The best chargers for your new iPhone

Wired charging with Apple chargers

Let's start with our wired charging experiments with Apple's OEM adapters. Luckily, we managed to find all of them for this article - the small 5W adapter, the iPad's 10W and 12W chargers, the iPhone's 18W and 20W plugs, and the MacBook's 29W power adapter. These are probably the most expensive solutions you can buy, but, you know, getting an Apple charger sounds the right thing to do - at least on paper. But which one? So, let's check them out.

For our test setup, we've used the same phone - an iPhone 12 Pro, completely discharged and properly cooled before plugging it in. The room temperature was 23C.

We observed the slowest charging times with a 5W adapter. Apple sells its own 5W charger for $19/€25/£19 apiece, and that's simply outrageous. But perhaps you have one already from an older iPhone, and you are wondering whether it would be any good for charging your shiny new iPhone. Well, yes... and no.

Slower chargers sound just what the doctor ordered if you care about battery longevity or if you usually charge your phone overnight. However, the caveat here is that the charger must have a cable of its own because the new iPhones ship with a Lightning cable that ends in a USB-C port, enabling the highest charging speeds, but you can't plug that in one of those older chargers.

If you have a 5W Apple power adapter complete with a Lightning cable, you can use them to recharge 19% of the iPhone 12 Pro's depleted battery in 30 mins. An hour of charging gets you 38%, while a full charge requires almost 3 hours.

5W Apple power adapter

Surprisingly, the 5W Apple adapter, in fact, outputs 7.5W (5V, 1.5A) when you connect an iPhone - at least for the first 30 minutes, and then it slowly tapers off to 5W. The charger gets hot at the beginning, and that's the reason - this small thingy outputs more power than it is rated at as long as it's an iPhone that's connected to it.

If you have Apple's 10W power adapter from an old iPad, you can do even better. It will recharge 32% of your battery in 30 minutes, 61% in an hour, while a full charge takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes.

This 10W adapter charges at its nominal power output of 10W and after 30 minutes drops to 9W.

12W (left) and 10W (right) Apple power adapter originally made for iPads

Apple's 12W iPad charger is even better - it refills 43% of the battery in half an hour, 79% in an hour, and a full charge takes 1 hour and 40 minutes.

In comparison, even the fastest charger possible will still give you 50% or so by the 30 minutes mark and 80% by the 60 min one. The slow charging begins shortly after passing 80%, and trickle charging begins at 95%.

The 12W adapter's charge is actually 12.48W (5.2V - 2.4A), and it posted some pretty good numbers! It always outputs its maximum, and its results are not that far off the fastest charging possible.

With the release of the iPhone 12, Apple discontinued the 18W adapter, but it can still be found online, and you may also have it if you own an iPhone 11 Pro or 11 Pro Max.

18W and 20W Apple power adapters have USB-C ports and look identical

This 18W charger replenishes 57% in 30 minutes, 87% in 50 minutes, while a full charge is achieved in 1 hour and 45 minutes. This charger outputs 18W at first and drops to 5W upon reaching 80%.

Apple's most current 20W charger recharges 62% in 30 minutes, 90% in 60 minutes, and 100% in 1 hour and 22 minutes. It outputs 20W at first and goes to 5W shortly after reaching 80%.

29W Apple power adapters was the first adapter to offer fast charging

Finally, Apple's MacBook 29W power adapter refills 59% in 30 minutes, 83% in 60 minutes, and 100% in 1 hour and 21 minutes.

The even faster 29W MacBook charger was the only fast charger we got for the Xs and Xs Max family. This was before Apple released the 18W adapter we just talked about.

The 29W adapter is rated at 14.9V - 2A, 5.2 - 2.4A, and it charges at about 17W for 20 minutes, 14W for another 30 minutes, and then goes down to 5W or so. It always uses 14.9V at 1.2A or lower when charging fast. It doesn't support 9V or 12V - it only supports 14.9V and 5V. It cannot achieve more than 17W despite the higher rating of the adapter itself.

Charging at 14.9V makes the phone hot. We don't recommend using this brick every day as charging at high voltage generates extra heat which in the long run might shorten the lifespan of your battery faster than any of the other chargers tested.

Full charge to 100%

Let's talk about time to full charge now. The iPhone 12 Pro charges fast until it reaches about 80%, and then it drops to 5W or lower. That's why the last 20% usually take the same amount of time to complete regardless of the charger used - and that's usually about 40 to 50 minutes.

So, all chargers rated 12W or more recharge the iPhone 12 Pro in about one and a half hours. The 10W and 5W power adapters require longer than that.

Time to full charge (from 0%)

• Apple 29W
  1:21h
• Apple 20W
  1:22h
• Apple 12W
  1:40h
• Apple 18W
  1:42h
• Apple 10W
  1:51h
• Apple 5W
  2:52h

Conclusion: The best genuine Apple charger for your iPhone is probably the new 20W adapter. If you have the 12W one from an old iPad (with a cable to go with it), it will do a splendid job, and you don't have to buy a new one. An 18W charger would perform as well as the 20W one, but this is a discontinued model so watch out for fakes. Now let's check out some third-party alternatives on the next page.