I bought my hubby an iPhone 16 Pro Max for his birthday this month. He had been using an iPhone Xs. I’m still ok with my iPhone 13 Pro.
He loves it, but is having trouble with his old Qi charger and getting it aligned. So we thought it might be a good idea to try the latest magsafe adapter.
I’ve never used magsafe before though, except on my Mac. I have a couple of Qi chargers for my iPhone 13 Pro and they seem to work fine.
Do I understand the following correctly?
Basically magsafe is just helpful because there are magnets in the adapter and iPhone which help it align correctly.
I’m curious about:
Is there any strong magnetic strength to it, or is it basically just useful when sitting on a desk?
I understand there is a newer version that came out for the iPhone 16 Pro. What’s different about it?
Is the Apple magsafe adapter the best? If I go to Amazon, I’m overwhelmed by magsafe products. But since there was apparently an upgrade, how do I compare?
There is some strength to it. There are all kinds of accessories, including wallets, that attach to a phone via MagSafe. There are also desk- and car-stands that use MagSafe for attachment.
I’ll have to leave it up to others to answer your other two questions.
When I buy anything related to charging other than cables, I always buy Apple OEM. Why? In this case, there actually is a difference between the design, components, and construction quality of the accessories. I’d rather spend some more money up-front to get a safe and well-made product than deal with a fire or electrical shock later.
In fact, Apple has even offered trade-ins on non-Apple power adapters in the past for safety reasons.
Apple makes really high quality chargers, and random no-name chargers (typically from random no-name Chinese manufacturers) are very low quality and potentially dangerous.
But Apple is not the only company making good quality equipment. If you stick to major brands like Anker, Belkin and UGreen, you will also get a good quality product.
But I would recommend only buying Apple gear directly from Apple or from an authorized Apple retailer. There’s a ton of counterfeit Apple equipment (especially chargers) being sold and “marketplace” web stores seem incapable of keeping them out. Even when you buy something from a major reseller, you might not be safe because some (especially Amazon) are known to co-mingle stock from all sellers.
Thanks, Adam. I found the article useful… if overwhelming. You use your iPhone camera for lots of things I don’t, like the continuity camera feature. I do almost all my iPhone 13 Pro charging on my Belkin Qi charger and it has always seemed fine. I didn’t even realize it had a magsafe feature until I bought the new 16 Pro Max and saw that the 13 Pro was also in the list of supported iPhones.
I can’t really think of a use for magsafe myself. On something like a long flight I will do charging via a cable. I never noticed any heating issues. In fact, I always assumed that Qi charging was better on the battery because it’s slower. But you said the opposite in your article.
Anyway, for the new iPhone 16 Pro Max the main issue is setting it properly on the Qi charger. It’s really only for that reason that we are looking at magsafe chargers now - so you get an immediate, good charging connection. My partner’s Xs cable connector is no longer working, for some of the reasons you mentioned, so he wants to charge without a cable as much as possible.
If you’re mainly charging overnight, Magsafe is not a big deal. However, I’ve gotten used to charging on a desk where a MagSafe charger can be a nice stand with the iPhone held by a Magsafe (or Qi2) charger on the stand.
We have MagSafe mounts in all our vehicles. Been on some very rough roads and the phone has never come off. We have them on our nightstands and use them in StandBy mode. It also charges my watch and AirPods Pro. We had on that didn’t have a strong enough magnet for my wife’s thick case.
I was given a charger to use on my MacBook Pro, a third party one. The minute I put in on, my headphones started to crackle. Off, they stopped, on, back again. Eh, no thanks…
I do use Anker chargers, I find them high quality, very reliable. I’ve been curious about a Qi charger for my 16 Pro, so keen for recommendations too.
One thing I don’t get about the MagSafe is this… right now I use plain old Qi chargers for my iPhone 13 Pro. I have one on my desk and one by my bed. I just rest it on the charger and pick up the phone whenever I need it.
If it were MagSafe would it be that easy? I mean… isn’t it sticking to the charger with a magnet? Don’t you end up picking up the charger a lot that way?
I do see it’s needed for something larger like the iPhone 16 Pro Max though - so you don’t have problems aligning it.
I’ve found that some people don’t get the phone aligned properly on a Qi charger, or it gets knocked out of place. A MagSafe charger works better for them, as there’s definitive contact with the charger. MagSafe also charges at 15W or 25W, vs 7.5W for original Qi, which is useful if you want or need faster charging.
I will often mount the charger to the surface to prevent any issues with it lifting up with the phone.
If you have a lightweight puck on a charger device that moves when you pick it up and you want it to stay put, another alternative is to use something like museum putty to fix it in place.
I have also used the non-damaging Velcro type strips (for example, the 3M Command strips) to keep these lighter weight charging devices in place.
Most of the ones that have heavier bases seem really overpriced to me.
Thanks, everybody. I think that clarifies everything for me. As mentioned, I’m ok with the Qi charger by my bed and on my desk for my iPhone 13 Pro. But it does sound like for the iPhone 16 Pro Max that the MagSafe would be more convenient.
If you have a large surface Qi charger it might not work at all with the later pro-iPhone models that have high camera “islands” since it may be a too large air gap. The magnetic chargers seem to be smaller and work better. But what charger works well seems to be a bit case to case. I have one Apple MagSafe charger that works fine. One Belkin MagSafe that has stopped working for unknown reasons. One magnetic but non MagSafe charger from Hyper that works fine but charges slower. All of the wireless chargers tend to get the phones quite warm.
