Use clean energy charging on your iPhone
support.apple.comI’m so tired of this kind of marketing. Meanwhile, if your SSD dies on m1 macbook, the laptop becomes unrepairable. If Apple would care about ecology, they would at least allow to resolder it.
Doesn't Apple repair the M1 Macbooks if you take it to the Apple Store? From what I've understood, the macbook repairability issue is more to do with Apple's pricing and self-repair than the device becoming e-waste.
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.
Apple replaces the whole motherboard. That’s not repair, that’s at least $1000 worth of electronics thrown away for pro max models.
That's the expedient field repair, but what happens to the motherboard afterword?
They're under no obligation to replace your motherboard with a "new" one, so it's possible that it goes back to the repair depot for actual diagnostics and repair by better trained and equipped technicians.
I have no idea, maybe they do just shred it and melt it down, but it sure doesn't seem efficient for Apple to simply toss the motherboard rather than try to repair it themselves, otherwise the repair would be vastly more expensive -- AppleCare or not.
They charge you the full price of the motherboard when it’s out of warranty. Third party services can replaces SSDs on non-m1 models for 20-30% of what’s Apple charges.
I bet if the ECU in your car dies a technician is unable to open it and replace anything. Everything has to have a limit. How many Xboxes were thrown away because of one bad component? It sucks, but if the company has at least some program in place to try to recover as much as possible from damaged/used parts, then that's a bonus. And Apple seems to have a decent program for their iPhones at least with robots to tear them into component pieces for recycling.
At least they don't replace the whole engine when the ECU fails. That would be more like what Apple is doing.
They don't throw the motherboard away. It is recycled/upcycled.
If they didn't, their own warranty and repair program would be a money black hole.
Everything is soldiers to the mainboard, so there's no parts to swap. They swap the whole board.
Sure. Same situation if your CPU, Chipset, PMIC, or any random capacitor or resistor dies on any other laptop. SSDs have achieved the point where a replacement from a failure is almost unheard of compared to other components failing first. Nobody complains their laptop CPU isn't socketed.
It's definitely a frustration for upgrades - but not really reliability anymore. When's the last time someone complained their phone's SSD died?
I'd love my CPU to be socketed actually. Though Intel's practice of changing sockets every generation defeats the purpose a bit.
One out of my three macbooks (that I ever had) died because of SSD. They have a limited lifespan. That's a common problem for 3-5 years old macbooks.
Summary:
> 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.
Appliances that actually use energy should have this. I'd love to be able to put a wet load of laundry into my drier and press "make sure it's dry by tomorrow morning".
> I'd love to be able to put a wet load of laundry into my drier and press "make sure it's dry by tomorrow morning".
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.
The eMonPi is the older hardware. See https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/overview.html for documentation on their newer hardware and associated software.
https://www.energystar.gov/products/smart_home_tips/about_pr...
That kind of thing already exists.
I'm afraid consumers have grown leery of this kind of thing, though, between power companies messing with our cloud-enabled thermostats and appliance manufacturers harvesting data and good lord, nagging us with ads and popups and incessant updates on our damn fridges and laundry machines... not to mention transmission providers neglecting the whole scheme to death.
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.
I am actively interested in a good energy monitoring system, that can monitor each and every circuit separately, as well as the overall usage across the whole house. It would be great if it was smart enough to figure out what usage patterns corresponded to what, so if I have multiple items on the same circuit, it can still distinguish between them.
I don't want any part of that system connected to anything that the utility companies have access to or control over.
I don't want that provided by third party companies that could go out of business overnight, and leave me high and dry.
I don't want to have to replace my electrical panels to get this information.
I do want this data all being collected and stored locally, but with a way to reliably back that information up to offsite facilities of my choice.
And it would be great if it could have a system that could apply intelligence as to which circuits/devices need to be powered when, in case of emergency or if I just want to optimize my power bill.
Yup. I feel that the idea of smart interconnected devices talking to each other to decide "okay, now is when it will be most efficient to run" is a really awesome thing, but it's been ruined by capitalism. Just a race to the bottom to sell shit products and sell customer data to maximize CEOs' paychecks.
As it is, if you have the knowhow you could do it yourself. But that's a lot to ask the tech illiterati, and even I find myself just falling back to manual methods since they Just Work with no fiddling about with wires.
Make it a heat pump dryer for extra energy savings! https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_dryer
How connected to the IoT are you willing to go to access that functionality though - now your drier requires wifi access, and cynically, you know it’s not going to just use that to access local peak load times.
My guess is that one’s iPhone will one day become the « brains » for a home’s appliances and control all that.
You’ll set your alarm for 6am and then the dryer will know to dry by then.
I hope it is not just me (please someone tell me), but I find that if you let a load of wet laundry sit overnight, it starts to stink?
It’s called mildew.
“In places with stagnant air, such as basements, moulds can produce a strong musty odour.”
