Although some fantasize about their everyday gadget load being one day miniaturized to nothing more than a wearable contact lens, all I want is to be able to say goodbye to battery life anxiety. There’s no permanent solution to being perpetually stressed about charging on the horizon just yet, but there are ways to mitigate those stresses, including this compact transforming multi-charger from Anker.
Despite the lack of a clever name, the Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe might be a useful addition to your EDC kit, but only if you leave the house decked out in Apple gear, including a Magsafe-compatible iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods that support wireless charging.
The charger starts out as a relatively small cube a couple of inches in size, but a MagSafe wireless charging pad on top, intended for an iPhone, can be angled up to reveal another wireless charging pad hidden beneath it. Just slap your AirPods charging case (or the wireless charging case from any set of wireless earbuds) on that, then slide out the third wireless charging pad, designed specifically for the Apple watch, from the side.
The Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe’s ability to collapse into a portable cube isn’t its only selling point. Using an included 30W USB-C adaptor, the MagSafe charging pad on top delivers a full 15W of wireless power to an iPhone 12, 13, or 14 perched atop it, while wireless headphones and the Apple Watch each get 5W of power. They’ll charge slower, but they also have much smaller batteries than the iPhone.
Anker is also positioning the cube charger as a convenient adjustable stand for the iPhone, and thanks to the MagSafe connector, the smartphone can be used in either portrait of landscape positions. At $US150 ($208), Anker’s cube is far from being a cheap charging solution, but when compared to Apple’s MagSafe Duo Charger, which only charges two devices at once and requires one of Apple’s 35W power adapters to delivery 14W of wireless power, Anker’s solution kind of seems like a bargain.