell us the true capacity of each battery. Second, we also need to consider the loss of energy when charging wirelessly to determine how much juice actually makes it from the battery pack to your phone.
So first, let’s determine the watt hours of each battery – now this is the equation that we’ll be using:
Watt hours = volts * amp hours
So, filling in our equation now with the Apple battery we can see that it’s rated at 7.62 volts and 1460 milliamp hours or 1.46-amp hours. Plugging those numbers in we get 11.13-watt hours, which is the actual battery capacity.
The Anker battery is rated at 3.7 volts, 5000 milliamp hours or 5-amp hours. Multiplying those two numbers, we get 18.5-watt hours; so, the Anker battery definitely has a larger battery capacity than the Apple one by about 66 percent. That was a lot of information but I hope you learned something new.
And now, the part that took me many hours of testing; which is figuring out how much percentage actually went into my iPhone 12. This really did take a long time to test, here is the formula we’ll be using: the iPhone 12’s battery capacity is 10.78-watt hours so with the Anker battery pack i was able to get 95% back into my iPhone 12. With the
battery pack I was able to get 63% back into my iPhone 12. Finishing out the equation we can see that the Apple battery pack is 61% efficient and the Anker battery pack is 55.4% efficient.
Honestly, I was a little bit disappointed by Apple’s max 8 battery pack. I thought the efficiency number would be much higher and that it would have charged my phone up more. Anyway, with everything calculated out, here is the amount of percentage that you can expect to charge into all iPhone 12 models, from each battery pack.
As you can see the Anker battery pack clearly takes the cake here. So, I guess the important questions to ask here are should I get one? and if so, which one should I get? I should go without saying but you should probably only be considering any of these only if you have a phone with MagSafe so currently that is the iPhone 12 line.
These batteries are awesome if you don’t mind the extra weight on your phone when charging and want a more sleek and portable solution, rather than carrying a separate battery with a cable.
Also, like I mentioned before, these batteries charge at an advertised rate of 5 watts – now yes, that is painfully slow but, in my opinion the products are to just keep the battery on the back of your phone keeping the phone percentage at a nice healthy level instead of charging your phone when it’s about to die.
And to answer the final question of which one is better – well, the hard facts are that the Anker is half the price and holds double the amount of juice. You’ll definitely be getting more value out of the Anker battery however, if you do like the design, the material, and the tight software integration that Apple’s put into their product, it could also be a good option for you.
Here’s the thing: both devices will probably get you through an entire day, which is what they were designed to do so, you really can’t go wrong with either of these. So yeah, I’ll leave that one up to you to decide, maybe let me know in the comments what you think and as always, I’ll have links to both products in this review.
