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.