Apple is now offering a MagSafe battery pack for iPhone 12. The battery pack can charge your iPhone 12 wirelessly via its built-in MagSafe charging coil. It also sticks to the back of your iPhone because it’s magnetic. This makes power banks a little more convenient as you don’t have to plug them in via USB and have them dangling from your phone. It can supply 5 Watts to charge your phone if done wirelessly. However, that isn’t much. Corded fast chargers typically provide more than 15 Watts. This MagSafe charger can provide 15 Watts if you plug it in via a Lightning cable.
Nonetheless, wireless chargers in general are often slower than corded ones, so this isn’t a MagSafe-specific issue. Nonetheless, the fact that it just sticks to the back of your phone without dragging it down by a cord means that charge time isn’t as much of an issue. You can just keep using the phone while it charges. The $99 MagSafe charger is in no shape or form cheap, and will hopefully become cheaper due to economies of scale (or competition).
This kind of battery pack is useful for people with smaller phones such as the iPhone 12 Mini. Future versions of the iPhone SE — which has a relatively short battery life compared to larger models could benefit from it too (provided they are equipped with MagSafe, and they probably will be). When devices get older, resulting in shorter battery life — this power bank will come in handy. This new product is another example of why it’s smart to build products with the future in mind. The introduction of MagSafe facilitated this convenient stick-on battery pack design.
