If you bought an iPad Mini, you might have noticed that it came with the same 5w charger that Apple ships with the iPhone, instead of the 10w charger that comes with the iPad 3, 2, and 1 (the iPad 4 actually comes with a 12w charger). We’ve found that the iPad Mini, using the 5w charger it came with, takes around 3-3.5 hours to charge from 0-100%. What happens when you use the higher wattage charger? Well, it charges faster! Using the 10w iPad 3 charger, we were able to charge the iPad Mini from 0-100% in about 2.5 hours, a difference of around 25%. It’s probably not a best practice to use a higher wattage charge to juice up your tablet than what it came with, but if you’re in a pinch and need to charge your Mini as fast as possible, it probably wouldn’t hurt to use a 10w (or even 12w) charger occasionally.
