Apple MagSafe Battery Pack
apple.com
apple.com
- 15W charging when plugged into the battery (effectively serving as a MagSafe charger), but 5W when not (effectively the same as a normal 3rd-party battery)
- It may only charge to 90% (with the workaround being to put the iPhone into Low Power mode?)
- If plugged into the phone, it can charge the battery (is this the first use of "reverse charging" for the iPhone?)
It also requires iOS 14.7 which isn't out yet; the RC was released today so will likely be out next week.
It's not, the Pencil does it, too.
Various other accessories are also bus-powered.
But seriously, someone fucked up with the circuit design here.
When the battery pack is plugged into an outlet, it will function more or less as a standard 15W wireless charger. When unplugged from the wall and drawing from it's own energy, it will only provide 5W of power.
Now that's cool. It's certainly the first wireless reverse-charging that I've heard of.
I genuinely don't know - the only magnetic charging I have on my 1st gen SE is through a dinky little adapter that plugs into the Lightning port, and since those adapters also come in USB-C and mini-B I can't imagine Apple ever getting close to the kind of interoperability they provide. I'm sure I'll have an iPhone that can do inductive charging at some point, but God alone knows why I'd ever bother using it.
There are some sensible justifications to those metrics for battery health and charge efficiency. Stopping charging at 90%, limiting battery-based wireless power transfer to 5W instead of 15W, limiting charge levels when the devices get warm, charge management software to protect battery health when plugged in for long periods of time, charging more slowly when you don't need a fast charge, and charging the iPhone before the battery pack are all features with good technical reasons for doing them instead of technical limitations.
The naive approach of always providing 4.2V at as much current as the cell can take is bad for batteries. Apple has the required vertical integration and ecosystem controls to do some of these things that may be confusing.
I'm not disagreeing that it's not an order of magnitude more expensive than a comparable USB battery pack with larger specs.
More on-point with what I think you meant, cellphone fast chargers are usually putting 1C into cells below 75% when thermal conditions are met, which many consider to be stressful to li-ion chemistry. I do think this is ignoring that 1. Better charge standards like VOOC have higher efficiency and so lower thermal load, and 2. cell chemistries have improved iteratively to reduce internal resistance, again reducing heat.
Where manufacturers differ is how they deliver and convert that voltage inside the phone/device. Some of the designs (qualcomm quickcharge) dump a lot of heat stepping down a higher voltage while the earlier mentioned VOOC tries to match everything inside to meet a desired rate of charge.
Temperature is the big enemy followed by dwell time in the saturation zone. (over 80% state of charge, getting worse over 90%).
I think they are stretching to include that as a feature bullet point.
Overall, I actually like the product quite a bit. Not sure how justifiable the price is when The competition sells a very similar product for less than half the price, but it is nicely designed and would be a convenient piece item to have in a bag.
Presumably because of the power draw on the battery, which doesn’t matter if it’s plugged in.
Charging the battery pack and also the device connected via MagSafe simultaneously is stated to require a USB-C power supply greater than 20W.
If so, I want to wirelessly charge the iPhone while the iPhone charges the battery pack!
Someone will beat me to it and make a YouTube video about perpetual motion/charging
For comparison's sake, here's the Anker 5,000 mAH magsafe battery pack for just $45. However, it doesn't appear to charge above 5W even if plugged in. I bought one during Prime Day but haven't had much need to use it. It definitely looks beefier than the Apple version.
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Magnetic-Wireless-Portable-Powe...
OTOH, at least it comes with a USB-C cable!
edit: the Anker pack has a standard USB-C port, which you can charge directly from far more efficiently. The Apple charger appears to charge via lightning port...I'm assuming there's no way to directly wire charge your phone from it, nor power any other non-magsafe device
Wired in series, mAh won't change, wired in parallel, it's additive.
The charging cable is usually called a "balance plug", because it distributes power equally to all cells instead of shoving it all through all of them in series.
It is all too late now. Sigh.
