How Fast is Fast Charging on the New iPhones?

You’ve probably seen the whole debacle about the new iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X support a form of fast charging but Apple doesn’t include the compatible fast charger with the phones and apparently, if you were to buy one that is compatible from Apple, it’d run you about $75 plus tax.

The reason for this price is that you need to buy a specific USB-C to lighting cable for $25 ($35 if you want a longer one) and at least the 29W charger, normally meant for a MacBook to be able to deliver the power you need.

So it got me wondering, how much faster is this fast charging? Is it even worth it? Time for an experiment, I think.

I let the same phone die entirely twice and one time charged it with the included charger and one time with the fast charger and checked the battery level every 15 mins.

As with any fast charging tech, thanks to the way batteries and fast chargers work, the initial battery gain in the first 15 mins is the fastest and it gets slower as it gets closer to full.

So as you can see within the first 15 mins the fast charger is about 3x as fast as the regular one getting 27% instead of 9% in the first 15 mins.

At the 30 min mark, we have 48% on the fast charger vs 18% on the regular–giving Apple’s claims of 50% power in 30 mins some credibility actually.

By an hour, we’re at 68% vs 36%, meaning that the fast charger is about twice as fast at this point.

And here’s where we really start to see the diminishing returns for the fast charging tech as it takes another hour from that about to get to full for a total charging time from 0-100 of about 1 hour and 55 mins.

And it takes the normal charger another hour and 20 mins or so to get to full after that, reaching full charge at 3 hours and 17 mins.

So there you go, 3x as fast up in the first 15 mins and still a little over twice as fast by the hour mark.

Now if that’s worth $75, that’s up to you. But, if it was cheaper than that… Got a bunch of other chargers that supposedly work with the same fast charging standard and going to run the test with them vs the Apple fast charger and see how they compare and let you guys know the cheapest one that can keep up.

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