The iPhone Air has a super thin frame, 5.6mm to be exact, and manages to fit a 3,149mAh battery in there. But for power hungry users, the battery barely lasts a day. Enter Apple’s $99 MagSafe battery pack, a magnetic companion that claims to add 65% more battery life, extending video playback to 44 hours. It’s 0.3 inches thicker than the phone, so what’s inside?
Opening the MagSafe battery pack is not for the faint of heart. The plastic shell is sealed with adhesive and requires heat and muscle to open. A heavy-duty suction cup and an opening pick are the tools of choice for carefully prying apart the seams without shattering the case. After some effort the shell cracks and you see a steel cased battery inside. Two familiar tabs point to a clever trick: electrically releasing glue, a feature borrowed from the iPhone Air.
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To make the device safe to probe, first disconnect the battery. iFixit uses their FixHub portable power station and a VoltClip to apply 12V to the adhesive tabs. The electric charge causes a chemical reaction that dissolves the adhesive in minutes. With a pleasant pop the battery lifts free; no crowbar required. This 12.26Wh battery, 2.7mm thick, is the pack’s heart. It has a weird design with curved edges and a protrusion at the bottom, it’s not your typical battery. In fact it’s a dead ringer for the one found inside the iPhone Air, showing off Apple’s part reuse genius that keeps their production line lean.
So why only 65% more power when the battery pack matches the iPhone Air’s battery specs? The answer is in the inefficiencies of wireless charging. Energy transfer between batteries isn’t perfect and MagSafe’s magnetic magic loses even more. That 12.26Wh cell, like the phone’s, loses some charge in transit so the 65% increase is due to that. It’s a trade off for convenience but it makes sense given the physics. The pack is 0.3 inches thick, three times the thickness of the battery alone, due to the plastic casing’s need for durability. Unlike the iPhone Air’s titanium armor this plastic casing has to be strong enough to protect the valuable cargo.
Repairability suffers from the glued shut design which makes swapping out a worn battery hard for the average user. iFixit points out the difficulty of cracking the cover without specialized tools and reminds us that Apple’s beautiful designs sometimes prioritize form over fixability. But the same battery architecture has a silver lining – replacement parts should be easy to find since they are the same as the iPhone Air’s. It’s a rare win for repair enthusiasts even if it takes some finagling and a few volts.
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