That said, the ability to charge over USB-C is still a nice bonus, since it provides more options for charging on the go.
The MagSafe port also has the advantage of easily disconnecting without taking your MacBook Pro down with it, should somebody trip over the wire. Of course, you still get a USB-C to MagSafe 3 cable with the 14-inch MacBook Pro either way, and since the MagSafe port can’t be used for anything else anyway, it would be rather odd to use a USB-C port for normal everyday charging. Apple seems to have cut a lot of corners in this base model 14-inch MacBook Pro, and this one really feels like it’s nickel-and-diming customers. You will need that 96W adapter to fast charge the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, however, which means if you’re going for the entry-level model, you may want to spring for the extra $20 upgrade. After all, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro only comes with a 96W adapter, at most, which places it just below the 100W maximum that a USB-C port can handle. Since USB-C Power Delivery specs are mostly backward compatible, you can still use the 140W adapter with the standard USB-C ports, but you won’t be able to take advantage of fast charging on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, as its sizeable battery requires more than 100W to pull that off.įortunately, this isn’t the case with the smaller 14-inch model, which can clearly fast charge the battery with less than 100W of power.
Put simply, the Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports on the new MacBooks Pro can’t draw more than 100W. Since the Thunderbolt 4 standard pre-dates the release of the USB-C PD 3.1 spec, it’s capped out at the 100W level of the older USB-C PD 3.0. This is where MagSafe 3 becomes critical. While Apple hasn’t published the specs of its new 140W adapter, however, we suspect it’s using the lowest spec’ed voltage of 28V. The secret here is that Apple’s new adapter has actually adopted the bleeding-edge USB-C PD 3.1 standard that was announced earlier this year, which allows for more than twice the maximum voltage of the prior USB Power Delivery standards - 48V vs 20V.Ĭombined with a standard 5A current, this allows a USB-C PD 3.1 adapter to reach power levels of up to 240W. Unlike the old MagSafe ports, however, Apple now uses USB-C power adapters exclusively and bundles a USB-C to MagSafe 3 cable with its new MacBooks. In fact, the new fast charging capabilities on the 16-inch MacBook Pro not only require the 140W USB-C Power Adapter, but can also only run over the new MagSafe 3 port, as the standard Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports simply can’t transfer the necessary voltage. New MacBook Pro Fast Charging Requirements These charging speeds have long been supported on the iPhone, of course, but an iPhone battery is also a fraction of the size of the battery found in any MacBook, much less the one that’s the king of all MacBooks. The most powerful charger is particularly important considering Apple’s promise to allow a 16-inch MacBook Pro to fast charge up to 50% in about 30 minutes. While early rumours suggested Apple would use this to make its iPhone chargers smaller, we can now see that it had something else in mind. While the 140W power brick is still something of a behemoth, it would be considerably larger if Apple were using traditional silicon rather than relying on GaN. What’s particularly notable about the new and more powerful 140W adapter is that it’s the first of Apple’s power bricks to take advantage of the new Galium Nitride (GaN) technology that it’s had in the works since early last year. By contrast, the 14-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 67W adapter in its base $1,999 configuration - the one with the scaled-down 8-core M1 Pro chip - however bumping that up to even the mid-range M1 Pro will net you the 96W USB-C power adapter instead.
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