The battery on the iPhone has always been a hotly discussed topic, and something that iPhone critics constantly bring up. A friend of mine said to me a while ago “it must cost you a fortune to charge it all the time”. Well to anyone else in my boat, here is your chance to get one up.
A recent study done by Opower gives an insight into how much we are paying to charge our iPhone annually. The results are very positive for those of us who stand on the Apple side of the Apple vs Samsung battle. Read on to see the results.
These prices are in US dollars. The study took into account the average price per watt in America and assumed that the device would be charged daily. Obviously the price per watt in New Zealand is different to America but to give you a better understanding, Macworld Australia calculated that Australians can expect to pay 91 cents to charge their iPhone 5 annually.
91 cents seems very small but consider this from Barry Fisher (Opower)
“Even if we consider just the 170 million iPhone 5s that are projected to be sold globally in the next year, their aggregate electricity requirements are nothing to sneeze at. The collective annual electricity consumption of the iPhone 5’s sold within 12 months will be equivalent to the annual electricity usage of 54,000 US households”
Now that is a lot of power!
As you can see in the table above, the iPhone 5 costs only slightly more than the iPhone 4 annually.
However, the main point to note here is the difference in cost between the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S3.
OK, so its a pretty small difference, but its certainly a win for the iPhone in my book. I personally cant wait to get back to my friend I quoted in paragraph one.
Some more perspective: when charging, the iPhone can draw a maximum of about 1 Amp at 5 Volts. That’s 5 Watts. So about an eighth of a weak 40W lightbulb. New Zealand electricity prices are just under 30 cents per Kilowatt Hour. So if you fully drain and charge your iPhone once per day, (roughly 4.5 hours charging at 5 Watts), that’s 8.21 KWh per year, costing approx $2.46. Peanuts!
(MattyG has made 24 comments)
Peanuts! Your right about that. I was hoping someone would do the maths for NZ. Cheers Matty!
(Henry has made 20 comments)
You forgot inefficiencies and losses, my official apple charger says input current of 0.15A which at 230v is about 35W draw while charging.
(leStar has made 65 comments)
Oh good call leStar. What was I thinking? I was also incorrect on the ’4.5 hours at full charge’ info. The charging cycle for a Lithium-ion batter only draws a constant current for the first third or so of the cycle, then reduces slowly for the remaining two thirds, ending at about 10% by the end of the cycle. I don’t have any good data to do the calculation properly, so we might as well just do a rough currency and electricity price conversion from Henry’s data and say it costs “only dollars per year” to charge your iPhone
(MattyG has made 24 comments)
This was a fun article. More like this please.
(xenodata has made 1 comment)