I schedule loads to be ready when I wake up. I hang them outside and 1.5 hours later they're dry.
“Your iPhone doesn't send any of the location information that it uses for this feature to Apple.”
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?
I doubt this is how it works, but you could do a k-anonymity thing and search for a location by submitting the first few characters of the hash of the location, and getting back a response with the data for all locations with a hash that starts with those characters. Client picks out the correct location from the response, and the server is never aware of which one the client wanted.
Same as searching for passwords by partial hash with the pwned passwords api.
I think it connects directly to Wattime's service: https://www.watttime.org/explorer/#2.06/40.7/-107.55
I guess 'clean energy' tastes different to the phone or something.
{ 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.
You can buy green energy on the financial market, just as you can buy gold on it
Does this mean the phone only charges during the day? It won't charge at night when solar and wind are least effective and fossil fuel power is used nearly exclusively?
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."
Fortunately this is answered by the linked article. (This is often a great place to check for information relevant to the discussion title.)
> 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.
Wind power is generally higher at night.
Can you provide a citation for that?
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.
And/or at least a higher proportion of energy use.
In reality, Apple is making the wrong calc: it should look at what the marginal electric generation carbon output is.
This sounds like a feature that would be more useful in Germany, where the percentage of renewables varies wildly by time of day. Also, I hate the carbon footprint framing, a concept invented by fossil fuel companies to direct attention away from systemic issues. Climate change is not an individual issue and this feature at scale is already much more impactful than a thousand people checking their carbon footprint.
I hate carbon footprint for a related but distinct issue: companies such as Apple or Microsoft use it as a way to say they’re “green” while producing untold levels of ewaste. They can’t even follow the Three Rs. Reduction of waste is literally the most important for a reason.
On one hand, simply going back from MagSafe to wired charging would probably save significantly more CO2 (wireless charging is inefficient as hell), but my guess is that this is mostly a way to draw attention to the problem. To subtly inject thinking about how we generate and use electricity into something as mundane and common as charging a phone. Which is cool by me.
I would imagine its far more important for them to point out to shareholders that this has a “green impact” to raise their ESG score, rather than trying to make it a well-known problem.
Toggle on virtue signaling.
At Apple's scale the effort building this feature is certainly worth the co2 impact. edit: impact would be approx. the same as powering 300k US homes to only use clean energy.
I was surprised, but this calculation checks out. Wild. This really points to the scale of influence that large companies have, especially considering this is < 0.1% of typical household electricity consumption. Consider then that household electricity consumption is not the complete picture - add in cars (both ICE and electric being ~ICE/4), food production, etc, and you see both how much energy we use and how much single entities influence this amount. According to the internet, google data centers are ~1 million households (I saw 15TWh/yr), so 1% efficiency improvements are a small town worth of electricity. At they same time, they claim 3m household savings due to Nest, wow.
At Apple’s scale a more worthwhile problem is reducing ewaste and reusing what’s available. For instance, not designing their overpriced devices to kill themselves regularly.
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.
More likely a play to reduce battery lifetime by increasing incidence of full discharge...
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....
> Note a year ago they settled a lawsuit about throttling CPUs with updates on older iphones for the same purpose.
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?
They were throttling CPUs to literally extend the life of the phone. They did it so your phone could still run reliably with an old battery which would otherwise need to be replaced.
So they were “fixing” a problem they caused. CPUs wouldn’t need to be throttled if batteries could be more easily replaced.
And theoretically, if this was the case, why isn’t there an option to throttle? It is the user’s device. And why wasn’t it used to help lengthen the battery life of the new phones? I certainly would prefer throttling my CPU to lengthen battery life.
There literally is an option to toggle the throttle once the battery is degraded, and the feature did/does exist on new phones, even today. Go and read the wiki on batterygate.
So they shouldn’t do this?
I never understood the use of the phrase "virtue signalling" until I realised that the people using it literally don't believe that the problem and/or the solution exists.
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".
Well to be fair this doesn't "fix" anything. Not denying climate change but really, charging a phone is one of the smallest energy uses in a household. They're probably wasting more energy advertising the feature.
Also, people won't use this all the time. Often when I'm charging my phone I need it charged now, not in 10 hours.
I’d like it to draw enough power to not use the internal battery but avoid charging when driving in a car if it’s at least X percent charged.
I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.
Unless you have an EV charged only with renewable energy, I'm not sure there's any way to charge it with your car in a carbon-neutral way anyway...
Depends where your grid electricity comes from. ICE is a pretty damn inefficient way to generate electricity (and costly when it comes to its excess taxation).
This is a pointless stunt. A refrigerator will use 10 to 20 times the electricity of phone that is going at 100% 24 hours a day. The impact of this is ultimately nothing.
Let's assume an average iPhone battery is 5.45Wh and that they are charged to full every other night. That is 0.99kWh/year. We know there are 136 million iPhone users in the USA (1) so we are looking at 134GWh of electric consumption shifted to green generation.
