Sorry iPhone 12 owners, Apple’s MagSafe Duo Charger isn’t as powerful as you’d hope

One of the most exciting early uses for MagSafe – Apple’s magnetic accessory system – looked to be the MagSafe Duo Charger – a wireless charger that could juice up two devices at once, so you can use it with your iPhone 12 along with an Apple Watch 6 or other device. However, not only is this very expensive, but it’s also now been revealed that it’s rather slow.

As spotted by Mark Gurman (a tech journalist at Bloomberg) Apple has updated its store page for the MagSafe Duo Charger, revealing that when paired with a 20W USB-C power adapter (which is sold separately) it will charge at 11W, and that it will top out at just 14W when paired with a 27W or above USB-C power adapter – which of course is also sold separately.

The standard MagSafe Charger on the other hand (which only charges one device at a time) is faster at 15W, and only requires a 20W power adapter for that.

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A high price for slow speeds

The difference isn’t huge, but the price is. While the basic MagSafe Charger costs just $39/£39/AU$65, the MagSafe Duo Charger costs $129/£129/AU$199.

On top of that either of them would then need at least a 20W USB-C power adapter, which Apple charges $19/£19/AU$29 for, but to get speeds that approach the standard MagSafe Charger’s from the Duo Charger the only adapter Apple offers is a 30W one for $49/£49/AU$69.

So all in you’re looking at an outlay of $178/£178/AU$268 for 14W speeds from the MagSafe Duo Charger, compared to just $58/£58/AU$94 for 15W speeds from the standard MagSafe Charger – and even that’s not overly fast.

At the time of writing it’s still not clear when you’ll actually be able to buy the MagSafe Duo Charger – the store page just says it’s ‘coming soon’, but on the basis of all this you might not want to buy it.