Apple’s MagSafe Battery is Trash

apple makes some frustrating decisions sometimes but those decisions while confusing to us initially are typically pretty calculated when apple removed the headphone jack from the iphone their reasoning it just wasn't sound get it yeah they provided only one outrageous justification courage of course minutes later when they announced the solution to the problem that they had just created airpods everything started to become more clear and airpods well they're great even if the way they made us buy these stupid things was so off-putting so when rumors started circulating in 2018 that apple would be removing the lightning connector entirely in favor of no not usb-c but of the qi wireless standard brought to the iphone 8. i thought no this can't be i mean look chi is a great supplemental charging method but it can't really be the end-all be-all practice you can't charge while using your phone really or while throwing it in your bag and it's quite a bit slower than cable charging oh and not to mention inefficient expending a lot of energy as heat but the rumors of a portless iphone continued to come and it wasn't until the announcement of the iphone 12 that it really even seemed possible but then magsafe was pitched by apple at last year's september keynote and well i i was on board in fact in my recap of the event i was fairly bullish that magsafe could actually replace lightning but then magsafe actually came out and my skepticism well it returned make no mistake i like apple's magsafe charger and it has been my primary method of juicing up since i got my phone but the ecosystem of magsafe accessories we were promised have hardly been a game changer including apple's own remember that 60 wallet that apple sells that barely stays attached to your phone yeah so when the 99 maxsafe battery pack was released i thought it might end up a little bit disappointing but i've had one well actually three one for my wife one for me that was broken and didn't charge my phone and thus one replacement i've had those for a few weeks now and i have to apologize apple it's not a little bit disappointing it's one of the most under baked products i think you've shipped in years [Music] let's start off with form factor and general construction quality this thing is solid and well built with a plastic exterior that feels nice a semi-slippery rubber mating surface a status led and a lightning port for charging now the status led it is a friggin mess it displays itself as a solid amber color when charging an iphone being charged by an iphone being charged via the lightning port and attempting but failing to charge itself via a wireless qi charger there's literally only one color amber to denote any status at all until it's magically done charging and then it turns green it seems that even apple doesn't really know what this led is supposed to do their documentation states while your magsafe battery is charging the status light might flash if it flashes green your battery pack is fully charged if it flashes amber your battery pack might need more time to charge it might flash might based on what the led is worthless when charging the battery itself but only when plugged in via lightning without a phone attached it flashes amber when charging my air pods which it can do it's just a chi battery after all it didn't flash at all despite actively charging the buds conversely the battery remains solid amber when i tried to charge it via a qi charger never mind the fact that it actually wasn't charging at all and that brings me to my next point the whole pitch of magsafe was that users could charge wirelessly reliably and finally ditch their lightning cables once and for all except for just kidding lightning's back and now you 100 have to use it if you want to use the magsafe battery in a move that confused literally everyone the magsafe battery cannot be charged wirelessly except it can you can do this this or this but not this or this this makes no sense some people have said ah well that's easy to explain it's a uni-directional charging coil except for no it isn't because the iphone can reverse charge the battery wirelessly when your iphone is plugged into power but you can't just throw the battery on a wireless charging mat the nfc chip inside the battery that communicates to your iphone its charge state and percentage charge well it triggers the handshake as well that permits charging of the battery pack now maybe i'm missing something and the phone is i don't know handling the rate of charge to extend the life of the battery pack but could not these smarts be built into the battery itself my wife who look she's not a tech nerd but she's fairly sophisticated she's young and aware of how technology works she did this this is what i came home to now it's easy to laugh but this is a perfectly reasonable mistake i would have done this but this is not doing anything it's not charging at the end of the day look these weird design decisions they're not a huge deal except for apple doesn't provide any quick start manual qr code or ios card tutorial showing you how to use the battery which is insane they absolutely need to because even for me a tech nerd i didn't know it couldn't wirelessly charge it's unintuitive so i can only imagine how weird it is for a regular user don't pretend it just works when it just doesn't now what i would have liked is for apple to have put a magsafe puck docking location and a cheat coil on the back of the battery pack so that the whole sandwich could be charged however ignoring heat that would have certainly made the battery pack thicker and that brings me to my next point this battery is not thin in fact it's a fair bit thicker than my entire iphone 12 mini and look i get it physics they didn't make it this size just for the laws however apple has to cater to the lowest common denominator and that is the iphone 12 mini which i love but apparently nobody else friggin does the reason this battery is so beefy is because of that phone apple wants all magsafe accessories to work with all phones and i understand that having different size skus for each size of phone that's less elegant however should they have done that well the batteries could have occupied a larger surface area in exchange for either one a much higher battery capacity two a much thinner case because the cells themselves could have been flatter and wider or three both not only that but the iphone 12 mini is kinda the reason that maxsafe is um not well in my video titled the problem with iphone magsafe it's really good in sciencey you should check it out i talk about how despite apple's usage of really high quality magnets they can't out physics physics and magsafe's magnetic holding strength just isn't very good because of how shallow few and narrow the magnets are and that's largely because of the iphone 12 mini now in that video i mentioned that the reason apple's magsafe wallet sucks is because of sheer force neodymium magnets only have a 15 holding strength relative to their 100 adhesive force it's the reason sliding magnets apart is way easier than pulling them apart apple's just about using the most expensive magnets they can put inside the phone and their accessories but the surface area and z depth of magsafe literally limits how strong these magnets can be so to increase a magnet's holding strength you have to add a medium to increase the shear force something like rubber if the magsafe wallet had rubber on the back of it it wouldn't slide around as much i don't know why apple didn't do that but look that doesn't matter because we're not talking about that we're talking about the magsafe battery pack and that does have rubber however not only