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.
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.