The moral of the story? It might just be worthwhile to pay the extra and get a proper Apple charger and, as applicable, Apple charging cable to go with it. There’s just no good way to navigate this chaos, and once you start looking at the photos of the products, they’re just about all trying to look exactly like the Apple product too: How can this happen? Because there are a ridiculous number of third party vendors selling MacBook chargers, as you can see when you do a search on : Not only do you not see any identifying information, but it’s only giving 55W to the computer, which categorizes it as a non-charging plug, denoted by “ Charging: No“. But when we plug it in and check the System Profile information, well, the truth is shown: Now I’ll try a third-party 60W charger that should work just fine, at least according to the vendor. Note that the correct Apple cable and a lower wattage charger reports as you’d expect: In other words, a faster charger, but a slow charge. You can see the problem, right? 87W charger, but only 60W coming in to the computer for charging.

Now, let’s try swapping out the Apple cable for a third party USB-C cable and watch what happens when we relaunch the System Report: Most importantly, though, look at the “ Wattage (W)” field, which shows that the computer is getting 86W of power, a fast charge for this device. That shows it’s a proper Apple 87W USB-C Power Adapter, and even shows its serial number. Click on that, scroll down on the right side of that window and you’ll get this information: See the button labelled “ System Report…“? Click on that, then scroll down on the left side to find the “Power” entry. Key to realize: the wattage specified isn’t necessarily the wattage that the computer receives when charging. The very latest bump up slightly so my MacBook Pro with TouchBar has two official Apple options 61W and 87W. In fact, I learned some things about charging systems as I was writing this post, so I should thank you for your original question! First off, the key variable is wattage and it’s calculated easily as amperage * voltage. Apple has four different chargers depending on your notebook or computer model: 29W, 45W, 60W, and 85W varieties. Even with an Apple charger, if you have a USB-C system like I do and use a third-party cable, that cable itself might drop the wattage down and slow down the charge.

Cables, chargers, both can have a surprising effect on your power and charging experience with a Mac system in ways that are not at all obvious. Ah, you’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box of complexity when you move to third party anything in the Apple ecosystem.

2010 apple macbook pro charger