MagSafe Battery Pack review

 

                              MagSafe Battery Pack 

 This is Apple's new iPhone battery pack or a magazine battery pack. And this is something we've been waiting for for a long time for the iPhone 12 series, it's supposed to be magnetic, have reverse wireless charging, and more, and it comes in at $99 so I wanted to show you this show you a size comparison with the different phones such as the iPhone12 mini all the way up to pro max and see what it's all about. So let's go ahead. I'm surprised how heavy it is. Let's see this aside for just a moment. See what else we have in here and just has safety and handling regulatory compliance information and warranty summary. So just usual paperwork, no apple stickers or anything like that. So we'll take a closer look at the battery pack itself. and let's see the box aside. Now the first thing is the overall design. The apple logo is slid up a little bit and not centred so that it's centred when it's attached to the back of your iPhone to replace the logo on it. And so around the outside edge, nothing really exciting. It has a plastic feel to it and on the bottom, it looks like you have a lightning port as well as a status light is what I believe is on the back. We have our little MagSafe ring with a little alignment magnet bar and nothing else. Now let's go ahead and take a look at the magnets overall. And so there are no magnets in the back of it meaning you cant charge it wirelessly, but if we flip it over, you can see the magnets in the back of it. And it's not a full circle. 

It actually has a piece of the ring open there. so you can see that. and when you adhere it to the back of a phone, that's what helps it stick.Now let's talk about its overall size. so this particular battery pack let's see if it has been written. We can see here, this is supported to be a 1,460 million power battery. So this is going to vary depending on which device you use it with and how much charge it will provide. Now, you will need ios 14.7 for this to work. And if we turn it back on, let's see what we've got here, it says iPhone can charge to approximately 90% while using a MagSafe battery pack. So that's a notification and again you'll need ios 14.7 for this to work, but I wanted to know if it would work on ios 15, beta three as well. And let's see what we've got. So, so far it's not charging at all with ios 15 beta three. So it's not charging even a little bit. Now we don't know the actual charge status yet. We didn't check that, but let's go ahead and set that aside. Now let's try the iPhone 12 pro max with ios 14.7 with the MagSafe battery pack. Now, one thing to know is I wasn't able to get this to work. It didn't seem to charge properly until I plugged the battery pack into a lightning cable for the first time. So I plugged it in the charged the battery pack, as you can see here. So it's charging the battery pack using a lightning cable. It'll fully fill that up and it should work. Not working on ios 15, beta three. So if we go back over to beta three and plug it in here, now you'll see that it's actually charging the iPhone. If we swipe over, go down to our battery management here or go to our battery manager here, you can see that it shows its charging with a  lightning cable. So it thinks it's being charged with a lightning cable on beta three. However, it will charge. But if we go back to ios 14.7, let's see we've gotten a little animation and it shows us the charge of the battery pack. And it was a little buggy until I plugged it in. It wouldn't show me some of those animations. So now it's charging, and if we swipe over to our widgets, you can see the status of the battery pack. So you need is 14.7 to see this properly, maybe they'll update it with ios 15, beta three, or beta four. So we'll have to wait and see what they do with that. Now, as far as charging the battery pack, there's a couple of different ways you can do that if you have a USB-c to lightning cable, that's over 20 watts, you can fast charge both devices at once. So if you plug them in, well go over you'll see it's actually charging at the same time. This is actually plugged into an iMac. So you'll see it's charging. And I thought we'd try out, maybe we plug them both in at the same time. See if we get any difference it doesn't really seem to affect it in any way so we could plug both in, but It doesn't really do anything. 

But now we are reverse wireless charging through the iPhone, into the battery pack itself. So it's going through the iPhone and charging, not only the phone but also the battery pack. And that's indicated with a little light here. Now a couple things to note is this cannot be MagSafe charged going through the back of the battery pack as is showed you the magnets earlier, but I thought maybe we could MagSafe charge it going directly through here. Although the magnets probably aren't going to work. So you'll see there's a light on the battery pack indicating that it's on. And if we put this on here, it won't line up properly just because of the way it sits. So you cant use a MagSafe wireless charger to charge the battery pack itself. You need to use lightning if you're using the battery pack itself. You need to use lightning if you're using the battery pack and you want to take a photo, there's a message that pops up if you try and use the flash.  So if we go into the camera and you'll see here, it says, the flash will work best with the MagSafe battery pack removed. Now why this is, hard to say, if you turn off the flash, the message goes away. And this was found, thanks to my friends, the moser kind of pointed me in the right direction. And as you can see here, the flashes at the top of the 12 pro max. So maybe this has something to do with the way it reflects light or maybe just it has to do with the heat in general.

 So what specifically is causing them to put this message on there? it's hard to say, but it is something you'll encounter. If you're using the battery pack now also to give you a size since you all have the different phones here,  the case it's about as wide as an iPhone 12 mini. so you'll see, but it's much thicker. So the thickness of it is, quite large. And then on an iPhone 12 pro or 12 again, you'll see the sort of thickness overall, and each time the apple logo is in the middle. And then again, let's line that up. There we go. and it looks kind of the strangest or most awkward on the 12 pro max. Now, one thing to know is this will not interfere with using this for NFC things such as payments or key fobs, for example. So you shouldn't have any as far as that goes. Now, keep in mind, the battery pack is smaller than other iPhones.   So what that means is the battery pack is 1460 million powers. But the iPhone 12 mini is 2227 million powers where the iPhone 12 and 12 pros are 2815 million powers. and the iPhone 12 pro max is 3687 million powers. That means you're going to get some battery life, maybe 50%, maybe up to 75%, or 50 to 75 on the mini, but everything else about half. So you will get about one and a half if you include this with it. So it's not a huge gain as far as the battery is concerned, but it's super convenient in that it reversed wireless charges. Now I did want to try with a case on and see if it will still work. So we'll put a case on the phone. We've got a MagSafe case on here. This is an apple MagSafe safe case and then we'll put the battery pack on the back of that and let's see what happens. It will still charge through the case. So it's charging through the case, you'll see it there, it's charging. And let's see if we can reverse wireless charge through the case as well. So we'll give it a moment and it does not look, oh, it does. It's reverse wireless charging with a case on. So if that was a concern, I thought we'd test that out, also, now I wanted to try the magazine battery pack with an older phone. 

So I have an iPhone 10 R that does have wireless charging. And also as ios 14.7, now It should charge. I felt it vibrate. So it is charging, but I'm not sure it will recognize it. So it doesn't recognize it. It just shows that it's charging.So it's not something that it will recognize. You could use it, if you had one sitting around it will wirelessly charge it and does seem to work. As far as that goes. Also, it will charge anything else that's wireless. So you should be able to charge your AirPods and as you can see, it will charge AirPods pro. So the light lights up, you've got a little indicator on the bottom that goes away after it starts charging. So it's just like any other wireless charging device. It will charge all of your different phones, although for the price. I'm not sure that it's worth it to everyone for just the convenience. There are some other third parties out there that work similarly, but they don't reverse wireless charge from the iPhone back into the battery pack. It will take a little while to see how long this takes to charge. So if you have any other questions I'd love to hear from you in the comments below, also, one other thing I wanted to mention is it did seem to sort of creak a little bit as I was moving it around. So as I squeezed it a little bit, when I was putting it on sort of holding the phone, it seemed to make a creaking noise. Although I can't reproduce that now it just felt like the plastic didn't maybe adhere to 100% or creaked a little bit, but I thought I'd share that with you. So that's it for the new MagSafe battery pack. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. If you have any other questions or let me know if you're picking one up or have already picked one up, or if you went with something third-party or you don't need one altogether. 

Thanks for reading.