Not All Phone Chargers Are The Same

Posted November 28, 2017

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Last week, I got my new iPhone X.

Along with the phone, you also get, among other things, a charger for the phone.

Well, this makes sense. For the phone to work, it has to be charged!  What they gave me, for my $1,000 was one of those little white brick chargers - the kind you plug into the wall and then connect to the phone with your USB to Apple cord.

Fair enough.  

That is how I have been charging my other iPhones (and pretty much everything else) for years.

As Elon Musk can tell you, battery life is the Achille's heel of the electronics industry. How many times have you watched as your iPhone or Smartphone hits 20%, then suddenly 10% and in a few seconds later, dead.

If the battery life is supposed to be 26 hours (which is what Apple says the iPhone 8's is), then when it says you have 10% left, is it not reasonable to assume that you have 2.6 hours left? Why then is it more like 26 seconds?  

I can't do much about battery life. I leave that to Elon Musk, (who I am sure is going to come up with something), but I can do something about how long it takes to charge the phone. This, I only just discovered in today's Wall Street Journal. 

In an article, aptly titled, "The Best iPhone Fast Chargers and Wireless Chargers," tech writer Joanna Stern explains the difference between various 'bricks' - and I thought they were all the same.

Turns out they are not.

The mini-brick that Apple gave me (for free!) with my $1,000 phone is apparently the slowest and the worst of all possible choices. My mini-brick comes in at 3 hours and 7 minutes to charge my phone.  

The 12W iPad charger, $14.95 on Amazon, peels more than an hour off recharge time, coming in at 2 hours and 12 minutes. 

The 29W USB-C charger, $47.93 on Amazon, comes in a 2 hours and 2 minutes, peeling just 10 minutes off the 12W for an additional $33.02.

Time may be money, but it is not worth that much money to save 10 minutes, IMHO.

Then there is wireless charging.

Apparently, you can also do this with your Tesla (as I don't have one, I can't say). You park the car over a charger in your garage and through the magic of God only knows what, your car is charged. (My toothbrush must work in the same way). 

In any event, you can also do this with your iPhone or smartphone, and apparently for only $90, for the 'Cadillac of chargers" (is Cadillac still a positive adjective? Maybe we should say the Mercedes of chargers? The Samsung. 

Frankly, for $90, I will stick to the plug and play.