This is a pointless stunt. A refrigerator will use 10 to 20 times the electricity of phone that is going at 100% 24 hours a day. The impact of this is ultimately nothing.
Now assuming those phones were previously charged on the standard energy mix in the USA that is 0.368kg of co2 saved per device per year, or 501,584,76kg of co2 saved. That seems like a huge number! But is it?
Well let's put it in perspective. A flight from Heathrow to New York emits 312kg of co2 per passenger (3) so we have saved the equivalent of 600 fully loaded transatlantic flights. There are ~1700 flights a day so it doesn't seem like a huge difference. Disappointing.
But it seems like a pretty easy win so at this point I ask why not do it? I'm a big believer in aggregation of marginal gains and there are 10x that number of iPhones worldwide and many more Androids.
(1) https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (2) https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/#:~:text=We%20cal...). (3) https://www.nesta.org.uk/press-release/gas-boiler-emits-more.... (4) https://www.eurocontrol.int/news/celebrating-100-years-trans...
Where is the idea that that 'green generation' wouldn't be used or created without this iphone feature? This doesn't make sense from multiple angles.
Also refrigerators use 1 to 2 kilowatt hours per day.
Often people need a phone charged asap so this won't work.
If they actually make iphones more repairable and last longer so they don't have to waste natural resources to make new ones, it would have a far larger impact. But hey then they'd be making a little bit less profit.
The amount of electricity needed is so small that it might even be comparable (mobile so i haven't calculated yet)
With a deep fridge you can push things to the side, reach over them, etc... you can still kind of see where everything is if you move your head to look around other items.
With a chest fridge you stack everything.
This can:
* more completely obscure other items
* squish items
* require you to move items to find what you want (i.e. pile them on top of other items)
Then you have things like... cartons of milk and various other bottles, which aren't designed to be stacked vertically, but are mostly optimized to be next to other items.
You also lose the utility of having a smaller shelved door area. You can have a level of shelving in a chest refrigerator (basically sliding racks/baskets)... but these become more things you need to move to see other things. With doors they're naturally out of the way on fridge open.
You also have the problem of spills. In a standard fridge a spill means I pick up items, wipe the bottom, put them on another shelf temporarily... then wipe the shelf and replace. Needless to say, spilling anything into a chest refrigerator is a nightmare. You have to remove nearly everything... and since so much is stacked, it's much messier.
A deep vertical refrigerator already completely obscures most of its contents, requires you to move items in order to get what you want, and contains drawers where the contents are not only stacked but completely invisible until you specifically open the drawer to search inside.
Your reference to moving items in the fridge from one shelf to another shelf (temporarily) in order to clean up a spill tells me that you're not engaging in typical deep refrigerator use. The other shelf is already full; to clean up a spill, you need to pull the things that were in the dirty area out of the fridge.
But why not have a chest freezer underneath the countertop, but as a pull-out drawer? Same benefits of a top opening, but no need to dedicate a section of countertop for the lid to open.
But yeah, for a fridge, that’s not as easy.
https://ecocostsavings.com/freezer-wattage-energy-efficient/
I looked it up online, and apparently the "average amount" used by a phone is 15Wh or 0.015kWh per day.
A chest freezer apparently uses ~0.55 kWh per day, or 36 times the amount of electricity.
I don't know if the phone includes energy loss during charging, or if that is the amount being drained from the battery.
It's not 1/100th, but it is still quite a bit more. Considering this is mostly caused by insulation, I wonder if there are ways to improve the insulation to reduce this energy use further.
If the load shifting that this feature enables lets us avoid building out a proportional amount of utility-level battery storage, that is a pretty non-trivial savings in money and resources. A single GWh of utility-level battery storage costs on the order of half a billion, so the return on investment for coding a feature like this into iOS is probably pretty good.
It's not gonna save the world on its own, but it's still a nice win.
Mother Teresa