Belkin Car Vent Mount Pro with MagSafe review: not a charger

As Vergecast listeners know, I’m a sucker for mounts and car chargers. These are a perfect gadget for the modern era – a design problem with no perfect solution, prices that usually reach the top end of the impulse buying area and are completely suitable for targeted Instagram ads. “People who have bought a Qi car holder in the last year”, the marketing director of a small accessories company strictly instructs the Facebook ad targeting system. “Find them and keep pressing them to buy our product, which is the best marginally better than the one they have.”

Reader, it works.

All this means that I was very excited when Apple added the MagSafe charger on the new iPhone 12 line. A series of magnets align a wireless charger to the back of the phone and has enough attachment power to – yes – hold the phone on a stand auto. A dream: get in the car without any problems think! the phone on the stand and run away, laughing at the suckers groping with swings and motorized rubbing arms and other difficult ideas. Magnets, baby. How it works.

Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel

Unfortunately, six months have passed since the iPhone 12 was announced and there is an embarrassing shortage of MagSafe car chargers. In fact, there is Not MagSafe car chargers officially sanctioned. Instead, there is this Belkin Car Vent Mount PRO with MagSafe, which, as the name suggests, allows you to mount a phone in the vents with MagSafe, in a professional way. However, it does not charge your phone.

I have been using a Belkin Car Vent Mount PRO overhaul unit with MagSafe or BCVMPwM for several months. It is at the same time extremely satisfactory – think! – and also extremely frustrating. Like all ventilation brackets, the weight of the phone is enough to pull the ventilation blinds down over time, especially if you have a large phone like the iPhone 12 Pro Max. The magnets are really strong enough to hold even that phone in place, but if you get over any particularly huge swellings, something will fall out – the phone on the stand or the mount on the hole.

“Damn, BCVMPwM,” you’ll shout, using the full name of this $ 40 pledge. “Why aren’t you everything I hoped and dreamed of when I looked at social media marketing photos?” Then you will put everything back on the next stop light, take a damaged look at your partner and slowly realize that they have completely stopped paying attention to these types of pranks. You need new tricks. You need to add Linux to your smart home.

Nilay Patel

Stop it. Did I mention that BCVMPwM doesn’t have a C? No, this is not a charger. To do this, you still need to connect a Lightning cable, which can make sense if your car doesn’t have CarPlay wireless and you need to connect it anyway – but here, connect a cable to your phone, which is the complete opposite of think! Magnet experience. Your old car holder, with its horrible friction arms, had a built-in Qi charger. There are CarPlay wireless adapters! People say they’re a bit slow and have audio latency issues, but come on – one think! to mount your phone, charge it and connect instantly to CarPlay? Now that’s good shit.

Belkin Car Vent Mount Pro with MagSafe

Prices taken at the time of publication.

Belkin Car Vent Mount Pro with MagSafe allows you to mount the iPhone 12, 12 mini or 12 Pro on the car’s vents, using the magnets built into the phone. However, it does not charge the phone.

Why is not is there a MagSafe approved car holder with built-in wireless charging after six months? Why do Apple accessory ecosystems always seem so petrified in every sense of the word? This is the easiest win of all time, but there is BCVMPwM instead. It gives you a look at a dream. Then it falls. There are better unlicensed ones that could burn your car to the ground, which you can buy on Amazon. It’s Apple’s paradigmatic accessory.