5000mAh compact is around $20, 10,000mAh $40 for good devices.
Closest I can find is probably the Anker Qi magnetic brick: https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Magnetic-Wireless-Portable-Powe...
5000mAh, only 5W Qi charging, and $45.
Again, not defending the Apple tax here, but it's not as far fetched as it sounds.
But yeah, OK, you can attach it with magnets to the back, that's worth double the cost. Oh wait, make that triple, since you need the case.
I better stop now, shitting on Apple was a favorite pasttime of mine.
I mean, as someone looking to manufacture and sell a premium product, I'm pretty happy with it, people will pay anything for imaginary benefits.
Also, the Anker device does have magnets. Looks like they operate just like the magsafe.
So wired charging is boring and magnetically attached is exciting?
You know, this is not like AirPods, which are completely disconnected from the phone. It's a lump attached on your phone that you may also unintentionally disconnect and drop on the floor while taking videos of something.
I'm way more "excited" by the cable, especially given the price (you can find pretty good 5000 mAh bricks for as little as $12).
Are amp hours in some way better due to the varying voltage across the charge profile of a draining battery perhaps?
One problem here is that what looks like a battery on the outside is often a system under the hood, so the output voltage is not necessarily the voltage at which the battery operates due to for instance DC-DC convertors and other electronics embedded in the battery housing.
Because what I want to know about a battery is exactly how many hours I can use it at a given wattage. The voltage is determined by application, and the only amp-related stat I'm interested in is maximum current, which is more useful to me in watts anyway.
So a 50 Wh battery which I'm going to draw at 10 watts? five hours of use time. 20 watts? 2.5, and I can do this in my head all day. Joules are less convenient because going from seconds to hours is too annoying to do as mental maths.
So it’s actually probably the worst way to compare battery capacity.
Sites have said it's 11.13Wh (~comparable to a iPhone 12), but then even at that, how efficient is the Qi charger itself? How much of that capacity do you actually get?
[1] https://debugger.medium.com/wireless-charging-is-a-disaster-...
Apple neither states the dimensions nor provides a picture with a 90° side view, so I’m wondering how slim it really is.
That Anker power pack is 16mm/0.63 inches thick. The iPhone 12 is 7.4mm/0.29 inches thick.
Looking at how Apple design it’s products, I would be surprised if Apple made this thicker than the iPhone and that phone is less than half the thickness of the Anker power pack.
Saying it is slimmer than the Anker seems like a reasonable assumption.
When the Xbox 360 came out, it was substantially smaller than the original Xbox. But, most of the space savings came from moving a huge chunk of the power supply unit into the power cable! So now you had a massive cable and a smaller device, so it was really just for show. The overall system itself was still the same damn size!
Another consequence of thinner phones is less protection. Drop your phone once, and the chances you shatter the screen are high. There's an entire protection economy around phones-- everything from insurance to cases to glass screen protectors. All of these expenses and "opportunities" could be circumvented if they just made a fat, ugly, functional phone.
Although I don't think bigger inherently means more durable/more protection. Bigger means when dropped, whatever part of the chassis hits the ground first has a lot more energy to absorb.
I think you miss the point of maximizing the customization of the phone. Because phones have to be in a single unit, user customization can only be done through external peripherals (vs. desktop PC where individual components can be customized).
To make the external peripherals as non-invasive as possible, the phone should be as small as possible while still being usable for most use cases. For example, if battery is your priority, get a case that has a built in external battery; many exist. Then you can have your extended battery, while a user who doesn't care about it, can have a smaller phone.
I just think the companies are delivering the equivalent of a baby with no skin and a tiny stomach. It's a precious thing you want to hold every day, but it doesn't come with even basic outer protections from damage, and it can't stomach enough food to produce the energy it needs to live throughout the day. BUT, Johnson and Johnson (inventor of babies) will be glad to sell you a silicone baby skin or the waterproof baby case. And there's Ultra-Tum®-- a stomach addon with normal baby-stomach capacity to keep your little tyke chugging along all day! Like, bitch, just make a damn baby with skin and a normally sized stomach!
