With iPhone 17 Pro, there was one major rumor that a lot of Apple fans were looking forward to this year: reverse wireless charging. After all, with the new glass window with a centered Apple logo – it looked like a perfect opportunity for this new feature. Our batteries are also larger than ever. Yet, the Apple Event came and went – and there was no reverse wireless charging.
While this is certainly disappointing, there’s a good reason for it not arriving, and I’ll delve into that.
Magnets cause interference
In short, reverse wireless charging other devices while supporting MagSafe isn’t easy.
You might think – didn’t Apple already support this with the MagSafe battery pack back with the iPhone 12? The answer is yes, but, that’s largely in part because of the MagSafe connection that allows perfect alignment without interference.
Charging another phone, or even AirPods, wouldn’t be possible – unless the other device was able to magnetically snap to the back of your iPhone. Even if Apple were to do that, it wouldn’t be particularly useful since it’d be incredibly limited.
The biggest indicator of this is Google. With the Pixel 10 series, the company added Qi2, which is an open version of Apple’s MagSafe standard. However, with this addition, the company had to remove reverse wireless charging, a feature the company had supported across many generations of Pixel phones.
So, as cool as reverse wireless charging might be, don’t expect it on iPhone’s anytime soon. At least, as long as there’s MagSafe on iPhones.
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