I am in London now, with an iPad that I have bought in Chicago. It is plugged into a U.K. electrical outlet, there’s a plug adapter, then the usual Apple plug where you use the cable to charge with an electrical outlet.
What slows the process does? Voltage conversion inside the iPad? The big three pronged UK adapter?
nothing should slow it down. the charger brick which came with the iPad is a “universal” switch mode power supply. it can be plugged in to any outlet between 90 and 250 VAC, 50 or 60 Hz and it should output the same 5.1 VDC at max 2 amps regardless.
I would think that it’s the adapter since its the only component in the chain that is different from your USA setup.
It doesn’t seem right that the adapter can’t meet the current requirements of the charger.
“Slow”, how? What “process”, charging? You haven’t mentioned anything about either up to the point of asking the questions.
I can’t think of any reason why it should be different. Is the wall wart a genuine Apple, or a Chinese knock-off?
I’ve done the same thing many many times to Europe and Asia and never noticed any slowdown at all with my original Apple components: Apple cable and Apple USB wall plug and then a cheap no-name plug adapter.
Important note: Voltage adapters/converters and plug adapters are different. Voltage adapters/converters have circuitry to convert the 220V to 110V. They also usually have fuses built into them prevent overloads and fires. A plug adapter just adapts the prongs of the plug so they match the configuration of whatever country you’re in. They’re very different things.
One way to tell when you’re buying is price - I can buy a simple plug adapter of usually less than $2 at the local dollar store. A “voltage adapter” is usually +$50
In the case of most electronic devolves like phone or computers, no voltage adapter is required since the device’s internal circuitry deals with the voltage difference.
If you’ve plugged your iPhone/iPad into its USB wall plug and then plugged that into a voltage adaptor that may what’s slowing things down.
The iPad charger draws at most 0.3 amps from the AC mains. A step down converter should easily be able to deliver that.
A decade and a half ago when I went to Ireland, we bought an adapter for the trip. It was a voltage adapter, but we didn’t notice until we got there that it specifically warned against using it with a battery charger. And it wasn’t until after we left the last decent-sized city on our trip that we noticed that the camcorder (the one device that we really cared about keeping charged) had a universal power supply (which at that time were still somewhat uncommon), and so could have used just a simple plug adapter (if we were somewhere that would sell such a thing).
“A decade and a half ago” was still the 21st century. Adaptors were freely available in shops all over the UK and Ireland, well back into the 20th C. You would certainly have been able to pick one up at the airport.
In fact, we are still using the one my wife bought when we went to France way back in the 70s and they were far from a new idea then.
Knowing that they could have got one at the airport is no use if they are in a village in West Cork.
I’ve had similar experiences of being abroad and finding that I hadn’t brought the necessary plug adaptor, and it’s certainly not always easy to get one at short notice. If a local shop sells an adaptor at all, it’s more likely to be for locals to use overseas, rather than for visitors to use locally. However, some hotels keep an adaptor in a drawer to lend to guests.
@ jz78817 According to what I’ve read previously (just double checked) iPad draw considerably more that the .3 amps you mention, more along the line of 2.1. An iPhone draws around 1 amp. From Feb. 2018:
Whether that difference is enough to affect the charge time with a step-down voltage converter versus a plug adapter, I leave it to those with more electronics knowledge.
The iPad draws 2.1 amps @ 5VDC. jz78817 is talking about current on the mains side of the transformer - amps don’t stay the same when voltage changes. Ignoring losses in the transformer, 2.1A @ 5V is about .1 amps @ 120V or .05 amps @ 240V.
If an iPad drew 2.1 amps @ 240V, it’d be a 500W space heater.
Second this request for clarification - everyone is assuming the background to the question is a complaint about something working slower than usual - and that’s not an unreasonable assumption, but it could still easily be incorrect.
It is unclear whether the question in this thread is actually of the nature “why is this slower here?” or if it’s “What stops this being even faster here than it is normally at home?”, or maybe just “What factors affect the rate at which this thing charges”.
We could certainly have gotten the right adaptor at the airport when we landed, or somewhere in the city of Cork, which was our first stop. But at that time, we didn’t realize that we needed one. And we probably could have gotten one in Limerick, our last stop, or in the airport before takeoff, but by then we didn’t have use for one any more. Most of the rest of our trip, though, was in tiny little villages where, if the locals had to buy anything electronic, they’d have to drive far out of their way to do so.