Obviously the above is hyperbole (and I'm trying to do my best Keaton Patti impression), but I really think the designers are in a special position where they're the best-suited party to just make a damn phone with a case built in and a high-capacity battery, even at the cost of sleekness.
But anyone with a purse can just stick this battery in their purse and make sure their phone lands next to it when they put it away, gaining the benefits of the extra battery with none of the drawbacks of having to hold the extra weight most of the time. I would expect it's not quite thin enough for men's jeans pockets to tolerate this use case (and so this will be completely overlooked by all reviews and press), but this is definitely an object that looks designed for purses rather than pockets.
When I accidentally broke my original iPhone SE, I switched to an X and ended up having to use it caseless just to make it easier to use with one hand.
Hated the size of the X enough I bought an iPhone Mini the first day it came out, my first brand new iPhone purchase since 2013.
I have no interest in adding even a mm of size to my phone. The battery lasts all day and it can fast charge anyways.
Such a shame. Original SE size was near perfect.
How does thinness decrease screen protection? On the contrary a reduction in thickness also usually involves a reduction in weight, which decreases the impact force from a drop.
Personally, I'm fine with protection through external, replaceable accessories. No matter how sturdy, scratches on the screen are inevitable. With a glass screen protector, you can throw your $500+ device around carelessly, and replace the $15 protection after a few years or if it breaks.
Replaceable battery.
Anyway, this argument has been made plenty of times. Apple prefers to sell you a new phone and an external battery.
There are 4 messages about being able to buy this on credit/monthly payments.
Veblen goods don't target the wealthy, but they need to appear to.
I feel like this has mixed messaging, or maybe this is a necessity to make the sale.
2. The iPhone 12 mini is $699
3. Half of the US is not “rich”. But somehow they manage to have iPhones.
To me that still seems like a lot of money.
He's always packing the latest iPhone Pro.
If iPhones are a status symbol, I'm not sure to whom.
So iPhones are a status symbol for people like your friend, who are making more money than the average citizen, if that clears it up for you.
iPhones are not simply Veblen goods like Hermes handbags (although there might be that element to them), they are also in many ways the best smartphone you can buy, for lots of different reasons. I buy all of my clothes at Costco and I have an iPhone. It is a mainstream product targeting mainstream Americans, many of whom consume on credit.
For the ultra wealthy, their lives are completely dependent on loans and debt.
The more straightforward explanation is that Apple just wants to make it easy to buy on credit.
I disagree that Apple products are Veblen goods in the same way that, say, Prada products are.
Both of you are arguing on which side of an ideal abstraction (Veblen goods) Apple is. Seems silly to me.
Apple products ARE status symbols in many countries, that's what most of the Chinese market is for Apple presently.
They're also playing as utilitarian tech products with mass appeal. Apple has always had this hybrid strategy, it's not one OR the other.
A quick look at their profit margins vs. the competition will show that they're marking up their products significantly above the competition. And I mean in profit margin specifically, so that we don't have this argument about whether they have more expensive software and hardware in principle (they do, but most of it is profit margin).
And also sorry but this is a $15 battery sold for $99, even as an Apple user they're losing me here. Some of their accessories are literally for people who want to spend money on Apple shit.
Yet the prices almost double.
The wikipedia page for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good is interesting. It talks about wastefulness, but then excludes "ethical goods" from consideration as being wasteful. Apparently we are never allowed to ask whether a cottage farm in Portland is wasteful compared to an efficient mechanized farm. Only intent matters.
Whether you buy into the marketing or not, the pitch is this: the latest iPhone is the best phone in the world, and if you can make the monthly payment, you can have it. It's like Warhol's observation about Coke: you can't pay more for a better iPhone, even if you're a prince or a celebrity.
You can pay extra for exactly two things: storage, which is invisible, or a red one.