does the accessory material matter so does the mating medium your phone we found last year that accessories resisted force thanks to the sticky glossy glass on the iphone 12 way better than the smooth slippery satin glass on the iphone 12 pro and in a surprise to nobody with a brain apple hasn't magically out engineered physics your best mating surface for the magsafe battery is rubber on rubber with a silicon iphone case now if you bravely decide to use the battery without a case on your phone get ready for a bad time the battery pack isn't really ever super firmly seated and it frequently shifts around in your hand and in your pocket in fact if you decide to push a button on your phone without remembering to reach all the way around the thick brick to hold the other side of your phone goodbye phone now apple's using the same not super grippy rubber that they always use and accessories like these moment uh whatever these are for cameras and what have you they have a substantially grippier material that holds the iphone like a champ however this rubber attracts lint and dirt and every other particle of crap in its path that's not really apple's design mo oh and it also scratches really easily i can already see the headlines so i'm not really surprised that apple opted to go a separate route with the rubber that they selected all right now let's get to the last problem the battery itself now a lot of dumb dumps were quick to hot take how awful the 1460 milliamp hour battery was that couldn't even charge an iphone 12 mini with 2300 milliamp hours to 64 however and i cannot stress this enough amp hours is not a measure of capacity this is the formula to find the number of watt hours and that is the measurement that can actually compare apples to apples or apples to pairs now look the iphone 12 series use 3.81 volt batteries and the magsafe pack has two cells in parallel making 7.62 volts do some math here and you'll find out that the number of times the magsafe battery can charge your iphone is this except for no that's actually a lie because those numbers assume a 100 charging efficiency if your phone has ever gotten warm or hot while charging that's the result of good hard-working electricity getting lost to charging inefficiencies the system is cruel even charging by a cable in the best scenarios nowadays that is to say a high quality power supply cable device and ambient room temperature only results in about a 90 to 95 efficiency rate and wireless charging is substantially more inefficient in fact it's exponentially so i was able to on average charge my iphone 75 now this is an iphone mini which when we do the math gives us about uh a 60 charging efficiency with the magsafe battery pack now using the numbers that my friend aaron found in his excellent video i've linked below all iphone models in their ideal circumstances charge much less than one full charge with about 40 of the entire magsafe battery's capacity just getting wasted away is heat now this might sound really bad but a 60 wireless charging efficiency is actually quite good and a lot of it is thanks to how magsafe is designed the magnets perfectly align the send and receive coils newer fast wireless charging standards on the android side have significantly lower efficiency now ignoring the environment who cares about planet earth anyway this isn't really much of an issue when you're tapped into the grid because well the electricity is continual but when the power source you're carrying around is finite like a battery efficiency actually is really important unfortunately how apple achieves this impressive 60 efficiency rate is a bit uh well uh it sucks you see i hated apple's old battery cases because they were cases they were huge bulky and not really intended to be removed magsafe's pitch is ah i'm low on power let me slap this battery on really quick get the juice i need and then take it off see you later magsafe but that's not really reality the charger only puts out a maximum of 5 watts and that is again under ideal circumstances so even with the phone in standby and in a cool location charging takes quite a long time like like a couple hours and that's in again ideal circumstances in my test with the iphone 12 mini in the real world just using the phone at all made it warm enough for the battery to pretty much all but stop sending juice to the phone in fact the phone was draining faster than it was filling up to make matters worse i found that the phone's display would dim very quickly anywhere outside or in the car presumably to prevent the device from getting too toasty which made outdoor screen visibility awful this is apparently a much bigger and more frequent issue with the iphone 12 mini than it is with other models but i have heard reports of similar behavior on other devices as well additionally the battery will slow to a crawl once your iphone hits an 80 charge and it stops all together at 90 because charging efficiency decreases as your phone's battery fills up now you can force the battery to top you off inside of control center but this generates quite a bit of heat and really only uh pretty much nets you a few extra percentage points and it kills the battery really fast so i really wouldn't suggest it now look i know that the whole pitch to magsafe is how it's wireless and rotationally and different and you can just slap stuff on however magnets well they have polarity right apple was rumored to be testing a smart connector of sorts like that pogo pin implementation that they have on ipad pro on the iphone internally a few years back with a strip of magnets on each side to perfectly align a charging pug you could have had magnetic properties of magsafe while having the efficiency of a wired charger through those pogo pins because it would literally have been copper to copper contact just like on the ipad then again i'm not an engineer nor a designer so maybe that's just a stupid lousy take the magsafe battery pack is just it's not good and look that's not really apple's fault i bought the anchor and mophie magsafe chargers 2 that everyone's been recommending and frankly they're both pretty stupid as well with many of the same problems and also the sheer force is worse the phone falls right off the mophie and the anchor is really not much better however they do actually allow you to charge with your device connected via a cable which is nice and they both come in at pretty much half the price of apple's solution which makes them a way better option if you feel like you need a magsafe battery but just trust me on this one you don't i found that strapping this enormously fat brick to the back of my iphone for more than half the day in exchange for a fairly marginal increase in battery life it just wasn't worth it i get through the day pretty easily even with my iphone 12 mini because i chi charge at my desk and i charge via lightning in my car and on days where i know i'm going to be running out of battery like when i travel i'll just have my bag anyways and a basic wired usb cpd battery pack is not only way less money but it will charge my phone much faster to a much higher percentage in a diminutive fraction of the time without making my phone stupidly difficult to handle in the process sorry apple this just ain't it same to you what are these other ones called mophie and what was the last one oh yeah the anchor one sucks too ah if you didn't think this video sucks you should give a like if you did think it sucks just like the magsafe battery pack well let tim know by sending it to him your friend or anyone else that may dislike this video wouldn't that be awesome more views i'm going to stop talking thank you so much for watching stay sounding [Music] you

