Can MacBook Neo charge faster with a better charger?

If you buy a MacBook Neo, you’ll get a 20W USB-C Power Adapter, the smallest charger of any Apple laptop. Apple sells higher-wattage adapters ranging from 35 watts up to 140 watts, and you can find third-party adapters with more features. The Neo’s charger is clunky and has just one port, so most people who buy one will likely use a different adapter that delivers more power.

However, the MacBook Neo doesn’t officially support fast charging like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Apple never mentioned fast charging during its Apple Experience on March 4, and Apple’s support document about MacBook fast charging also doesn’t include the Neo.

So it shouldn’t matter what kind of charger you use with the MacBook Neo. But we wanted to make sure there’s no difference if a higher-wattage adapter is used on the Neo. We tried charging a Neo’s battery at 20 percent to see how much it would gain in 30 minutes using Apple’s 96W USB-C Power Adapter and the bundled 20W USB-C Power Adapter. Here are the results.

That’s… not the same. It also doesn’t fit Apple’s definition of fast charging, which is up to 50 percent battery in around 30 minutes. So we did some digging.

Below are screenshots of the Battery Health 2 app, which I used to take a look at the charging rates. The shot on the left is with the 96W charger; the right shot is with the 20W charger. In the section labeled “Charging With,” the 96W charger was at twice the rate of the 20W charger. While on The Full Nerd podcast, we plugged in a 250-watt charger, and the rate was similar to the 96W charger. It appears that the charging rate for the MacBook Neo is capped at around 24 Watts if you use a charger that’s faster than the bundled 20W charger.

So, based on these results, you can get a faster charging speed if you use a higher-wattage charger. But you don’t get the “50 percent in 30 minutes” that Apple touts with the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro fast charging, which is probably why they don’t promote it as fast-charging capable.

We’ve contacted Apple for comment on our findings, and will update this article if we hear anything.