- Thanks to the new USB-C port, the iPhone 15 can reverse charge smaller peripherals.
- USB-C iPads have been able to do this for years.
- Charging your phone will shorten battery life.
It finally happened. The iPhone is switching to USB-C, and a surprising feature may stop anyone complaining that they can no longer use their old Lightning cable.
iPhones now use USB-C ports for charging and data transfer, just like your iPad, Mac, Android phone, and any other non-dollar-store electronic gadget you've purchased in the past few years. Scrape that off. Even my electric fly swatter (aka the Insect-O-Cutor) has a USB-C charging port. However, people still hated having to throw away those old charging cables until they discovered that you can now use your iPhone to charge your Apple Watch or AirPods.
“I think the ability to charge your AirPods or Apple Watch using the new iPhone 15’s USB-C port is a very useful feature, especially in emergency situations where you need to quickly charge your device,” CleverFixes founder Carl Borg told Lifewire via Lifewire ."e-mail. “This is not just a gimmick, but a practical solution that leverages the versatility and power of USB-C.”
We've been here before. In the summer of '21, we were delighted to hear speculation that Apple would allow you to charge your AirPods through your iPhone, but without the use of wires. We think MagSafe could be a unified charging technology where you just put the "Pods case" on the back of your iPhone to charge it.
That's never happened, but it's probably a good thing too, since all the heat generated by "wireless" charging is bad news for the battery and is also a waste of energy. But now we have another answer. With the iPhone 15, you can plug the AirPods charging case or Apple Watch charger into the iPhone's USB-C port and sacrifice the iPhone's battery for a smaller device.
This is a great feature that can help you in a pinch. Last night, while I was at a friend's house for dinner, my aging Apple Watch issued a low-battery warning. If I have an iPhone 15 and a USB-C Apple Watch charger, I can go home fully charged. It might be more useful for AirPods, which are harder to survive without than a dead watch.
"Charging AirPods and Apple Watch through iPhone is useful to a certain extent. However, I don't think it is as useful as many people think. Charging devices through iPhone drains the phone's battery and is cumbersome to carry around. This can Helpful. "In a pinch, but not a long-term solution," technology expert Daivat Dholakia told Lifewire via email.
Reverse charging is nothing new. In fact, this is very common and normal if you use a Mac or PC. You can charge your phone, bike lights, headphones, etc. simply by plugging them into a free USB port on your computer. This is true for both the crappy old USB-A ports and the new high-powered USB-C ports.
Did you know you can already charge peripherals via USB-C iPad? You can charge AirPods and even iPhone. This is all thanks to USB-C, which is much more powerful than Lightning.
"USB-C can support up to 240W of charging power, while Lightning is limited to 25W. This means USB-C can charge larger devices such as laptops and tablets faster than Lightning," Borg said.
But again, this is more of an emergency solution.
"However, this feature may not be very effective because the iPad's battery capacity is much larger than that of the iPhone, and you may end up draining the iPad's power faster than you can charge the iPhone," Borg said.
Reverse charging your iPhone is certainly a good trick to use in emergencies, but if you regularly find your peripherals running out of juice, consider using a battery pack. All batteries lose capacity the more they are charged and discharged. Of course, the same goes for the battery pack, but the battery pack is much cheaper than the iPhone 15.