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 716,219

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, magsafe, magsafe battery, iphone 12, magsafe battery pack, magsafe battery vs anker magnetic, anker powercore, anker magnetic, qi battery, qi wireless charging, wireless charging battery, iphone 13, iphone 13 mini, iphone 13 pro, iphone 12 pro, best battery iphone, iphone case, iphone accessories, apple fail, review, apple review, apple 2021, apple 2022, magsafe mac, magnets, science, shear force, holding force, adhesion

Id: cVT-8mBuGok

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/wankthisway]

A lot of these problems were solved by Motorola years ago with their Moto Z products. Yeah they had contact pads instead of seamless coils but they seemed to work way better.

[u/Amaran345]

There are many people that only buy official apple accessories, so Apple will sell these very easily, even at $99. The production costs of these devices are very low, so Apple will make lots and lots of money on these

[u/Dougie-18]

What's the charging efficiency on these things? I know they do 5 watts but what's lost through heat, interference, etc.. I remember reading that qi chargers consume about 50% more power for the same charge.

[u/msdyt20]

Next year you can buy a MagSafe Battery Battery and over time you can build a Jenga tower of chargers.

Instead of slapping ugly magnetic battery packs on the back maybe it's time rediscover the esoteric magic technology of 20 years ago and have a swap-able battery where I can charge a spare...

[u/[deleted]]

Excuse for getting rid of the only physical port huh?

Well... I'm sure it has nothing to do with making sure people can't do whatever they want with their property by using the port as a means to jailbreak ( among other things you can do with it that Apple may frown upon ). Right?

[u/AnimeAlt44]

SnazzyLabs is a kind man who’s almost always willing to see things from Apple’s point of view. Him going this harsh means really this thing has no redeeming value.

[u/Zithero]

The "Magic Mouse" charging port remains the worst design Apple's ever put out.

[u/SpartanPHA]

It’s an overpriced product and it’s too thick. It hasn’t fell off for me yet, but the matte plastic and the bulk makes it feel like it may. I don’t think it’s bad, it serves its purpose well though.

For anyone, this guy and MKBHD included, who thinks the Apple wallet will fall off, they’re either doing it for clicks or idiots. That wallet is way too thin and strongly attached, even at a perpendicular angle, for pants to get it off. Absolutely idiotic take.

[u/dallatorretdu]

ahh, dang I was interested in that thing