How Apple’s new 40-60W charger stacks up against the competition

Alongside the new iPhones and other Apple products revealed at the fall event, there was also a new Apple charging brick, which is impressively small considering how much power it can output. However, due to that size, I was a little skeptical that it would be able to offer meaningful benefits over existing 60-watt chargers.

So over the last few days, I’ve been putting it to the test, and this is what I’ve found.

From the data above, you can see that the iPhone 17 series has gotten a nice charging boost, which puts it up over the 16 series from last year. I’ll also note that the iPhone 11 and iPhone 14 are much older and have been used for over two years each. So while they might have topped up fast by virtue of having smaller battery cells, it’s worth accounting for how much they’ve been used as well. I considered cutting them from the data, but I assume that since most people who might own those phones would have also used them for years at this point, it’s actually pretty representative of the average user’s experience.

I haven’t been able to run all the phones through UGreen’s slim 65 watt GaN charger, the data I’ve collected clearly shows that it’s operating extremely similarly to Apple’s unit, even without the SPR AVS protocol that’s supposed to allow for smarter charging. This stands for ‘Standard Power Range Adjustable Voltage Supply.’ While at the surface level, the new tech allows for faster charging, after all my testing, most of the new chargers’ benefits come from its portable size and decent efficiency.

Diving deeper into the SPR AVS protocol, it seems that its main advantage over other modern chargers is its ability to sense the heat on both ends of the wire, allowing it to reduce throughput if the phone or charger is starting to get hot. This sounds great on paper, but in reality, it doesn’t come into play often with any of Apple’s current products.

Most iPhones only charge at around 20 watts, with only the newer 16/17 series phones ramping up to take in 30-40 watts, and even then, it’s extremely briefly.  The iPhone 17 Pro Max was the only iPhone to hit 40 watts, and the charger only reached 40 watts for maybe three seconds and spent most of its peak charging time around 35 watts instead. This happens on the UGreen charger as well. Frankly, most things hit their peak charging rate for less than a minute and then spend the remaining charging time getting slower and slower. iPads might be an exception to this since they seem to stay at a pretty level 25-ish watts for a long time before dropping down towards 1-2 watts near the end of their charge.

My MacBook Pro was the only product that really seemed to put a ton of pressure on the new Apple charger, with it constantly fluctuating up to 60 watts for around 20 minutes and then back down to 40 watts for 20 minutes. That process repeated for most of the computer’s two-hour and six-minute charge time. This is really impressive, but since the charger was thermal throttling well before the computer, I’m not sure how much of a benefit SPR AVS has over popular protocols like PPS (Programmable Power Supply), which can also modulate its power level on the fly to factor in how much power the device is pulling and the heat of the charger.

All of that sort of culminates in my results, which show that the 65-watt UGreen charger performs basically the same as the new Apple model with SPR AVS. Perhaps this tech will be put to better use in a dynamic 100-200 watt charger down the line, but for 40-60 watts in this small form factor, it’s basically the same as any other 60-watt charger out there at this size.

That’s all to say it’s a great unit, but it doesn’t beat the competition.  One of my favourite parts of the new device is that the marketing around it is clearer than most chargers. While my UGreen charger markets itself as a 65-watt brick, it thermal throttles itself down to 30-40 watts during use, just like the Apple one. So in truth, Apple is being more clear with what people should expect from the product, and I’d love to see the rest of the charger industry adopt naming conventions like that.

When it comes down to it, I think I’d recommend most people end up with the UGreen option. While it’s a little larger, it doesn’t block multiple outlets, it fast-charges Apple and Android products, plus the real kicker is that it has three ports, making it just a little more useful.

If you’d like to buy the UGreen charger, it usually costs $60, but with Black Friday and the holiday shopping season coming up, I think we’ll start to see discounts on it, so I suggest holding off until then. If you want the Apple charger for its slightly better efficiency and smaller footprint, it costs $55, but it will be harder to find one on sale.