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...
> consumption shifted to green generation
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.
Only if all those iphone users use this feature all the time, and only if before enabling this they always happened to charge when clean energy wasn't available. This calculation is very optimistic.
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.
I should bring up that top opening chest fridges are actually pretty great for energy efficiency!
The amount of electricity needed is so small that it might even be comparable (mobile so i haven't calculated yet)
You are WAY off. An efficient top freezer will still use about a kilowatt hour per day. A typical phone will use 1/100th of that.
https://ecocostsavings.com/freezer-wattage-energy-efficient/
I definitely was wrong; they are "comparable", but the phone is much more energy efficient.
I looked it up online, and apparently the "average amount" used by a phone is 15Wh or 0.015kWh per day.
A chest freezer apparently uses ~0.55 kWh per day, or 36 times the amount of electricity.
I don't know if the phone includes energy loss during charging, or if that is the amount being drained from the battery.
It's not 1/100th, but it is still quite a bit more. Considering this is mostly caused by insulation, I wonder if there are ways to improve the insulation to reduce this energy use further.
Absolutely terrible for usability though, which is why no one has one in their kitchen.
But lots of people have deep refrigerators, which cause exactly the same usability problem ("most of the stuff in the fridge cannot be accessed, because the stuff between it and the door blocks it").
It doesn't really though, I've lived with a chest refrigerator so I know this experience.
With a deep fridge you can push things to the side, reach over them, etc... you can still kind of see where everything is if you move your head to look around other items.
With a chest fridge you stack everything.
This can:
* more completely obscure other items
* squish items
* require you to move items to find what you want (i.e. pile them on top of other items)
Then you have things like... cartons of milk and various other bottles, which aren't designed to be stacked vertically, but are mostly optimized to be next to other items.
You also lose the utility of having a smaller shelved door area. You can have a level of shelving in a chest refrigerator (basically sliding racks/baskets)... but these become more things you need to move to see other things. With doors they're naturally out of the way on fridge open.
You also have the problem of spills. In a standard fridge a spill means I pick up items, wipe the bottom, put them on another shelf temporarily... then wipe the shelf and replace. Needless to say, spilling anything into a chest refrigerator is a nightmare. You have to remove nearly everything... and since so much is stacked, it's much messier.
You're right that several problems are worse in the chest fridge. Squishing and cleaning are real differences. The shelving in the door is very useful... but it's useful because the door is shallow. A one-item-deep door can't block access to the rear layers of stuff that it doesn't contain.
A deep vertical refrigerator already completely obscures most of its contents, requires you to move items in order to get what you want, and contains drawers where the contents are not only stacked but completely invisible until you specifically open the drawer to search inside.
Your reference to moving items in the fridge from one shelf to another shelf (temporarily) in order to clean up a spill tells me that you're not engaging in typical deep refrigerator use. The other shelf is already full; to clean up a spill, you need to pull the things that were in the dirty area out of the fridge.
Completely possible I just dont keep my fridge as full as some people! but I do not miss the chest fridge despite its glorious efficiency
Would make a lot of sense if it was just built into the counter-top imo.
Nah, that just makes that section of countertop "forbidden space". Can place anything on it (toaster, microwave, coffeemaker, etc.), can't use it for prep space unless you already know you won't need anything from the freezer. Can't let any dirty dishes pile up there.
But why not have a chest freezer underneath the countertop, but as a pull-out drawer? Same benefits of a top opening, but no need to dedicate a section of countertop for the lid to open.
Not impossible but needs really heavy duty sliding drawer thingies. Usually anything I’d take out of the freezer would be taken out much in advance of meal prep to thaw (ideally in a fridge the day before).
But yeah, for a fridge, that’s not as easy.
Until you need something from the fridge while you're cutting something on the countertop... or you spill something on the countertop and it leaks down into the fridge.
Oh I don't know. How many iPhones are active in the world right now? 500 million, conservatively speaking? That's a not insignificant amount.
A typical iPhone battery is on the order of 10 Wh. An iPad is more like 40 Wh. If you add up all the iPhones and iPads in the world, the combined battery storage is probably on the order of tens of GWh.
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.
Depends. Maybe they start with phones, go to ipads, macs. As usage of this feature increases and development increases the move this feature to more device types.
Personal electronics are still just a small fraction of all the energy humans use.
Using an ad blocker can certainly make a device use less energy...
A lot of little things can be big
'Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.'
Mother Teresa
That’s awesome. Almost all battery devices can work this way
Why US only? Are carbon emissions only a problem there?
It uses data about the current generation of the grid, and I guess they only added data sources for the US so far.
I’m in Canada where we’re (almost all) on the same interconnections as US. Texas (and maybe Quebec) are the bigger outliers when it comes to outlier systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmi...
Perhaps a data sources issue?