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Use clean energy charging on your iPhone
- gjsman-1000 3y ago“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?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoI 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.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago[flagged]
- bhaney 3y agoI 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.
- OtherShrezzing 3y agoI think it connects directly to Wattime's service: https://www.watttime.org/explorer/#2.06/40.7/-107.55 https://www.watttime.org/explorer/#2.06/40.7/-107.55
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoYou can buy green energy on the financial market, just as you can buy gold on it
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThis 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.
- cced 3y agoDepends. 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.
- jbm 3y agoI should bring up that top opening chest fridges are actually pretty great for energy efficiency! https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI The amount of electricity needed is so small that it might even be comparable (mobile so i haven't calculated yet)
- micromacrofoot 3y agoAbsolutely terrible for usability though, which is why no one has one in their kitchen.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoBut 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").
- honeybadger1 3y agoToggle on virtue signaling.
- JoshTko 3y agoAt 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.
- rolldat777 3y agoI 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.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoAt 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.
- secretsatan 3y agoSo they shouldn’t do this?
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI 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".
- kunalgupta 3y agoThat’s awesome. Almost all battery devices can work this way
- amoshebb 3y agoAppliances 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".
- Jtsummers 3y agohttps://www.energystar.gov/products/smart_home_tips/about_products_connected_functionality_0 https://www.energystar.gov/products/smart_home_tips/about_pr... That kind of thing already exists.
- jmbwell 3y agoI'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.
- npsimons 3y agoYup. 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.
- 3y ago
- f311a 3y agoI’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.
- hellking4u 3y agoDoesn'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.
- f311a 3y agoApple replaces the whole motherboard. That’s not repair, that’s at least $1000 worth of electronics thrown away for pro max models.
- whartung 3y agoThat'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.
- f311a 3y agoThey 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.
- qingcharles 3y ago
- sparrish 3y agoDoes 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."
- johnnyb9 3y agoWind power is generally higher at night.
- Scoundreller 3y agoAnd/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.
- sparrish 3y agoCan 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.
- wilg 3y agoFortunately 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.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI’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.
- jmbwell 3y agoUnless 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...
- Scoundreller 3y agoDepends 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).
- jmbwell 3y agoSummary: > 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.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWhy US only? Are carbon emissions only a problem there?
- jsperx 3y agoPerhaps a data sources issue?
- rmccue 3y agoIt uses data about the current generation of the grid, and I guess they only added data sources for the US so far.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI’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_Reliability_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reli... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmi...
- _cenw 3y agoThis 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.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoI 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.
- Toutouxc 3y agoOn 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.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoI 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.