For years, charging speed has been one of the easiest things to criticize about the iPhone. Android brands moved to much faster charging while Apple stayed relatively conservative, so even expensive Pro Max models could feel slow when you needed a quick top-up. With the iPhone 18 Pro Max, that gap is finally starting to look a lot smaller.
In one charging test, the phone’s 5,391mAh battery reached a measured peak of 52W, climbed to 34% in just 10 minutes, showed 100% after around 55 minutes, and completed its full charge in about 76 minutes. Those numbers are a noticeable step forward for an iPhone and suggest Apple is becoming much more comfortable pushing higher charging power than it has in previous generations.
Apple still is not trying to compete with the extreme 100W-plus charging numbers we see from some Android phones, and it probably does not need to. The important part is that charging is becoming fast enough that it no longer feels like an obvious weakness. If Apple keeps moving in this direction, the old joke about iPhones taking forever to charge could finally become a thing of the past.