Apple does make a few products which appear to exist to anchor the "luxury" part of this branding, such as a $999 monitor stand, or the AirPods Max, Hermes-branded Apple Watches and so on.
But their bread and butter is affordable luxury.
I'm guessing it's also a US-specific thing. The MagSafe battery pack listings for non-US stores don't have this:
UK: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MJWY3ZM/A/magsafe-batt...
Singapore: https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/MJWY3ZA/A/magsafe-batt...
As a pandemic hobby, I've gotten into building batteries to power light vehicles, and it's an interesting problem to try to fit the maximum capacity you can into as small a package as possible. Efficiency is a huge concern here, as the more energy you lose to, for instance, a voltage conversion, the bigger your battery has to be to meet the required use-case.
So this kind of wireless charging is neat, but if there's a significant efficiency difference to just plugging in a power bank, it would be hard to feel like it's worth it.
This might be cool for something like a camera, where hot-swapping batteries faster has a major benefit to the use-case.
The thing is, most trolling motors for a boat this size run on 12V, because lead-acid batteries are the standard for marine batteries. The energy density of lead-acid batteries is terrible, so you need a pretty big battery for a little tiny boat which doesn't make a lot of sense. You can do a little bit better with a lithium-iron-phosphate battery, but since these are the "new" tech in marine batteries, you pay a really big premium for these which is absurd when you look at the price of the cells themself. So you are paying like 3-5x the price of materials just to get it in a waterproof case.
Also LiFePO4 batteries have a pretty poor energy density when compared to lithion-ion batteries, which are the current standard bearer. The problem with li-ion batteries is that there's not a great way to get them to 12V. Depending on the configuration, you can get a voltage nominal of 10.8V, or 14.4V, both of which put you a little outside the range of what's optimal to power most 12V motors when you're close to min or max voltage. Also there's some advantages to building a 24V battery instead of 12V. Also you have to be really careful about waterproofing, since li-ion batteries are extremely volatile.
So those problems are solvable, and I managed to make a battery which is about the size of a box of tissues, and can power my boat for up to a couple of hours, depending on how many people I bring with me. It's pretty fun to do, and I have all the stuff now, so I'm thinking about doing an e-bike or electric scooter next.
Also I'm thinking about trying to drive the boat with a brushless aquatic thruster, since the trolling motor itself is not that efficient by current standards. But there's a lot of fabrication involved there which I would still have to teach myself.
Regarding the motor, I'd suggest to look at enthusiast RC hardware, which tends to be efficient by necessity: great power density at these sizes is a question of cooling, which is easier if the components are highly-efficient.
And I have been looking at RC motors! The main challenge there would be figuring out how to mount it - those are the skills I think I need to level up a little bit.
It's surprisingly comfortable to carry a lot of weight if you're just heavier than normal.
if it were low power electronics you were powering, I would suggest taking the battery to 14.4v and using some diodes to drop the voltage down a little bit. There would be some power dissipation in the diodes and that would increase with current, so it's probably not a great solution.
It might not be that bad to run the motor out of spec a bit. It sounds like you have a good solution. Did you consider putting the lead acid battery in a towable floatation device of some sort?
In comparison to generic, consumer LiCo, they are better, much better.
Best I can get are 32700 LiFePO4 6000mAh cells for 5 Euros each... A prebuilt Li-Ion Chinese pack with an extra 2Ah is just 30 Euros more than the cells I would need alone (housing+BMS cost not included). Just sad.
Used cells are also an option, and there's some really good ones out there.
Anyway Li-ion and LiFePO4 cells are going to seem cheap once solid-state cells hit the market.
Hence, LiFePO4, heavier, lower voltage, less capacity, but also safer tbh.
Not efficient
You are confusing Apple users with the whole population. USB-C is ubiquitous and I have seen many new and not so new edvices implementing it, yet I have to lay my hands on a Lightning device, let alone having a Lightning - enabled personal computer.
The keep rolling out new devices like this with Lightning. If they were going to start a transition, this or the AirPods would have been the logical place to begin.
