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Comment by wuming2 | Hacker News Reader

With 70% of revenues from hundred million battery powered devices a year is a big deal.

Efficiency is always a big deal and at Apple's scale any slice of a percent is great. The supply chain for these materials seems to have predominately shifted to an internal resource as opposed to an external cost variable. This process also started small and slow but is starting to snowball. Apple has developed a supply chain that is efficient and still gaining efficiencies. Not to mention all the social and environmental issues.

Well, hmm - is it? I'd naively imagine cobalt content is proportional to battery size, and while Apple sells a lot of devices they aren't large energy-hungry ones.

Surely far more of the world's battery production (by watt-hours or kg, take your pick) goes into cars and grid storage than iPhones?

When run at full-steam, MacBooks, iPads and iPhones can churn significant amount of data for their sizes, and use significant amount of energy. The batteries sold by Apple are pretty dense for their sizes, and they sell a lot of them.

It will definitely add up.

Sure, I'm not hating on Apple - it's a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. But I'd question how much of global cobalt production was ever going into macbooks/iphones rather than electric cars, lawnmowers, hoovers and whatever else.

This sets a good precedent but we'd need other manufacturers (who I'd guess are more cost-conscious) to follow suit before it changes much.

Apparently an iPhone uses about 8 grams of cobalt.

Considering how many units are shipped annually, that adds up to quite a lot actually.

The applications that don’t need the highest energy density are shifting away from cobalt.

Hmm…

> 232 million iPhones, 61 million iPads and 26 million Mac and MacBook…

- (last year) https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

I'll assume the batteries are 8 Wh for iPhone, 30 Wh for iPad, 52 Wh for the Macs[0]:

= (232 * 8) + (61 * 30) + (26 * 52) = 5038 MWh = 5 GWh

Which is more than I was expecting, but at the same time Tesla is on track for 1.8 million cars this year at a minimum of 54 kWh each = 97.2 GWh

So, yeah; good on Apple, more of this please from other electronics companies, still tiny compared to automotive.

[0] plausible guesses only because I don't have a breakdown of sales by model and I don't care enough to go looking

>I'll assume the batteries are 8 Wh for iPhone

8Wh is exceptionally low (even guessing), it's just 2.22Ah for a Li-Ion (cobalt based). IPhone battery is 3.2Ah ~ 11.5Wh.

52 Wh for the Mac; that's a rather low estimate for a Mac, it has 3 cells in series, likely 2 or 3 in parallel. 2.8-3Ah per cell (at 3.6 nominal voltage)

Depends on the model, the SE is 7.82 Wh and that model is still on sale.

But even doubling the combined total, let alone a mere extra 3 Wh * 232e6 = 696 MWh = 0.7 GWh, Apple is still a small battery user compared to Tesla cars.

I didn't doubt the conclusion, just the estimate was extremely low, I'd just not call it 'plausible'.

> goes into cars

Most EVs worldwide are powered by cobalt-free LFP batteries. A decent fraction of EVs sold in the US are also LFP powered (all standard range Model 3 & Y). Cobalt is a short-term problem that'll be a memory a few years from now.

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