I’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.
Summary:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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".
“Your iPhone doesn't send any of the location information that it uses for this feature to Apple.”<p>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?
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?<p>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."
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.
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’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.<p>I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.
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.