Steve Jobs famously once compared speeding up a boot process by 10 seconds to saving a dozen lives:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

> If all iPhones do this it will matter.

No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage.

Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.

"150 million people"

There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).

Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.

And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.

And the total worldwide use of electricity is 22,848 TWh/year, (according to the IEA [0]). So that would be 5Wh/day * 1 billion phones * 366 days = 1,830 TWh = 0.0008% of world electricity consumption.

Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder, but I would wager it's at most as much of that. So yes, completely insignificant at a large scale.

If anything, the biggest impact will come to individual consumers, if and when electricity prices start varying more widely across times of day.

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

> Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder

That is the entire point of this exercise. My point is that OP fails to address that with data (as do you).

Do you have some data? Or some reason to believe that iPhones are a much larger part of peak hour consumption than they are of overall electricity consumption?

Based on the data we do have, there doesn't seem to be any reason to care about iPhone charging - so, if you don't come up with some data or rationale for why we should, then I still feel it's justified to say that this change has little chance of helping the world in all but the most minor of ways.

Recent price rises due to gas in Europe have exposed more people to the idea that the market price is set at the margin.

If 1W of gas fired power needs to be brought online in the middle of the night to charge your phone, then all the wind power gets the same price. That's why peaks have always been the most economical place to target investments.

It would be interesting to compare the charge rate of a Tesla Powerall * the number of them deployed. I can see iPhones alone winning that depending on some assumptions you make.

You'd then probably be able to find stats on what Tesla gets paid for providing that service to get some idea of scale.

> Do you have some data?

You are the one making claims with poor data and assumptions, not me.

They're using US numbers both for iPhone count (which they overestimate by ~40 million) and total electricity. That should bias their estimate against their point, as the US is particularly consumerist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that measuring as a fraction of total usage would also bias their result upwards- x/avg(y) > x/max(y).

No. Do you celebrate programmers fixing 1 in a million cosmetic bugs when the software crashes on boot and deletes the user’s disk?

Phones are rarely plugged in unless the battery is dead.

This strategy actually works with laptops though. I know that one company set up all their laptops to stop drawing power from mains and run from the battery at peak hours, even though it was still plugged in. This was for cost savings and not for environmental ones, but the same strategy would work.

> Phones are rarely plugged in unless the battery is dead.

???

Most people I can think of charge there phone as part of their nightly routine.