Apple also, I think, offers trade-in for the devices, recycling the components and preventing them from becoming e-waste if the device is a total loss.
It's definitely a frustration for upgrades - but not really reliability anymore. When's the last time someone complained their phone's SSD died?
> When Clean Energy Charging is enabled and you connect your iPhone to a charger, your iPhone gets a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid and uses it to charge your iPhone during times of cleaner energy production.
I suspect this is an extension of the existing battery management system in iOS, which also helps protect the life of the battery by managing charging rates according to your usage patterns so that your devices are ready to use when you typically need them — like by charging at a slow, steady rate while you're asleep so that it's fully charged by the time you typically wake up.
I bet this is little more than an additional input to that system, adding carbon footprint to the reasons to charge the battery more gently during the day, which ultimately has the benefit of prolonging its life just a little further.
So, I do a bit of this myself, manually. I've got a table of appliances and wattages, both rated and measured (using a Kill-O-Watt). I also have a 6kW (max) solar panel installation, plus I'm on a time-of-day metered plan.
I try to make sure that anything that uses hot water (tankless full electric water heater; 29kW rated max) like the dishwasher and shower are done between 1000 and 1400, as that's the highest time of solar insolation during the day, plus the time of day turns over to the highest tier at 1400.
I've bought but not yet installed an eMonPi (https://github.com/openenergymonitor/emonpi), so theoretically I could automate some things to optimize when to run devices. As it is though, by tracking and actively trying to reduce consumption, I've already managed to keep my electricity bill to zero for years, even putting thousands of USD back into the grid (sadly, I do not get money back from this; it only counts as credit, and resets every twelve months).
As for your specific example, I line dry my laundry. I don't see the point of running a space heater (dryer) in my garage; it usually only takes a few hours to dry where I live anyway. The only reason I still have a dryer is for down sleeping bags and coats that have to be fluffed up.
That kind of thing already exists.
I've had a string of in-home energy monitors, and I've turned on all the relevent features for this, but at this point, I have disconnected everything from the internet to stop it being enshittified, and my local incumbent energy transmission provider has left all the consumer-facing smart meter services rot on the vine while the state of Texas kneecaps all the legislation that made it possible in the first place.
In short, all the industry and government entities involved have given up on the consumer here and have pissed it all away, and it's a shame.
You’ll set your alarm for 6am and then the dryer will know to dry by then.
“In places with stagnant air, such as basements, moulds can produce a strong musty odour.”
I’m actually curious how this is possible. Does it download a carbon efficiency database for the detected region? Otherwise, how do you know the schedule for the best times? Is the database shipped with iOS? How granular is it?
Same as searching for passwords by partial hash with the pwned passwords api.
{ sarcasm }
This idea of different types of energy on the consumer end is pretty baseless. It's a complex energy-space and unless you have your own hydro power or such, maybe claims like this are theatre.
If that's true, it would be most inconvenient for me as I only charge my phone at night, while I'm sleeping. Seems simple enough to disable but to change the charging behavior on an update might be a bit of a shock if you expect your phone to charge at night and it didn't. I'd likely replace my charger first, which is wasteful, before checking if my phone was just "being green."
> When Clean Energy Charging suspends charging, a notification on the Lock Screen says when your iPhone will be fully charged. If you need to have your iPhone fully charged sooner, touch and hold the notification and then tap Charge Now.
I can see hundreds of wind turbines from where I live (all the red lights flash in sync on the horizon, it's kinda creepy). There's definitely more wind during the day than at night here.
In reality, Apple is making the wrong calc: it should look at what the marginal electric generation carbon output is.
This is still nice, mind you, but hiring competent designers and setting up reusable designs is a far more important problem. One they’re not willing to touch.
Note a year ago they settled a lawsuit about throttling CPUs with updates on older iphones for the same purpose. The environmental footprint of an iphone is significant no matter what offset fake math they employ....
Why do people spread this sort of stuff? Apple have never settled anything related to a “play” to intentionally shorten the lifetime of a phone.
Batterygate extended the life of individual handsets with degraded batteries that were out of warranty. These handsets were rebooting due to the battery until Apple brought out an update that throttled them after the next brownout, and replacing the battery brought the handset back to full speed. Why go to all that trouble if you wanted to sell another phone?
So, imagine that you didn't believe that the earth was warming, or that humans contributed to that, or that we can't do anything to change that if it was the case, etc. etc.
Clearly anyone bringing attention to these so-called facts or proposing or implementing alleged solutions to the non-existing problem isn't actually achieving anything. They're just signalling virtue to others in their confused tribe.
Same with racism, sexism and any other fictitious problems that don't exist and that therefore don't have solutions. You can't fix problems that don't exist hence pretending the problem or a solution to it exists is just "virtue signalling".
I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.
Now assuming those phones were previously charged on the standard energy mix in the USA that is 0.368kg of co2 saved per device per year, or 501,584,76kg of co2 saved. That seems like a huge number! But is it?
Well let's put it in perspective. A flight from Heathrow to New York emits 312kg of co2 per passenger (3) so we have saved the equivalent of 600 fully loaded transatlantic flights. There are ~1700 flights a day so it doesn't seem like a huge difference. Disappointing.
But it seems like a pretty easy win so at this point I ask why not do it? I'm a big believer in aggregation of marginal gains and there are 10x that number of iPhones worldwide and many more Androids.
(1) https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (2) https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/#:~:text=We%20cal...). (3) https://www.nesta.org.uk/press-release/gas-boiler-emits-more.... (4) https://www.eurocontrol.int/news/celebrating-100-years-trans...
Where is the idea that that 'green generation' wouldn't be used or created without this iphone feature? This doesn't make sense from multiple angles.
Also refrigerators use 1 to 2 kilowatt hours per day.
Often people need a phone charged asap so this won't work.
If they actually make iphones more repairable and last longer so they don't have to waste natural resources to make new ones, it would have a far larger impact. But hey then they'd be making a little bit less profit.
The amount of electricity needed is so small that it might even be comparable (mobile so i haven't calculated yet)
https://ecocostsavings.com/freezer-wattage-energy-efficient/
If the load shifting that this feature enables lets us avoid building out a proportional amount of utility-level battery storage, that is a pretty non-trivial savings in money and resources. A single GWh of utility-level battery storage costs on the order of half a billion, so the return on investment for coding a feature like this into iOS is probably pretty good.
It's not gonna save the world on its own, but it's still a nice win.
Mother Teresa
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmi...
