[glogla]

According to my research (1) wireless charging increases the consumption between 40 and 80 % depending on how well you align the coils.

It would be very much Apple move to take something that wastes enormous amount of energy (given the number of people who have iPhones) and claim it is eco-friendly.

(1): I looked on Wikipedia for 30 seconds

[datadrivenangel]

Iphones use such a small amount of energy that doubling the energy consumption is fairly negligible in the grand scheme of things.

[datadrivenangel]

12.7Wh per battery for the iPhone 14, times a billion iphones. Assume a worst case scenario of full battery usage per day per phone, which gives us 5 billion watts or 5 gigawatts.

Doubling that power use if everyone switched to low quality wireless charging (50%) would require another 5 gigawatts, or a few thousand more wind turbines.

Bigger than I thought in a worst case scenario, but still not too bad.

Especially if wireless charging prevents premature replacement by reducing port failure, as the embodied energy is estimated to to be the majority of the energy involved in the lifecycle of a smartphone.

[oceanplexian]

Running an Air Conditioner in a small room for an hour (~500Wh) uses the same energy an iPhone would take in ~40 complete charge/discharge cycles. Of course, the numbers look big when you scale them up but as a percentage of total energy use, it's marginal to non-existent.

[radlad]

> Especially if wireless charging prevents premature replacement by reducing port failure

Interesting. I wasn't aware this was a common problem? It's not something I'm used to hearing about as an Android user.

I'd be more interested in whether Magsafe or USB-C wears the battery out sooner.

[radlad]

Sounds like the same logic used for writing apps in Electron. :)

[glogla]

Back of the napkin: hundred million iPhones recharging their 13 Wh battery once a day every day from zero to full for a year is about 60 % the electric energy that this power plant [1] makes in a year.

Not huge amount of energy, but not negligible either.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project

edit: I see someone else did the math as well.

[datadrivenangel]

Not negligible, but also a small cost of the total cost of the iPhone system. call it 500 megawatts for 100m iPhones, which for moderately expensive generation capacity is ~ 2million per megawatt of capacity, works out to $10 per phone in electricity. A typical power plant has expected lifetimes of ~25-50 years, which if we assume a generous 5 year phone lifespan, and a 25 year plant life...

That works out to $2 per iPhone to build power plants to charge the iphone every day for it's an entire life. Not bad for a device that costs hundreds of dollars.