Beats have some exceptions for microUSB instead of Lightning.
The iPad is handheld and Lightning. The iPad Pro is not and is USB-C. Yes, you can handhold an iPad Pro, but it’s not designed/targeted for that use case, as the USB-C port indicates.
This battery pack is Lightning because it’s a handheld device and it’s an accessory exclusively for handheld devices. While that may be a disappointment, at least the evidence to date is clear that there’s no point holding out for otherwise: they have never released a handheld USB-C device and are unlikely to here either.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this comes up every time Apple releases a Lightning accessory and people continue not to realize this strategy is in play. I don’t know if it’s a good strategy or not, but duly noted all the same.
(ps. Apple Watch is not a handheld device, and so of course it’s doesn’t have a Lightning port :)
I like how it also works as a MagSafe charging pad, but it's a shame that they didn't use a single bidirectional USB-C port, and have a way to allow other devices to be charged from that port.
I'd much rather have this than a battery case, as this is much more convenient to just slap on and slap off, rather than removing/applying a full phone case. More storage efficient too.
I have a magsafe car mount, and I'm pretty sure I could get in a car accident without it moving, but with a fairly simple twist I can pull it right off.
I'm an iPhone/Mac user, but this thing costs $99 and they didn't even bother to write out the damn capacity on the page (reportedly less than 4000 mAh).
I like Apple, but their accessories are truly reserved for people with either too much money, or too little intelligence.
Kinda hilarious.
I like how it comes in a bunch of colors
This is more confusing than it needs to be. At least there is reverse charging so I don't have to choose between charging and CarPlay.
I think 5W is a deliberate design choice, though, for exactly the reason you mention: heat. You can slap the battery on and stick it back in your jeans without roasting your thigh, and the point is to keep your phone working, not to make the battery meter go back to green ASAP.
You can also charge both if you attach your MagSafe Battery Pack
to your iPhone, then plug your iPhone into a power source. You
might want to charge this way if you need to connect your iPhone
to another device while charging, like if you're using wired
CarPlay or transferring photos to a Mac.
[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cobattery/cobattery-nev...
[1] I picked up a cheap used one - they're rather expensive at full price (£129). It can charge my iPhone from 10% to 60% though, so it's current capacity roughly matches its design capacity.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-PowerCore-Essential-External-...
EDIT: Apparently just under 1500mah, so likely half a day for the mini, and a few hours for the max? I'd be curious too.
I lost my non-wireless one so just bought a new 10,000 Anker one with wireless charging.
I was expecting that to keep my phone going for a few days easily but it was dead after 1 and a half wireless charges.
Is this just the inefficiency of wireless or am I doing something wrong?
Is this what MagSafe is trying to make better? Better alignment = less wasted energy?
Battery voltage to charging voltage is a step.
Charging method (wireless) adds a step.
Input voltage to battery voltage is a step.
Plus you have the extra circuitry of Wireless to power.
Nothing runs straight off 5v of USB or 3.7v (nominal) of LiPo. There's little converters for everything, every step of the way.
This is why you'll never see a 3.7-4.2v battery pack delivering 1:1 charge to a smartphone over 5v USB. I did the math a long time ago and the capacity conversion is around 74% to 84%. So if you have a 10,000 mAh battery, expect it to charge about ~8000mAh worth of your phone.
For wireless, it's even worse.
I should get at about 2.16 charges then (based on 8000) got only 1.5 which seems pretty dire! I’ll take a cable next time!
The other thing I found was I couldn’t use the phone while changing. That seems to be a weird oversight for wireless/MagSafe charging in general.
How thick is it? And how heavy?
2021 still not usb-c...greed has no limit
You can make an argument that Apple should switch their phones to USB-C but they seem to be heading toward a cable-less solution instead. If they were to change to USB-C tons of people would scream that Apple were doing this just to sell new cables. That is exactly what happened when they switched from the 30-pin connector to lightning. I would like to see them switch on the Pro model phones, at least. That market is likely more ready to switch.