To quickly charge your MacBook Air, you’ll need a power adapter that delivers more than 60 watts, such as Apple’s 67W USB-C power adapter. Third-party accessory manufacturers have been offering these types of products for years, so it’s nice to see Apple finally jumping on the bandwagon. If you want to charge faster, you only use one USB-C port. If you’re not in a rush, you can charge two devices in a few hours from just one outlet. That is the advantage of this product: flexibility.
When sharing with an iPhone, it only charged half as much in that first hour and took about 75 percent longer to charge on a full charge. With the whole power adapter on its own, the MacBook Air was at 60 percent in an hour and fully charged in about two hours. You can see that charging two devices has the expected dramatic impact on charging performance. When the iPhone was almost fully charged, we swapped it for another to maintain a relatively constant load on that second port. We tested this charger in two ways: with just the MacBook Air plugged in and with the MacBook Air and an iPhone 13 plugged in. Usually you’ll get an even distribution of 17.5W, but if you plug in something that needs less juice, like an Apple Watch or AirPods, it will get 7.5W, while the other port will get up to 27.5W. Second, it has two USB-C ports, so you can charge two devices at the same time from a single outlet.Īpple says charging speeds are controlled independently, so the 35W maximum is split between the two ports based on need, as agreed upon by the USB Power Delivery 3.0 specification. It doesn’t stick out that far from the wall and the gates face down, which is quite handy. First, it’s more compact than most of Apple’s other chargers. It’s not poor performance, but if you’re already spending $1,199 for a laptop, you should probably spend $20 more for one of the other two options. A full charge takes about 140 minutes, 20 minutes longer than the 35W model. You’ll get half a charge in just under an hour, about 10 minutes longer than the 35W model. It’s a little slower than the 35W adapter, as you’d expect. There’s a reason Apple gives you a regular 30W charger with the cheapest MacBook Air model, although for a starting price of $1,199 we think Apple should have given all MacBook Air buyers the same option (35W dual port or 67 W single port).
We’ll look at the results in detail below. So we charged an iPhone while charging the MacBook Air, and when that iPhone was almost fully charged, we swapped it for another to maintain a consistent load during our test. What is that fourth line in green? Since the 35W compact power adapter with dual USB-C port has two ports, we wanted to know how quickly your MacBook Air charges when both ports are in use. The 67W USB-C power adapter is clearly the fastest, as you’d expect. If you want speed, you obviously want the 67W USB-C power adapterĬharging speeds for all adapters are limited because the laptop is almost fully charged – that’s normal for almost all rechargeable batteries. This gives us a look at the overall charging performance over time for all three adapters, and the story is interesting (if not really surprising). We had no applications running and kept the lid closed while charging, opening it briefly every 10 minutes to record the current charging status before closing it again. To test the charging performance of these three power adapters, we took a brand new M2 MacBook Air and drained it to 1 percent battery life, then used the included USB-C to MagSafe cable to attach it to one of the power adapters. When you buy a more expensive model with at least 512GB of storage, you get the 35W two-port model by default, but you can switch to the 67W single-port model for free.Įach has its pros and cons, so we’ve tested them all to help you decide which one to choose. If you opt for the base model, a 30W USB-C power adapter comes standard, but you can pay an extra $20 to replace that with the standard 35W dual USB-C port or compact power adapter, or the 67W USB – C Power adapter. If you buy one, you have three power adapters to choose from depending on the model you select. It’s not a perfect laptop – we want a better webcam, it’s a fingerprint magnet and it’s expensive – but we think it’s one of the best everyday laptops for everyday users. We’re big fans of the new M2 MacBook Air.