fairphone could rule... but oh well-
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I will never buy another phone without wireless charging. Yes, I know it has significant downsides. I do not care, I am hard on my ports, wireless charging doesn't break. Given that qi2 is now available as a standard and blunts the severity of the downsides as well ... Realistically not buying another phone until I can get an unlocked bootloader qi2 phone with decent specs.
Wireless charging is a waste of energy
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Wireless charging is a waste of energy
A ten minute cold shower vs a ten minute hot shower saves more energy than a month of wireless charging wastes. It is. Not. Significant. We're talking like 150WH a day wasted being the absolute upper reasonable limit. More likely especially with qi2 we're talking about maybe 30WH a day wasted. That's about 3/4 of a teaspoon of gasoline if you're curious. I don't own a car for the record though, I bike or ride transit everywhere. Also, I basically don't ever have to buy replacement charging cables. Somehow I'm not worrying about the energy lost to my wireless charger.
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A ten minute cold shower vs a ten minute hot shower saves more energy than a month of wireless charging wastes. It is. Not. Significant. We're talking like 150WH a day wasted being the absolute upper reasonable limit. More likely especially with qi2 we're talking about maybe 30WH a day wasted. That's about 3/4 of a teaspoon of gasoline if you're curious. I don't own a car for the record though, I bike or ride transit everywhere. Also, I basically don't ever have to buy replacement charging cables. Somehow I'm not worrying about the energy lost to my wireless charger.
Let's do the math. Apple sells about about 200 million devices a year. Let's say they remove the charging port and completely rely on wireless charging, which isn't completely unrealistic. If we use your 30wh this would result in 6.96GWh or lost energy every single day. With 150wh it would be 34.8GWh.
If that's not significant for one dumb decision I don't know what is.
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Let's do the math. Apple sells about about 200 million devices a year. Let's say they remove the charging port and completely rely on wireless charging, which isn't completely unrealistic. If we use your 30wh this would result in 6.96GWh or lost energy every single day. With 150wh it would be 34.8GWh.
If that's not significant for one dumb decision I don't know what is.
Okay, if we're going to do the math on typical consumer usage lets talk in less worse case scenario terms, an iphone 16 depending on the model has around a 15 Wh battery, a typical consumer uses lets say 80% of their battery life per day so we're looking at charging 12 Wh per day, QI2 reports as much as 93% charging efficiency, that seems optimistic though, let's say 80% average, and let's also generously say wired is 100% efficient (it's not but whatever). This makes the math easy, we're wasting 3 Wh per day to wireless charging vs wired. Across 200 million devices, all concurrently being actively daily used and wirelessly charged we're looking at 600MWhs. That's quite a bit, it's about enough to get a single Boeing 747 3/4ths of the way across the atlantic ocean. Or two private jets a round trip. There are about 1400 transatlantic flights per day on average. This would use about .0007% of the worlds electricity generation.
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Okay, if we're going to do the math on typical consumer usage lets talk in less worse case scenario terms, an iphone 16 depending on the model has around a 15 Wh battery, a typical consumer uses lets say 80% of their battery life per day so we're looking at charging 12 Wh per day, QI2 reports as much as 93% charging efficiency, that seems optimistic though, let's say 80% average, and let's also generously say wired is 100% efficient (it's not but whatever). This makes the math easy, we're wasting 3 Wh per day to wireless charging vs wired. Across 200 million devices, all concurrently being actively daily used and wirelessly charged we're looking at 600MWhs. That's quite a bit, it's about enough to get a single Boeing 747 3/4ths of the way across the atlantic ocean. Or two private jets a round trip. There are about 1400 transatlantic flights per day on average. This would use about .0007% of the worlds electricity generation.
Let's not forget that's devices sold per year. If you replace all iphones, that's about 3 billion I think. This number looks a lot different.
Comparing this to global energy production is not really helpful, in my opinion.