Does the MacBook Neo Support Fast Charging?
Toggle Dark Mode
Apple’s amazingly affordable new MacBook Neo is now in stores, with remarkable performance and a solid build for its $599 price tag. Of course, that doesn’t mean Apple hasn’t had to cut out other features to reach that wallet-friendly level.
In addition to a more basic display and only one high-speed USB-C port, the MacBook Neo also won’t charge as fast as its more expensive siblings. While the $1,099 MacBook Air can charge at up to 70W with an appropriate USB-C adapter, the MacBook Neo is only officially rated for the 20W adapter that it comes with (at least in North America; European models omit the power adapter).
On paper, that means you’re looking at charging speeds that could be nearly four times longer; however, the MacBook Neo also has a smaller battery — 36.5 Wh versus 53.8 Wh on the MacBook Air — so the difference is closer to a factor or two, since there’s less of a battery to fill up.
Nevertheless, there may be a bit of good news here for those who want to top up their MacBook Neo a bit faster. Although Apple only provides a 20W charger in the box, the budget MacBook will charge faster if you’re willing to throw a bit more power at it.
Roman Loyola at Macworld ran some tests with a 96W USB-C power adapter, and found that it allowed the MacBook Neo to charge faster, although the speed may not extend across the entire charging spectrum.
Specifically, the folks at Macworld charged the MacBook Neo’s battery from 20 percent for 30 minutes, using both the 20W and 96W chargers to measure the difference. For that test, the higher-wattage adapter delivered twice the increase — a 30 percent gain for the 96W versus only 15 percent for the 20W.
That might lead you to believe that the MacBook Neo can actually charge twice as fast, but upon further investigation, Loyola reported that the charging rate actually appears to be capped at 24 watts, which isn’t that much higher than what the 20W adapter delivers. If the MacBook Neo were actually charging twice as fast, it should be drawing around 40 watts, not 24 — and this is where things get a bit strange.
Data Loyola shared from the Battery Health 2 app revealed an odd gap: the MacBook Neo only pulled 12W of actual power from the bundled 20W adapter, while the 96W adapter let it draw 23.3W. It’s not entirely clear what’s going on here under the hood, and the tests didn’t include any chargers that were closer to the 24-watt mark to see how they’d perform.
Macworld has contacted Apple for comment and promised to update the article if they hear anything back, but there’s no obvious technical reason why the MacBook Neo would pull only 12 watts from a 20W-rated adapter. We have to assume it’s a bug or something went wrong during testing, as the 96W adapter shouldn’t have shown such a dramatic increase with a 24W cap.
Regardless, 24W falls short of Apple’s official “Fast Charging” standard, which requires a device to hit a 50 percent charge in 30 minutes. At best, the MacBook Neo might reach 30 percent in that time. Since charging will also undoubtedly slow down as the battery fills up, the total charging time is still likely to be around two hours. If the 20W adapter works as it should and actually delivers 20 watts of power, the gains from a higher-wattage charger will be negligible.
