Your iPhone has a green screen.
Even though iOS 16 was just published, Apple is already teasing improvements that will be included in the upcoming upgrade to its smartphone lineup.
In a blog post announcing the launch of iOS 16, Apple highlighted many of the new features it brings, such as customizable lock screens, an undo button in iMessage, and battery percentages in the status bar. iOS 16 is now available for the new iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro as well as many of the best iPhones available today. But the page’s bottom (which opens in a separate tab) also covered improvements that will be included in a future iOS 16 upgrade.
One of these features is Clean Energy Charging which will supposedly reduce the carbon footprint of your iPhone.
Apple claims it’ll do this by “optimizing charging times for when the grid is using cleaner energy sources.” While it doesn’t elaborate much further, we imagine it will be similar to Apple’s existing Optimized Battery Charging Feature which allows the iPhone to change its charging rates so that it doesn’t overcharge overnight and reduce your device’s battery life. Instead of looking at the iPhone’s overall charge, your device will instead change its charging rates based on the energy sources the power grid is currently using.
This feature will obviously require Apple to know a fair amount about your country’s power grid though, so at launch, it’ll only be available in the US.
Analysis: Will this really make your iPhone greener?
On an individual level, we imagine it won’t do all that much, but on a larger scale, we could see some decent-sized impacts.
charging your phone in North America releases roughly 0.62kg of carbon dioxide each year. Based on 2021 figure from Statista 47% of people with smartphones in the US use an iPhone (that’s 113 million iPhones in total). Put those together and that means that iPhone users release roughly 70 million kg of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
Based on EPA data that pollution is the same as the combined carbon footprint of 15,000 gas-powered cars per year – which is equivalent to driving 173,754,389 miles.
Although it’s unknown how big of an improvement Clean Energy Charging would bring, if it can reduce iPhone charging emissions by, say, 50%, that equates to removing 7,500 automobiles from the road, which isn’t too bad. We’ll have to wait and see how good the programme is when it debuts, but if it is successful in lowering emissions, we have a hunch that Apple will be eager to tout the feature at the following Apple event and, ideally, expand it to other locations as well.